Having been on both sides of several acquisitions this makes tremendous sense. The gating principle is a very sound one because remember that with the AI library and analytics tools the speed with which your key value will get stripped out will be very quick these days. NDA’s are great but remember many VC’s know their way around legally better than you and your lawyers. Second, they or their specific team are often sector focused so they will be also be evaluating the very start ups you are trying to race to market. Once they have the insight from both (or multiple) then insights-and sometimes personnel-can suddenly become the asset and be stripped to bolster what they think is a better bet.)
Finally for VC’s. I often get calls from the advisors/advisory firms (thirdbridge, guidepoint et al) to buy some of my industry insight. You get these calls with almost no briefing other than the industry sector and I usually spend the first 10 minutes trying to work out what the heck they are trying to learn.
These calls are often run by junior associates gathering data points as they know the $ clock is running. It’s usually obvious they are trying to validate claims from the data room of some company they are targeting, but are almost never open about what. Just dumb sequential questions. So with the clock running I do my best to provide them some value but…
I often leave the call going “Yeah they don’t really get what’s going on here”, but I know they get to give the appearance of some added value from their ‘research’.
Either be more open in the briefings and share what you are trying to achieve from your ‘industry insight expert’, or be judicious about assessing the value of what has been harvested, as it might not be completed having been biased by the attitude of the Jr Associate collecting the inisghts.
The “gating principle” is spot on. In today’s AI-driven world, your edge can get reverse-engineered faster than you think, especially when sector-focused VCs or corp dev teams are quietly tracking multiple plays in parallel.
And yes, I’ve had those expert network calls too. Vague questions, rushed junior associates, no context. You leave thinking, “That added zero real insight,” but it still gets packaged as diligence.
Appreciate you voicing this. More founders need to hear it.
Thanks for the kind comments Martyn. I have set a 1 hr minimum for those types of calls due to the casual dropping after 20 minutes ignoring the value of my time, and the prep I put in to preparing for them. The good news is some of these have resulted in the Strategic Insight articles I've written on here, so they at least make good high-value fodder for my Substack. I've written a few since I started two weeks ago.
One on R1RCM and their strategic relationship with Ascension Health;
One on the sad tale of Olive Health (A wonderful warning tale for any founder of an early-stage company as to how even unicorns can crash and burn;
And a critique of Microsoft's recent MAI-DxO announcement. Again, several lessons for early-stage companies about the danger of over-engineering solutions to impress with cleverness and accuracy, without considering the operational costs of scaling to 10,000 or even 100,000 users.
As I'm just beginning, these are free to all for now. It's only been a few weeks, and friends and family have been supportive so far, but I just need to keep finding new audiences to promote to :-)
Having been on both sides of several acquisitions this makes tremendous sense. The gating principle is a very sound one because remember that with the AI library and analytics tools the speed with which your key value will get stripped out will be very quick these days. NDA’s are great but remember many VC’s know their way around legally better than you and your lawyers. Second, they or their specific team are often sector focused so they will be also be evaluating the very start ups you are trying to race to market. Once they have the insight from both (or multiple) then insights-and sometimes personnel-can suddenly become the asset and be stripped to bolster what they think is a better bet.)
Finally for VC’s. I often get calls from the advisors/advisory firms (thirdbridge, guidepoint et al) to buy some of my industry insight. You get these calls with almost no briefing other than the industry sector and I usually spend the first 10 minutes trying to work out what the heck they are trying to learn.
These calls are often run by junior associates gathering data points as they know the $ clock is running. It’s usually obvious they are trying to validate claims from the data room of some company they are targeting, but are almost never open about what. Just dumb sequential questions. So with the clock running I do my best to provide them some value but…
I often leave the call going “Yeah they don’t really get what’s going on here”, but I know they get to give the appearance of some added value from their ‘research’.
Either be more open in the briefings and share what you are trying to achieve from your ‘industry insight expert’, or be judicious about assessing the value of what has been harvested, as it might not be completed having been biased by the attitude of the Jr Associate collecting the inisghts.
There, got that off my chest LOL
Thank you for sharing your experiences.
The “gating principle” is spot on. In today’s AI-driven world, your edge can get reverse-engineered faster than you think, especially when sector-focused VCs or corp dev teams are quietly tracking multiple plays in parallel.
And yes, I’ve had those expert network calls too. Vague questions, rushed junior associates, no context. You leave thinking, “That added zero real insight,” but it still gets packaged as diligence.
Appreciate you voicing this. More founders need to hear it.
Thanks for the kind comments Martyn. I have set a 1 hr minimum for those types of calls due to the casual dropping after 20 minutes ignoring the value of my time, and the prep I put in to preparing for them. The good news is some of these have resulted in the Strategic Insight articles I've written on here, so they at least make good high-value fodder for my Substack. I've written a few since I started two weeks ago.
One on R1RCM and their strategic relationship with Ascension Health;
One on the sad tale of Olive Health (A wonderful warning tale for any founder of an early-stage company as to how even unicorns can crash and burn;
And a critique of Microsoft's recent MAI-DxO announcement. Again, several lessons for early-stage companies about the danger of over-engineering solutions to impress with cleverness and accuracy, without considering the operational costs of scaling to 10,000 or even 100,000 users.
As I'm just beginning, these are free to all for now. It's only been a few weeks, and friends and family have been supportive so far, but I just need to keep finding new audiences to promote to :-)
I'm happy to start recommending your newsletter to my subscriber's.