No Is an Acronym
With the spring holidays upon us, we decided to take a break from the usual tech distortion and hyperbole and since this is pitching season – and speaking of the holidays, next up is summer when investors kick back a bit to spend time with their families and/or take some vacation time, so we’re resurrecting an earlier column as a reminder, and we’ll get to why in a bit.
When you were a kid how many times did your parents say No! N-O, NO! More than once, we’d wager. How many times did they say, Yes, Y-E-S, YES!’ Bet I can count the number of times on one hand – zero. Never happened.
We did notice this at a fairly young age – long before we knew that there was such a word – that NO is an acronym. It was parent-code for ‘keep trying’ or ‘change the talking points,’ provided that you’d figured out the code. In some cases, we found that if we changed our approach or arguments, we could get a yes. Persistence pays. And the same can be said of investors. Investors hate to miss opportunities, so they don’t really like to say no. They like to hedge their bets and keep their options open. Sometimes they will give you a hard and fast No and mean it. Still, that said, things change, so one never knows if it truly is a hard no. Or they may suggest that they might be open to coming in next round, once you’ve proved your concept a bit. It’s that FOMO thing, in case they might have missed something the first time around, so they keep you warm and keep their options open.
