Why I (Still) Don’t Make Investor Intros

TL;DR Nutshell: If in today’s connected startup ecosystems, with today’s tools and resources, founder CEOs still need their (paid) lawyers to introduce them to investors, there’s a very good chance they can’t build a company. And most investors know that.

Background Reading:

Certain law firms I come across love to use the following biz dev pitch: “our firm has close relationships with many investors, and we love helping make intros to them for our clients.” Some have even attempted to institutionalize this into an entire department within their firms.

Sounds great, doesn’t it? Lawyers are constantly interacting with investors, so they must be a great shortcut to getting intros, right? Not so fast.

A paid intro is generally worse than no intro, particularly in today’s ecosystems. 

I wrote Don’t Ask Your Startup Lawyer for Investor Intros about a year and a half ago, in which I made the following argument:

  • Early-stage investing is at least as much about betting on founders, particularly CEOs, as it is about betting on a particular business.
  • Because investors see 100-1000x more companies than they can fund, or even assess, they heavily rely on filters/signals to judge the quality of founding teams.
  • The way in which a CEO obtains an investor intro (and from whom) speaks volumes about that CEOs ability to network, persuade, and generally hustle; all of which are extremely important skills for a successful founder CEO.
  • There are far more ways, today, to get connected with investors and find true, authentic warm referrals – AngelList, LinkedIn, Twitter, Accelerators, etc. – than there were even 5-10 years ago.
  • Therefore, in a world in which there are 100s of possible paths to get introduced to an investor, the fact that your lawyer (someone you are paying) ends up making the intro can send an extremely negative message about the founding team – including that they can’t hustle, can’t convince anyone else in their ecosystem (that they aren’t paying) to introduce them, or both. Samir Kaji emphasizes this last point, about a weak intro making investors think negatively about the founders, in his post.

At the time I published that post, most people providing feedback on it agreed, but I had a few dissenters – generally lawyers arguing that they’ve made successful intros themselves. I don’t doubt that they’re telling the truth, but what was telling is that few could give examples of successful intros in recent years – and my point is very time-contextual. Even five years ago, relationships within startup communities were far more opaque than they are today, and an intro from a lawyer didn’t have nearly the level of negative signaling then that it does now.

But one pattern become obvious that relates to another point I’ve made before:

For a lawyer’s investor intro to not have a negative signal for a particular investor, the lawyer and investor must have a very close relationship, and that means you shouldn’t want that lawyer representing your company in a deal with that investor.

See: Why Founders Don’t Trust Startup Lawyers

There absolutely are particular lawyers who have very close relationships with particular investors, much more than other lawyers who simply run into those investors on deals and on boards (professional acquaintances). The issue is that those close relationships develop, nine times out of ten, from those lawyers working for those investors. And for reasons that should be obvious (but if they aren’t, read the above post), the last lawyer you want representing your company in a VC deal is the lawyer who is BFFs with the VCs you are negotiating with.

So maybe some lawyers can make a decent intro… but you shouldn’t work with them… which makes it significantly less likely that they’ll make the intro. Life is complicated.

Other founders, particularly well-respected ones and especially those who’ve been funded by an investor, are the best source of referrals. Other well-respected, non-service providers (advisors, accelerators, angels, etc.) are the second best. Anyone you are paying comes dead last.

Jeff Bussgang has a great post on how to ‘rank’ different potential paths to investors – Getting Introductions to Investors – The Ranking Algorithm. His hierarchy makes a lot of sense. And aside from other founders being the best source of referrals, they are absolutely the best source of intel on investors, when you’re diligencing them. If a group of VCs have provided you a term sheet and you aren’t actively (but discreetly) talking with their portfolio founders to understand what working with those VCs is actually like, you’re doing it wrong.

As ecosystems become more transparent, and prospecting tools become more sophisticated, investors may be relying less on referrals anyway.

I found the data reported by First Round Capital in their 10 year Project to be pretty interesting, including the data suggesting that First Round’s referred investments significantly underperformed relative to investments that First Round hunted on their own. Honestly, this isn’t that surprising.

A lot of studies on investor performance emphasize that, while many people get lucky with one or two home-runs, the people who consistently outperform the market are those who actively take a process, data-oriented approach, and try their best to counteract their biases. That doesn’t mean success in VC is about number crunching, but it does mean that if your personal relationships are the main way that you find companies, you’re going to have a lot more sources of bias in your decision-making than someone who takes a broader, but more calculated approach.

