An early-stage founder’s guide: What to expect post-investment

This is a five-part series by Clement Vouillon with help from those at Point Nine Capital.

Here’s the outline for our series:

• Part 1: Before working with VCs
• Part 2: Preparing your fundraising
• Part 3: First contact and assessment phase
• Part 4: From term sheet to signed deal
• Part 5: Post-investment

The 2-minute TL;DR video

You’ll find plenty of articles covering the process of raising money with investors but few on describing the interactions you’ll have with them once the investment has been made.

When and how am I going to interact with my investors after the investment?

Here, we can distinguish recurring interactions from one-time events.

Recurring: Board meetings

Board meetings are meetings held regularly (quarterly in most cases) with your board members. The primary goals of these meetings are:

• To keep the board members informed of the company’s progress regarding product, revenue, marketing and sales, or HR.
• To discuss short and long-term plans.
• To make decisions that require the approval of the board members.

For the meeting, the CEO is in charge of creating a presentation with up-to-date metrics and the meeting’s agenda, both of which should be shared a couple of days beforehand. The meeting generally lasts a couple of hours, depending on what needs to be discussed.

Running a successful board meeting is difficult and depends on the following factors:

• The quality of the presentation and the agenda you share with the board members. Be sure to share clear and concise board materials without trying to hide the bad news/failures. It usually takes a few tries before nailing a good meeting format. Jean de La Rochebrochard from Kima Ventures wrote an excellent post on the topic.
• The quality of your investors. This is where your background checks on investors will come in handy. Some investors add value to meetings and will help you tremendously, while some are less so.
• Setting the right expectations on both sides. The outcomes of a board meeting depend on the expectations and limits that both you and the investors set. I urge you to read this post if you want to avoid some common traps (e.g. discussing the feature suggestions by investors that are not in your target group of customers for hours).

Recurring: Check-ins

How can I make the most out of the relationship?

What is it like when things go wrong?