An interesting perspective from AVC:

1. Three-hour internal strategy session with VC partners worked great in person

2. Shorter follow-on investment decision meeting with Singapore-based startup worked great remote

I think we will get smarter which meetings work remote and which ones don’t.

Why does meeting type 1 work in person?

• People are in the same location anyway, and can all be in the same room (no “zooming in”)

• A great setting to bounce off ideas between people who know each other well, have worked with each other for a long time,

• That meeting required a significant amount of time to go through things (3 hours on Zoom… no). Also the relative cost of a commute for a 3 hour meeting is lower, than spending the same time in traffic for a 30 minute chat.

• The type of interactions in this meeting are probably “messy”: lots of n-to-n question, answers and discussions. (Unlike a 1 to n presentation with a few specific questions)

• It depends on personality: extroverts love to go back to long in-person problem solving sessions, introverts might not

Meeting 2 is the opposite:

• 1 to n presentation with Q&A

• Predictable content and questions to cover

• The meeting was shorter, and maybe stacked with other similar type meetings.

• And the obvious one: people were a continent apart, and the meeting (or even a call) might not have happened if it weren’t for Zoom.

The short pitch via Zoom (even if you are close physically) has opened up a real new way to connect. In a call investors can’t really size up the team. With this uncertainty, a full meeting with filled with small talk and other logistics is too expensive and will not happen. The Zoom call fits right in between.

So different type of meetings, different type of format.

Photo by Gabriel Benois on Unsplash