Lewis Cirne: Complete Openness with Investors

My litmus test for working with investors is if you're lucky enough to have term sheets from a few investors, you know what's more important than the terms are the likelihood that you're going to have a really open and honest relationship and a high trust relationship with that investor. And so if you're looking at a term sheet, what I recommend you do is give yourself a gut check and ask, is this individual someone that I feel I could come to very comfortably with bad news? Because you will no doubt have bad days, bad weeks, bad news to share with your investors. If you're going through the startup ride, everybody does. So the question is, are you going to feel like hesitant, you're going to shape the message to make sure that they don't overreact or whatever? Are they going to get too just difficult to work with, or are they going to be collaborative and help you solve whatever problem needs to be solved? That gut check, Peter, resonates very well with that. And I'm also blessed to have like, Dan Skolnick is another great board member on my team. I mean, I've just got great investors, but they almost feel like co founders. I mean, given that you were a solo founder, which is unusual. Well, they certainly, they almost become, you say he's the best friend, that almost sounds like a co founder. They feel like deep partners that I can be completely open and vulnerable with. And the interesting thing about it is I feel like it works better for their relationship with me too, because people are smart. They know when they're being played or managed or like someone's trying to represent themselves as being someone they're not. And there's temptation to do that when you feel like you've, I don't know, you got to defend yourself or you don't have that level of trust with a person. When you're completely open and vulnerable with your investors, they draw themselves in and really want to help you too and help you grow and your company succeeds. So it has this kind of symbiotic relationship. And I'd say the same thing with how you work with your senior team as well.