
Ask HN: What's your best (worst) VC pass reason? - vcproofalias
Like the title says, what&#x27;s the worst&#x2F;silliest&#x2F;just plain weird-est reason a VC has given you for passing on investment in your company?<p>For us, it has to be the time a VC passed because we couldn&#x27;t show him 70% retention over 12 months on our six-month-old product.<p>After hearing that, I have to know: does it get worse? I&#x27;d love to hear some more stories of excuses to pass on a round.
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tlb
See "21\. Investors don't like to say no." in
[http://paulgraham.com/guidetoinvestors.html](http://paulgraham.com/guidetoinvestors.html)

Investors often feel the need to give a made-up reason, but the real reason is
that they're not as excited about you as about something else. Don't be
discouraged -- even the most successful companies got many nos on the way to
their first yes. Don't change your business strategy based on the reason any
one investor gives you, although if several good investors give you the same
reason, you might want to think about it.

BTW, it's normal to extrapolate retention to a yearly number using cohort
analysis. Your claim is a bit like "I can't have been going 80 MPH because
I've only been driving for 30 minutes!"

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vcproofalias
Realized the title and final sentence were misleading, was less looking for
advice and more looking for war stories. Some of these interactions can feel
pretty bizarre from the entrepreneur side and was wondering if anyone else had
good ones to share.

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tlb
War stories are best when you hear both sides. One-sided war stories are
mostly like "they made a mistake, and we took advantage of it." But why did
they make a mistake? What were they thinking? Did they have bad data, or wrong
analysis, or internal disagreement? Were they losing a battle to win the war?
That's when it gets interesting.

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throwaway57892
Throwaway on the off chance this VC recognizes this:

VC: "We really like your product, and think it could really succeed with
business model X" Us: "Oh that's great, X is actually our exact business
model!" _one week of no contact later_ VC: "We're passing because we don't
really understand business model x"

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investoralias
Received an email from a VC at 3:30am that expressed interest in investing.

Sent over deck and demo.

Turns out he just couldn't sleep and wanted reading material "to pass the
time."