In short, we live in a very different world from the one in which VCs sat in their offices relying on proprietary, somewhat opaque deal flow sources. In that world, lawyers were a better source of investor intros. That world no longer exists. Investors fund hustlers, and (today) hustlers don’t need their lawyers to introduce them to investors.

Converting Your Startup to a Delaware Corporation, Correctly.

TL;DR Nutshell: If you’ve accepted that you need to convert your startup to a DE corp from a different entity type, then it’s also time to accept this: there is no off-the-shelf, “click a button and file” way to convert to a DE corp. It is highly contextual. The right lawyers can do it efficiently and correctly. The wrong ones will tell you it’s simple, screw it up, and require you to pay the right lawyers 5x more in the future to clean it all up.

Background Reading:

The purpose of this post is not to debate whether your startup should be a Delaware corporation. While we do work with a decent number of VC-ish backed Delaware LLCs (sometimes LLCs really do make sense), the vast majority of technology companies that raise venture capital either start or end up as Delaware corps. And the moment a lawyer starts playing contrarian with me, talking up why Delaware isn’t needed, or C-Corps are tax inefficient, I quickly end the exchange by asking how many VC-backed companies she’s actually worked with. We are talking about scaling tech companies and venture capital. Not small businesses or companies funded by local, non-institutional investors.

So for purposes of this post, we are going to take it as a given: you need to be a Delaware corporation, but you aren’t one right now. Converting is simple, right? Just file a form?

Converting from any kind of entity to a DE Corp is not “standard.” Ever. 

Properly forming a DE corp startup from scratch has, thanks to standardization and automation, become a relatively straightforward process.  The reason, of course, is that you’re starting from nothing, and nothing is the easiest condition to automate from; no messy context throwing a wrench in the system. Conversion, however, involves a history with any number of possible permutations, and that means all the shiny templates and technology must give way, partially, to human judgment.

  • What are your state’s rules around entity “conversions”; is a “statutory conversion” allowed, or will you need to do a merger or possibly even an asset sale? It depends. 
  • What approvals does your state’s rules require? It may be a majority of all equity, it may be 2/3, it may be unanimous. It depends.
  • What specific documentation (like a “Plan of Conversion”) and filings (often in both states, not just DE) do the rules require? It depends.
  • Are there any existing agreements in place that might require a separate consent to be obtained before the entity can convert? Ok you get the idea.
  • Does the company’s existing capital structure require a (hopefully quick) discussion with tax counsel regarding possible tax hits (phantom income) resulting from the conversion? This is a crucial issue to consider when converting an LLC to a Corp. 

Converting a Non-DE Corp to a DE Corp (Corp to Corp) is generally simpler than converting an LLC to a Corp. Converting any entity in a state that allows for statutory conversions (TX and CA do, NY does not) is generally simpler than having to do a statutory merger.  Whatever the context, you will screw it up trying to do it yourself. In fact, I’ve lost count of how many law firms have screwed it up, requiring founders to pay us 5-10x in cleanup costs than they would’ve paid if they had just hired competent counsel from Day 1.

The reason you will never just push a button to receive medical treatment is that every person is different, and tailoring high-stakes treatment to individual differences is precisely what professional judgment (supported by tech, of course) handles best.  Startup law is no different. Technology and tools absolutely cut down on waste, and yes there is a lot that is standardized even in conversions.  But in the end the institutional knowledge of the law firm you choose will determine whether it gets done efficiently and correctly, or whether you’re just deluding yourself into thinking that the guy promising a cheap, simple conversion actually knows what he’s doing.

Navigating Referrals in a Connected Startup Ecosystem

Nutshell: Referrals and recommendations from influential people in your startup ecosystem, or from people you trust, are an extremely important way to build your startup’s set of advisors, mentors, service providers, investors, etc.  But there’s a wide gap between an authentic referral made on merit v. one made because of quid-pro-quo business relationship hiding in the background.

Background Reading:

Cheap “Networking” v. Respect

I have never set foot on a golf course, and really don’t care to any time soon. I honestly don’t know anything about wine other than that I’d generally prefer a good beer over it. I have no idea what anyone on ESPN is talking about every time I’m sitting in my barber’s chair. And I still need someone to explain to me why everyone on there is so dressed up, to talk about sports? Why, might you ask, would any ambitious lawyer who cares about biz dev make zero effort at improving his game on what many consider to be the core pillars of business networking?

In short: when I recommend anyone to a client: an advisor, a service provider, an investor, even a specialist lawyer, I believe it should be solely because that person actually deserves the referral – meaning that I think they are the best for the task – and not because I expect to gain something personally from making that recommendation, or because I “like” them. I don’t care about anyone’s golf game, sports knowledge, or whether they will refer anyone back to me – and I expect the same in return.

