One Metric You Should Never Track When Fundraising

I stumbled across a thread on Twitter the other day where entrepreneurs were comparing the number of investors they’d pitched. For some reason, they seemed to be using the number as a badge of honor, with a higher numbers being more impressive than a lower number. “What the heck?” I thought to myself. “Shouldn’t the goal be to pitch as few investors as possible?” But, when I imagined people bragging about how few investors they pitched, I found myself thinking that wasn’t any better. Is tracking “investors pitched” is even a metric worth tracking?

Early in my entrepreneurial career, I remember conversations I’d had with other founders that were similar to the Twitter thread. We’d be bragging about the number of investors we’d met and how well-known they were. Meeting with a Sequoia VC? Check! Meeting with an Andreessen partner? Of course! And on and on.

I thought there must be something special about my company and the work I was doing — even if none of those VCs were funding me — simply because investors were taking my meetings.

WRONG!

A huge part of an investor’s job is to take meetings with entrepreneurs. It’s part of what they call “deal flow,” and they need good deal flow in order to identify good investments. So they spend large chunks of their weeks meeting entrepreneurs and…