Betatron Declined to Invest In Your Startup - What Now?
You’ve submitted your deck and shared some information about your startup with Betatron, but you haven’t been invited to pitch. Or perhaps you did pitch, but were not asked to proceed to further due diligence. Of course you’d like to know what exactly prevents Betatron from moving forward, and you’d like to get some feedback.
Instead, you likely got a somewhat-generic email from Betatron letting you know they won’t proceed right now. This is frustrating. How can VCs claim to be founder friendly, but then not give feedback? Should you press for feedback? And what do you do now?
What not to do:
Don’t take it personally
Don’t send a snarky message that might burn the relationship
Don’t think your company is uninvestable
Don’t get discouraged
It’s not personal. Why VCs usually don’t give feedback with rejections
VCs reject far more companies than they proceed with. Most VCs will make a small handful of investments each year - maybe 10 or fewer - and yet they review hundreds, or even thousands of pitch decks. VC teams are small, so they don’t have the bandwidth to respond to each startup with feedback. It’s not about you and it’s not that they don’t want to give feedback; the business model just doesn’t allow time and space for it.
Feedback should be expected if the rejection comes after some in-depth due diligence. If the VC has taken up a lot of your team’s time in meetings and poring over your company’s financials and metrics, then they do owe you some kind of feedback and it’s reasonable to ask for it.
Most of the time, the rejection is less about you and your company and more about the fit with the VC
Most funds have a narrow set of parameters within which they can invest, especially when they have a responsibility to stick to the mandate that their LPs have invested in. At Betatron, we look for early stage companies with both an outstanding team and meaningful traction. We also have a geographic focus on Asia (excluding China), and we try not to concentrate too many of our investments in any one sector or country. Reasons we may pass on you that have very little to do with your company or you as a founder include:
We’ve already invested in a similar or competing company
We have too much exposure in the country you’re in
We have too little experience investing in your region or sector
Your valuation doesn’t align well with our portfolio construction
You’re either too early stage or too late stage for us to participate
Even if Betatron declined to invest once, we still want to hear from you to potentially invest later
Even if we’re not part of the current round, we love hearing from companies who make progress executing on their vision, and we’re happy to look at your later rounds. Every investor says this, but there’s truth to it.
The best thing you can do after a rejection is continue to focus on growing the metrics that matter for the business while widening your hunt for investors. You can keep in touch with Betatron by sending updates to investments@betatron.co
