I ganked this slide from Joe Beninatos’ presentation to the fbFund Fund Rev teams entitled Raising Capital: Closing the Deal.
VCs rarely actually say no. This slide sums up pretty concisely the signals you’ll get from VCs when you’ve stopped making progress towards a termsheet or a close. Study them, memorize them and recognize when they’re happening to you. It will make your fundraising a bit more sane and make some of the asinine questions and stunts VCs pull during the process make so much more sense.
Have any others you’ve seen that should be added to the list? Leave them in the comments.
Boy do I wish more VCs had the balls to say “pass” openly and early. Then the conversation could turn to honest feedback.
It would also be nice if one of you could say no before the entreprenuers tell the VCs everything they think is important. I always thought the information transfer was a bit imbalanced, i.e. as an aggregate, I’ve educated a hell of a lot more VCs that said no than they have educated me.
