

Ask HN: Is it a good idea to let investor/s view your ticket/task list? - twidlit

Would this have a positive effect for investors and the team?
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gte910h
Oh god no.

That's a great way to make it not be used for real things

Trust is a key component among employees. Letting your investors into that mix
will just lower the trust there, and get less useful stuff on the todo list.

~~~
petervandijck
Agreed. Why the hell would they want to meddle like that? Do they not trust
you to Get Stuff Done? Do you not trust yourself?

If they do not trust you, it is possible that they view you as some kind of
glorified employees and see themselves as your boss. They're not, they're just
investors. It might be worth to give this relationship some thought and then
discuss it with them somehow. You didn't start a startup to gain another
meddling boss.

~~~
gte910h
I think your comment fits any number of meddlesome investor scenarios!
Archiving for later use

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michael_dorfman
I'm having trouble parsing the question.

When you say "investors", do you mean "potential investors we are currently
courting", or "shareholders"?

If you mean "shareholders", the answer is "no". If they have a seat on the
Board, then they are entitled to board-level information, but this wouldn't
generally involve unfiltered access to your task list.

If you mean "potential investors", then the next question is: "as a one-time
thing, or on an ongoing basis?" If you mean "on an ongoing basis", the answer
is "no"-- there's no reason to give someone on the outside this kind of
information regularly. If, however, you mean "as a one-time thing", then the
answer could be "yes", as it might be a good way to give the investors a
better view of what you are trying to achieve, and where you are in the
process.

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precipice
It's a great test for whether you have helpful investors. If a good
conversation comes out of it and you learn something, you have amazing
investors. If they say, "You know how to interpret this better than I would,
so go to it," that's fine. If neither of those happen, that's a warning sign.

So I would say show them before they invest and see what happens.

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Aegean
1\. Generally you would not want them to micro-manage your operations.

2\. If you are hard working and having good progress, it should not matter too
much.

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avichal
I would love this and think it would be tremendously positive.

95% of the information shared in an organization and put onto a task list is
about milestones that need to be hit, progress towards those milestones, and
information that needs to be gathered to make this happen. All of this
benefits from more helpful eyes on it. If your investor happens to know
someone at an organization that your salesperson is trying to sell then they
should help. If they have another portfolio company solving similar
engineering problems, your teams should get together.

Most people are intelligent enough to be able to use this information to help
and not try and micromanage. If they do try to do that, then you tell them to
lay off and stick to helping people do their jobs instead of interfering.

Put it another way -- if you don't think your investors can handle this extra
information and use it to be helpful, why in the world did you take money from
them?

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brk
I think it would depend on your investors. Do they have a background that
would enable them to fully grok the task list and offer useful, actionable
advice?

While I've never heard of investors getting involved down to this level of
detail, perhaps in certain circumstances it could be beneficial for them to
offer guidance on accomplishing certain tasks if they have the skillset to do
so. I tend to doubt that anything good would come of this idea though.

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twidlit
Let me play devil's advocate.

The purpose is for them not to meddle (eek!) but to be more informed, (give
better suggestions, know how close you are to a milestone, have less meeting)

For the team, itll be a good motivational tool and reinforcement mechanism.

ITs a bad idea if you have a bad investor, good idea if you have a good
investor.

\---end of devil advocation (?)

~~~
agotterer
It still seem unnecessary. I have a hard time believing that most investors
would want to even spend the time to go through a bug/task list since most of
those won't need suggestions. You shouldn't need to be told which bugs are
important and how to implement them! On the flip side I don't see anything
wrong with a high level overview of maybe the milestone objectives if they
ask. But every single little bug and task if over the top.

