“average” VC investor, you have a greater than one out of three chance that your business goes to zero. That is a SCARY statistic. If you have spent a major part of your adult life building a business, having a binary outcome shouldn’t be palatable to you. It isn’t to us either. The key is to align with a partner that is not just another investor in your “investor stack” but serves as an enabler of achieving a great outcome. In our view, this requires deep domain expertise, sincere passion for your mission, and alignment around a sensible definition of success. This should start with first protecting the tremendous value you’ve created to date, buttressing and bulwarking it, and then building out the city walls from there; never overexposing it to unnecessary risk. You wouldn’t add a piece of software to your tech stack that had a small chance of helping you grow faster, but also had a high probability of torpedoing your entire operation. So, choose your investors wisely, because many will tout logos of companies that have had massive success on their website, but never talk about the dozens and dozens that failed because they were pushed too hard to do unnatural things in the pursuit of unrealistic objectives. At PeakSpan, we look to align with teams that understand how to build resilient, sustainable businesses. We invest in the judgment of our entrepreneurs and understand that pushing companies to do unnatural things by driving them to try to grow faster than they can palpably digest is a recipe for disaster. We see far too many companies get overcapitalized and have venture investors that encourage them to hire at an absurd clip and take their spend posture through the - 26 -