Author's business card: Shi Lan Capital Partner, Director and Vice President of China-Australia Wealth Investment, and once a senior manager of Zero2IPO Group (Zero2IPO) Consulting Department, successfully operated private financing, mergers and acquisitions and overseas listing of more than ten enterprises. Bachelor of Engineering from Xi Jiaotong University, MBA from Tsinghua University. At present, I do VC investment full-time and pay attention to seed investment in my spare time. If you have any projects, please email me to guishuguang@sina.cn. How to communicate with investors politely Gui Shuguang (Beijing) Many entrepreneurs dare to take on many things and handle them confidently in the process of starting a business, but when dealing with investors, they become insecure children. This gesture may discourage investors, who will think that you are weak and do not have the qualities of an entrepreneur. Therefore, it is very important to communicate with investors politely. For example, you receive an email from a potential investor: AA, hello! I am an investor in ABC Capital, an early venture capital fund (VC) headquartered in Silicon Valley and with offices in many countries around the world. You may know some companies we have invested in, including the startups of some well-known entrepreneurs you are familiar with. XX, the founding partner of this organization, was deeply impressed by your company, which made me know more about your team and financing plan. Can I have a short telephone conversation with you in the next few days? What time is convenient for you? ——YY looks great, doesn't it? However, if you have experience in dealing with investors, you know that this may mean that they just want a junior investment manager to call you once. He will ask a lot of questions related to the company's business and get to know you as much as possible, but he has no decision-making power when actually investing. This is the operation mode of VC organization. Many investment managers do the basic work, and a few partners make the actual decisions. There is no objection to the investment manager here, but what you need is to communicate with people with decision-making power. So you can reply like this: thank you for your kindness. I'd be happy to have a short phone call with your partner XX sometime next week, preferably on Thursday or Friday. It is difficult for most VCs to communicate directly with their partners for the first time, but if this VC is really interested in you, they will naturally not give up, but they will not directly agree to your request, so they will reply like this: Thank you very much for your reply. I hope I can arrange for you to talk to ZZ, who is our vice president of investment and on the same investment team as XX. Is this arrangement okay? Arranging an investment vice president to communicate seems to be more important. Compared with an investment manager, it makes little difference to you. Of course, you can give VC a step and accept his advice. But you can not be interested in it. So I went on to reply: I got a reply, but I want to talk to XX. Tell me when he is free, and we can arrange a phone call. At this point, if the investment manager wants to continue to communicate with you, he should not pass the buck to others to communicate with you. He can only find another excuse. He replied again: I understand, but unfortunately, XX's schedule is full, so I usually need to collect some important data of your company first. If all goes well, thank you very much for meeting and communicating with XX. That sounds reasonable. It's hard to meet an unusually busy partner before reading your message. However, you can still insist on a brief communication with your partner by phone before deciding whether it is necessary to meet. You can reply: I'm happy to talk to XX briefly, and I can wait until he is free. If the investment manager replies to your email later and tries to persuade you to communicate with him first, you can ignore it or politely refuse. Finally, if they really don't want to miss you or let other VCS people get ahead-only if you have a chance to be the next great enterprise. In a few days, their other half XX will send you an email: AA, hello! It seems that you are a opinionated person! I just read an article about your company. This email is copied to my assistant, who will arrange our meeting time as soon as possible to discuss cooperation opportunities.