VC Left and Right Hand Adventures
True story:
Small start-up has interesting service. Selling well and doing well. They decide to raise some expansion capital to open up some additional markets, do some additional development work, and generally speed up the company's progress.
The CEO goes in and pitches big VC firm. VC firm has tons of cash, people, and offices. Pitch goes well and the partner says "Let's continue the dialog" while starting to do some work on the file.
The sales guy, who knows NOTHING of this fund raising activity, calls HR department of said big VC firm and proceeds to give the sales pitch.
Two emails come in from said big VC firm.
Email one: "Sorry, we pass"
Email two: "Cool product, here's the signed contract, can't wait to start using it."
I think this is hilarious but I'm generally viewed as twisted so your humor meter may not go off.
Good one!!! Ha!
Posted by: Jose Paul Martin | April 29, 2008 at 16:44
Makes you wonder though - wouldn't you want to know _why_ the HR department wasn't interested?
Posted by: Ron | April 30, 2008 at 11:03
It sounds like the HR department bought the product but the firm didn't fund the company...
For some reason, yesterday I couldn't comment on this- no commenting screen available. Sounds like they might have a reason to go back and pitch again.
Posted by: Martin Edic | April 30, 2008 at 12:57
Sometimes, perhaps even most of the time, a company may have a good product and a good team, but it may not follow the VCs game plan.
It seems JLA is mostly focused in explosive growth mass-market-user-oriented products that anyone can sign up for... tungle... or the next facebook or google... So someone could pitch VCs a good HR product that sells for 50K a license, but even if it looked like the next PeopleSoft it is quite possible they would pass if it's not in line with their plan.
Posted by: Alex G | May 01, 2008 at 08:48
1. if the sales guy really closed it over the phone with an HR manager he must have given his stuff away for too little (unattractive biz model for the investment arm), or
2. partners ego might have been in the way of a deal, or
3. the 2 emails are unrelated.
Posted by: Christoph | May 07, 2008 at 01:48