Investor Management

Use OCV’s Investor CRM template to plan and track investor outreach and interest.

Start building your investor CRM when you start working on your pitch deck, if you haven’t started already. Start with OCV’s Trusted VC Network list and use the Find Funding database to search for additional early-stage investors.

Early interest from investors

No matter how “informal” an intro meeting may appear, remember that all investor meetings are inherently pitches. Don’t meet with investors before you’re ready. Even if you’re not presenting a pitch deck, they are evaluating you.

At this stage, you should typically hold off on meeting investors until you’re ready to actively fundraise and keep your focus on building your product and growing. If you receive an inbound request, capture the interest in your investor CRM and let the potential investor know that you’re still early but would love to chat with them when you start thinking about fundraising.

Email Template: Early Investor Interest Response

Hi [Name],

Thanks for reaching out. We’re not meeting with investors yet, but we’d love to meet you when we start thinking about fundraising. Can we reconnect in a few months?

Regards,

[Email Signature]

Monthly investor updates

An investor update is a brief and honest snapshot of the company’s current status. It’s sent via email to current investors and team members. Keeping investors in the loop builds trust and keeps you accountable. It makes the investor feel like they are part of your team and makes them more likely to help you. Sending monthly updates is another way to hold yourself accountable to measuring, tracking, and reporting on your monthly progress.

The content should focus on showing month-over-month progress and typically includes the company’s monthly metrics, highlights/lowlights, and goals. Send your investor update on the 1st of every month. New companies should send their first newsletter the month after they started, even if it’s only been a couple of weeks.

1. Pre-Seed companies will send this to the OCV email address provided and employees.

2. Post-Seed companies should send their updates to all current investors (including OCV) and employees.

Don’t send potential investors the same update you send to current investors. If investors are showing early interest in your company but it isn’t time to begin the fundraising process, you can keep potential investors “warm” by sending a separate investor newsletter. This update can be sent less frequently (quarterly) and should focus on sharing good news and major milestones. You can choose to share metric,s but be selective. Don’t share all of your metrics or metrics that don’t show growth.

What to include

Use this template. If you need more inspiration, here’s an example from GitLab.

1. Metrics: Lead with your 1-3 most important metrics. The update should include both the monthly metric and the % change from the previous month. We also recommend including your ARR growth, burn rate, and runway.

2. Highlights/lowlights: Share a few bullet points on what’s going well and what’s not going well. This gives investors more context.

3. Goals: Share 1-3 ambitions explaining what you aspire to achieve in the upcoming month. These goals may be different from your bi-weekly office hours goals. They can include things like shipping new features/functionality, hosting an event with a high attendance rate, upcoming announcements, collaborations, etc.

4. Ask: Ask investors for something you need help with. Keep the asks in the update simple. For example: candidate recommendations, prospective customer intros, investor intros. More complicated requests should be sent 1:1.

OCV’s Trusted VC Network

OCV maintains a Trusted VC Network list. Founders can request access in their company channel. OCV classifies VC partners into four groups:

1. Test VC Group: OCV’s strongest supporters. OCV companies should feel free to test their pitches with this group. This is a subset of the Friendly VC Group.

2. Friendly VC Group: Those who have invested in OCV companies in the past and/or demonstrated an understanding and appreciation for OCV’s model. They are on our investor newsletter mailing list, along with the Test VC Group. Friendly VCs will be introduced to OCV companies one quarter before others.

3. Pipeline VC Group: VCs who are new to us and are looking at one company for investment for now. They may graduate to the “Friendly” group.

4. Deny VC Group: those we have had challenges working with in the past or who have a mixed reputation. For example, bypassing the OCV introduction process, suggesting founders renegotiate equity, not honoring term sheets, last-minute demands.

Founders are welcome to nominate investors in their own networks and/or those who have expressed an interest in investing in the company. OCV will add these firms to the Pipeline VC group.