Weird interaction with potential investor… How should I react?

[invinoveritas]

Hey community! I’ll try to make this very weird story as short as possible…

I’m a founder of a deep-tech co. We are in the life science/healthcare area, have raised 500k USD, and are hitting some very decent milestones for the type of co we are.

I started fundraising for a Seed round. I speak to a VC, we had a couple of meetings with a partner, things seem to be going ok. He says: I’d like you to pitch the co to the board, so that we can make a decision on whether to invest or not. Cool, I make the pitch, show some data, everything goes very well. I get a message from the CEO of the VC, he tells me that “he loved the pitch” and he just wanted me to meet with a board member that was OOO at the time due a personal problem, and the reason he wanted me to meet with him was that he was the “medical expert”.

I meet the guy, on zoom, after abt 10min, he stsrts going off about the co being “too early stage”, him “being dissapointed” on how little progress we made during the past 6 months, and how my scientific team was “way too young” (avg age 33 years old)

So I close the meeting asking him “hey listen I need to understand, are you in or are you out, because you’ve been complaining for 45’ so just give it to me straight”. He says “on behalf of XXX fund, we’re out, too early stage”. Ok, cool, farewell… I leave the meeting and not 3min later he access my deck on Docsend. Since he is out, I deactivate the link, no reason for him to have it. Since then he tried to access it 4 more times.

Should I send him an email saying “hey bro, you said you were out, why are truing to access the deck for a company you opted out of?” Or should I just let it go and play dumb?

This is the first time I’ve seen this happen. When someone says “pass” they PASS. This seems like he could be trying to use our deck as intel for some other company… I don’t know…

 

[smithe7]

@invinoveritas Leave it be.

There's no upside gain to interacting further with that fund right now.

 

[invinoveritas]

@smithe7 I feel you. I agree that there’s no evident upside to interacting with THE FUND. My problem is that if this guy is trying to steal info, copy our strategy, or copy slides for another company, just felt like it could be a good idea to let him know he’s being watched (although he should have known that when using DocSend)

 

[garsimtha]

@invinoveritas You’re thinking too far into it. Leave it alone

 

[aglcmohan]

@invinoveritas As others said, let it go. They have thousands of decks if they are an active vc firm in the space. I have thousands of decks, I always save but rarely look at them.

Nobody will build your idea based on a deck unless you shared the key to completely copying your business, in which case it's already out there (as you pitched it) and is not that valuable (since one can copy it just by looking at your deck).

Just forget it. I know he increased your cortisol levels a bit but fundraising is always like that. People will frustrate, treat you unfair or fair or whatever, none of it matters, focus on getting the cash in and moving forward! Good luck with the startup.