Here’s a tip, once you get a term sheet tell everyone you met with because now you’re in demand. You might get better terms by shopping it around to the “soft no” folks.

Don’t expect too much. A meeting is a very small step and these investors take hundreds or thousands of meetings a year. Take it as a learning process, improve your pitch for the next time and try to get more and more of them with others.

A hot trend is something called a web site. You go there and – this is wild – an investor gives you tips on what they’re looking for.

Again, and again, and again people turn away from the sources of information to that point furthest from it.

If they say anything similar to a ‘its not you its me’ / kicking the can down the road, thats code for ‘not currently interested’. basically they’ll never ever give you a hard no (unless you really pissed them off) instead, they’ll always wait and see. so don’t take that soft rejection negatively, instead move to the next VC (and take the feedback and improve your business)

talk about the business, how it will grow, how it will make money, and the evidence you have to support your assumptions. talk about the size of the market, support with evidence for this, and talk about how you will approach capturing your share of it.

dont be fooled by ‘startup land’ and sharktank… ultimately VCs are lenders, like banks so this is all about how they will get their return

on reaching this milestone with your deeptech hardware startup. For your meeting with the VC investor, ensure you articulate a compelling narrative about your product and its market potential. Be prepared to answer questions confidently, emphasize your team’s strengths, and showcase a clear roadmap for the funding. Good luck!

If you don’t get funding, ask what milestones are required to be acheived to approach them again.

Also ask for feedback and advise.

Good luck OP!

hey i’m running a deep tech hardware startup as well! at the seed stage let’s chat

I do financial modeling/consulting for startups seeking VC funding. The thing I would stress is having clear financial projections to present. No fancy BS. Show them know how you make money and projections for 5 years out. Also, when building your assumptions for said projections, make sure they are defendable to some degree. You can’t go up there and say my growth rate is going to be 25% year-over-year because I think that’s what we can do. Do your research so you can defend everything you’re telling them.

Ask them a lot of question to get their values and objectives.
Also know their Starting date, they usually have a 7 years period

Good luck op!

Looking forward for more insights. Next to next week I’m gonna meet with my first investor

What is deep tech hardware?

Just posted this in another thread, but I’ll edit:

Are you trying for Seed or early stage? Make sure you know if you really want VC money- it’s a dance with the devil.

Usually pre Seed and Seed is friends and family, and people you know or have worked with that believe in your idea and give you enough money to incorporate, get a cap table together, prototype, wireframe, do some dilligence, patent for hardware or really brilliant software and find the right people to execute.

Early stage is for when that seed money is going to exhaust and you need money to scale. Hardware kind of changes that, because you have design and production. Early stage may change timeline for prototype and production. Production and distribution can take a ton of money.

For VC investment you generally need:

1) your total addressable market and sales economics projections worked out. Your company incorporated, cap table and your early execution team identified.

2) you need a pitch deck, This needs to show why you need VC money and how and who is going to execute on returning that money 10x (or whatever the projections for the TAM are- could be part of a 1B market segement).

And as you’ve found out, you need to pitch a bunch of them. I’ve never pitched VC, but I’ve done several VC investments and VC funded startups as an early employee. I’ve founded a couple companies as well- but we were not VC funded. I’ve never done hardware, mostly software/services.

As a VC investor, I probably invest in one in 20 companies and those are well past the initial pitch stages. And frankly they are usually already referred by people I know that are successful (and have some investment). So even if they don’t want in, they maybe able to refer you to the right people.

You can read up on this stuff. I recommend Venture Deals to understand the basic process, and something like Hard thing about Hard Things to stay motivated and figure out what you are getting into. I’m clearly biased to the Bay Area VC scene, but it is what I know.