As any good manager knows, making sure communication flows fluently between everyone in the organization is key to it’s success. This means communication between the different team members, between managers and of course, between the CEO and Investors/Board.n be
Properly and correctly updating your investors can be a huge help. Most of them will want to assist you if they can. They’re in this with you already. Pointing them to the weak spots can be a big help.
The opposite is just as true. Being inconsistent with your updates or “beautifying” reality will backfire, eventually. Investors will start to lose confidence and get more and more involved to the point they’ll be a burden on the management, even if the business is just going through perfectly normal stages.
This page holds a collection of posts and tools on the subject which I keep updating over time, in no particular order. Feel free to suggest additional resources in the comments.
Posts
The Dos and Don’ts of managing the relationship with your investors
Excellent post from Daria Shualy, detailing what went wrong and what went right managing her own investors. Very honest and to the point post.
Updating your Investors
Post by David Lee
Investors Updating Their Investors: Inside Homebrew’s First Annual LP Meeting
Hunter Walk reports about their seed fund investors meeting.
Tools & Templates
Investors / Board docs templates
Example docs from IA Ventures, including:
- SaaS Dashboard excel
- OPEX Budget excel
- Board Deck
- Investor Update Deck
- Investor Update Email.
Update My VC
Email Template for a monthly investors update from RRE Ventures.
The email used to notify investors of shutting down one startup to start a new one
This is the actual email founder and CEO Danielle Morrill used to notify her investors they’re shutting down their startup Referly, to start a new one – Mattermark.
Buffer App’s Monthly Investor Update
Buffer published their investors update publicly. Note the October 2013 update where they report being hacked.
FounderSuit
Suite of online tools for start-up founders. Tools include:
- Idea Validation Tool
- Investors CRM
- Sharable Progress Tracker
- Media CRM
- Competitors Tracker
- Startup Docs covering: Starting Up, Raising Capital, Investors Update, Marketing & PR, Partners & Competitors, Building Advisory Board, Hiring Employees, Planning & Modeling, and Corporate and Legalese
Investor Update Email Template – by Leo Polovets
Startup Advisor / Investor Update Template
A short description covering the basics of update emails and a template/sample email.
Hockeystick
Founded by Raymond Luk, Hockeystick is a tool for sharing the metrics with investors. It aims to provide a unified dashboard for CEOs and investors to allow tracking of the company’s performance. In addition to the site itself, they also have an interesting twitter account – @hockeystickco – where they often post related links.
Good Tip:
founders that start their investor updates with current growth rate tend to do well, and founders that start it with press hits tend to not
— Sam Altman (@sama) July 16, 2014
