Dear SaaStr: How should co-founders handle multiple investors all interested in the last small available portions of a seed round, especially when final meetings are scheduled over a few different days?
My advice, which is contrary to what you hear from many: slow it down.
Yes, you want to “run a process” if you can in raising a financing round, to get more demand than you have supply. Creating clear boundaries on the process, and the timing, are important to doing so.
But once you have more demand than supply, what matters most then is picking the right partners:
- Who can you trust?
- Who can help the most?
- Who can write another check, if you need one?
If someone really wants to invest this week, then unless something changes … they’ll also want to invest the next week, too.
So once you really have more demand for your shares than supply, unless you are 100% sure which investors you want … then it’s OK to tell them you are taking a week or two to finalize the round. It’s OK if you are direct, honest, and nice about it. And it will give you calm time to pick the best partners. And if they aren’t OK with that — oh, they will tell you.
You can’t Un-Do your investors. They are stuck on your cap table for years, and often, decades.
A related post here: 5 Non-Obvious Things To Know About VCs | SaaStr
