Brad Feld

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I’m Trying To Be Respectful, But This Makes Me Crazy

Jan 11, 2012

Following is something that happens to me on a regular basis, with a new and exciting twist. I’m telling this story both to vent (maybe I’m grumpy today – I don’t know) as well as for an object lesson on how not to interact with a VC, or at least with me.

First – the normal part. I’ve had an email exchange with an entrepreneur over the past week. We’ve never met, but he started the email thread by asking if I’d be interested in getting together about his company because he’s looking for financing and he’s sure I’ll be interested. I asked for a short description of what he’s doing. He sent me another email telling me all the friends we have in common who will vouch for him. I responded by asking what he was working on. He gave me a vague description and told me I’d love it. I didn’t really understand it, but it didn’t fit in any of our themes and I told him so. He said he’d looked at the themes and thought I’d be really excited about what his doing. I again asked him to be more specific in case I was missing something.

Now – the new and exciting part. I didn’t hear back from him for a few days and then got an email asking me to respond to his previous message. I looked through my email archive and didn’t have a previous message from him. He responded a little later with the following:

“Kindly,  thoughts below…pls recognize that this is intellectual property and disclosure of this information in any manner is agreed to be upon mutual consent prohibited.”

I sent him a simple reply. “I haven’t read past the first sentence of this email and I’ve deleted the original from my email archive. I don’t sign NDAs and have no interest in having you unilaterally commit me to a confidentially agreement of any sort.”

Stuff like this just baffles me. I get some version of a strange interaction like this every few days. Last week it was the guy who had “flown to Denver just to meet me because I said that I’d meet with anyone.” After a dozen emails where I kept asking him to tell me what he was working on, he basically told me to go fuck off and I’d regret not meeting with him because he was going to create a great company and I was going to miss out.”

It’s weird. Advice to all of you out there – don’t be that guy. If I tell you I’m not interested, try to respect that. I’m trying to be respectful of you by passing quickly and not wasting your time. It has nothing to do with you – and I’m often wrong. But thrashing around with weirdness to try to get face to face isn’t helpful.

And yes – I’m having a much better day today now that I’m hiding in my room behind my computer.