Hacker News Reader

Comment by joshu | Hacker News Reader

Another one I learned that pops up in this tale: get on the plane if the meeting is important.

Telling your counterparty that you're about to get on a plane to meet them is one way to qualify a deal: they may tell you not to.

A bizdev friend of mine taught me another: reschedule a call to a Saturday (make up a reason). If it's a serious deal... like, "you're going to be Powerpoint in our office suite"... they'll bitch, but do it.

Sometimes these things are about followup, but a lot of times they're really about qualification; they may just not be into you. It can be important to know that if you're otherwise going to spin your wheels.

Telling your counterparty that you're about to get on a plane to meet them is one way to qualify a deal: they may tell you not to.

Ah, again we see the parallels with dating?

(I did very nearly do this once.)

The trick is often to not make it a choice.

"I'll be in town after visiting a customer on Friday, can we get together?" is much more likely to have a positive response than "should I fly out to meet with you on Friday?". If the meeting is very important to you (high EV, even if maybe low odds?), it's sometimes worth not making it clear how important.

In other cases, being willing to make what seem like big sacrifices (getting a plane the next hour, changing your flight plans, driving cross-country, etc.) will help your case, if known.

The parallels with dating are very apparent.

That was my first thought. If you get a call from these guys, you tell them "I'll be in town next week, when would you like to meet for 20 minutes?"

Yep. Some things have to be done face to face.

The book The Art of Possibility has a good chapter about this. It's also a great book in general; it's Rosamund & Ben Zander's philosophy of life disguised as a self-help book, in the same way that The Black Swan is basically Taleb's ideas about epistemology disguised as investment advice. The ideas aren't super unique, but they do a better job selling them than I've seen anywhere else.

Hell, I'd say more than some. It seems to me that real business gets done on the phone and in person, much more than anywhere else in the digital realm (email, social media, etc). If someone isn't willing to take your call, then they probably aren't serious enough. If they aren't willing to meet face to face, then it's more of the same.

Yeah, we were trying to coordinate that. Jonathan was anxious to get me up there and thought I'd be a big hit with the Writely guys who he seemed to hold in very high regard. But he had to fly back to New York (we were in SF at the time for the conference), then he had some other trip and then it just got complicated. That's why he just decided to pass me up the ladder, but in the end that clearly didn't work to my advantage.

I think Josh's point was to not wait for them to fly you out, but to fly out yourself. As rokhayakebe noted, say you'll be in town in two weeks and set up a meeting. Perhaps Google has streamlined the process to fly you out, but it still isn't as easy as "Great, check in at the front desk on Wednesday at 2PM". If meeting is a much bigger deal to you than who you're meeting with you need to do what you can to make it easy for who you're meeting with.

I do agree with Josh's advice (not that I considered anything like that at the time), but just to clarify, Jonathan was in New York with the rest of the Google Spreadsheet team, was due to fly somewhere else (I think it may have been Europe) and felt it was important to meet at the Googleplex in Mountain View with the Writely team. I don't think I could have showed up in Mountain View without him being there since he was the champion of the acquisition, and the decision makers weren't in New York so it probably wouldn't have helped much for me to fly there. Obviously, none of this matters now, but I just wanted to explain that the logistics weren't quite so simple.

That said if you want to make something happen then you make it happen and I didn't. Fail.

People want to see a sufficient level of excitement. Maybe you should have headed to New York.

I blew a deal like this once, myself. When I was in NYC, a big SV fund wanted to invest in Delicious, but I didn't bother to get on a plane and go visit them after several hits; I just kinda expected them to send me a term sheet without ever meeting me! Pretty stupid. Luckily I later met Fred and company.

PS It's Joshua, not Josh

Reply on news.ycombinator.com