Writing Investor Updates or a Fork in the Eye?
Quarterly updates are a chore.
So is fundraising.
They both feel like distractions from actually running the business—or so my portfolio founders tell me when I ask for updates. :)
Something that Metal.so is doing now combines those efforts into one—in a way that could upend the way founders and investors find each other, and save everyone a boatload of time. Metal just launched a set of investor relations tools that takes this up to the next level. Their pitch is that companies stay private so long now that founders use the investor update the way a public company CEO uses the quarterly earnings report.
I have no investment in this company (yet), but I’m fascinated by how they’re building around a really underappreciated pain for founders—and an underappreciated upside of this thankless task.
Is an update going to raise your round for you? No. What it does is keep your progress, your message, and your goals top of mind for the people who already wrote you a check, and those people talk to other VCs all the time—and that’s if you don’t send a version of it around to potential next round folks.
When another investor asks me about a company, ideally I know what their latest accomplishment was, or a recent win, or the timing on the next fundraise. I also need to know what can be discussed and when it's appropriate to say certain things. What you want me to be able to say is, "You should talk to these guys. They just did X for Y, they just closed this major partnership, and now is a good window to get on their radar for when they fundraise in the spring."
I can only say that if you told me. Think of it like performing inception in my next catch up with another VC—one who might be on your target list.
So yeah, sure, the update is a report to your existing investors. It's also where you hand them a tight pitch story to pass on to potential next round investors, well before you're actually out raising.
What I think is interesting about what they're doing is on the matching side. It's really hard to figure out what each VC is focused on in their thesis at any given time, separate from the high level categories like "we're going after consumer." Startup decks change, too. Startups pivot all of the time. Metal takes what's in your latest deck and your latest update, whether that's a new offering, a new product, or some realization that came to you, and lets you know where there are matches with a VC's thesis and who you should talk to.
That kickstarts your search well before you actually have to do any work on it.
What I’m finding most interesting is by capturing update and board decks and pairing it with their fundraising tools where they ingest pitch conversations and feedback, they’re building a database of knowledge that no one else really has—the actual, real time who’s doing what, who’s still investing in what, and what everyone thinks of it.
Permissioned in a thoughtful way (and this is critical), and it’s the most up to date database on both sides of the startup equity market that anyone has.
Metal will also help you write the damn thing. Like most AI composition, getting you 60 to 80% of the way to a draft severely cuts down on the cognitive load.
You've already had team discussions about how things are going, and maybe those discussions have transcripts attached to them. What if you just went about your normal business, meeting with your team and executing and the AI got you 80% of the way to the update without you ever having to stare at a blank page—especially if it was smart enough to strike that balance of transparency and marketing that goes with relying on your current board members and cap table for follow-ons in the next round.
I’m such a fan of what Metal is doing, I asked them for a discount to hand out.
Book a meeting with Metal here and you can get 20% off. One founder I mentioned this to wrote back with "I am also using Metal.so religiously during this round; it really does work."