Stepping into the shoes of a VC reveals why your startup isn’t getting funded

At the outset, please accept my apologies if this post seems pretentious. The key takeaways from this are not “how I live my life” nor “how busy I am,” but are summarized at the bottom of this post. With that off my chest, let’s begin.

When entering into a partnership/professional relationship with someone (customer, investor, employee, etc.), I feel it is essential to understand the other person properly. This is even more important if you are a founder trying to pitch to an investor. You should know how they lead their lives.

It seemed sensible for me to recount what a day in the life of a VC looks like. And, unlike popular misconceptions, this is not what we do everyday:

The schedule

Here’s a minute-by-minute account of what tomorrow really looks like for me:

7:30 am I wake up and the first thing I do is check my emails. I know this is a bad habit—I am trying to get rid of it.

9:00 am I am off to work, reading emails, newsletters, deal news, Tech In Asia, Fred Wilson, Crunchbase, CBInsights, etc.

9:30 am I get to the office, coffee in hand. I plug in my laptop and crunch out a few emails.

10:00 am It’s the first startup meeting of the day and I’m grabbing coffee with an ecommerce stealth-mode startup (pre-product). I would have already read the deck by this time.

11:00 am I have a monthly update call with a portfolio company, getting feedback on their current fundraising situation and making sure KPIs are growing. If things look bad, I’d need to brainstorm on possible solutions.

12:00 pm I’m meeting Albert for lunch. As some of you might know, he just moved on to another firm. This is our proper team get together. 🙂

1:00 pm It’s the second startup meeting of the day and I’m grabbing coffee with a data analytics company (seed stage). Again, I’d have read the deck beforehand.

2:00 pm It’s the third startup meeting of the day and I’m still at the coffee shop, but with no more coffee. I’m meeting a construction tech company (seed stage).

3:00 pm I’ll probably take a quick bathroom break and then will be on to my fourth startup meeting of the day. This time it’ll be with an ecommerce enabler (seed stage).

So what does this mean for you?