I have pissed off and/or disappointed a lot of people because of this mindset, but in the arc of your own career, particularly in a career based on serving as a trusted advisor, respect will sustain you far more than dozens of superficial connections purchased with steak dinners and side deals.

Build Your Inner Circle

As a founder, the moment you show even the slightest sign of building a strong company, you’ll find yourself inundated with people who want to connect with you. One of your first jobs is to learn, quickly, whom to (politely) say “no” to. You can only have so many coffee meetings before they get in the way of actually building a real company. And if you spend enough time at a few startup events you’ll quickly realize how many “startup people” aren’t actually building real companies. Avoid noise. Find signal.

Building your network (quality over quantity) is extremely important, especially if you’re CEO. But it’s (at least) equally important to build and maintain your inner circle.  More than people with great resources, money, or advice, these are smart, helpful people whose character you’ve judged to be a cut above everyone else’s; meaning that they can be trusted in a way that your broader group of connections cannot.  There is no magical formula for finding these people, or sorting them out from others. Your ability to “read” people will improve over time.

In general, your inner circle should be made up of experienced, smart people who (i) consistently speak their mind more freely than others, (ii) often make recommendations that run against their financial interests or personal connections, and (iii) will give you opinions/feedback that others in the ecosystem don’t have the personal brand independence to give.  Referrals from those people are gold.

Your inner circle can be made up of advisors, investors, experienced founders at other companies, etc. What matters most is that you have one to turn to when faced with those inevitable, high-stakes moments where people with all kinds of incentives are pushing you in different directions, and you need cold objectivity. And as I’ve mentioned before and will repeat here: build diversity of perspectives into your inner and outer circle. The smaller the ecosystem, the harder this is to do – and often times connecting with true outsiders (geographically) can be very valuable.

Lawyer Referrals: Merit v. Kickbacks

With respect to the legal services required for a scaling tech company, a group of corporate lawyers (what we are) generally serve as the quarterbacks of a broader team of specialist lawyers; much like how an internist or general practitioner physician quarterbacks specialist doctors in treating a complex condition. For that reason, the main types of referrals that we (at MEMN) find ourselves making are to specialist lawyers – patents, trademarks, immigration, IP licensing, privacy, import/export, etc.

As I’ve written before, every law firm has built in financial incentives to “cross sell” their own lawyers. If I’m at a law firm that follows the traditional “one stop shop” full service approach, I make money if I can convince you to use our specialist lawyers. It’s called “origination credit.” If you use another firm’s lawyers, perhaps because they have more domain expertise for my type of technology (often the case for patent lawyers in particular), I get nothing. Given this fact, it should not shock you at all when your BigLaw corporate lawyer always refers work to his in-house specialists, without suggesting more appropriate alternatives.

A network of specialized, focused boutiques and solo lawyers should, at a structural level, have a far more merit-based referral system. And it does.  But even among smaller firms there are lawyers who’ve set up kickback relationships that usually aren’t disclosed to clients – and yes these are often on shaky legal ethics grounds. They’re often structured in the form of a referral fee, or % of fees resulting from the referral. While I’m not going to say definitively that these arrangements should automatically invalidate the trustworthiness of a referral, they should at a minimum give founders reason to do their own diligence on the referral before moving forward with it.

It never hurts to ask a referring lawyer: “is there a referral fee arrangement in place here?” If it’s some kind of startup program (accelerator, incubator, etc.) making the referral, I would ask “is the lawyer/firm you’re referring me to sponsoring your program?” ‘Sponsorships’ often mean the firm is, effectively, paying for referrals. This is actually becoming a mechanism by which large firms entrench themselves, through accelerators.

Again, I’m not going to criticize lawyers who monetize their legal connections. I understand the reason behind it.  But with that being said, MEMN’s specialist network does not have any built in kickback arrangements. When I tell a client “you should use X lawyer because she’s the right person, and at the right billing rate, for the task” I value being able to say it with total objectivity. Back to the point made earlier in the post, make your money by becoming awesome at what you do, not by trying to cut shady side deals that taint your trustworthiness.

Financially motivated referrals work great in a lot of product and service vendor-oriented marketplaces, but in the world of top-tier advisors – where trust is your most valuable asset – they should, in my opinion, be avoided. One of the largest benefits of properly functioning ecosystems is how transparent they are compared to large, top-down organizations.  That transparency means meritocracy, if enough people with backbones are able to resist the urge to “cut a deal.”