Most investors add no value, but when they do, it can be company-saving.
In 2010 as @udemy was just picking up steam, eBay-owned PayPal was cracking down on marketplace businesses for violating ToS. Without warning, they shut our entire payments system down.
**Read On**
We had a few months of runway and were starting to raise our Series A. It would take weeks to implement an alternative system, and that would've killed our traction story.
It was all-out panic mode.
We asked everyone for help - many were experiencing the same problem.
PayPal was notoriously bureaucratic at this time and was completely inaccessible to small startups like us.
The "best case" scenario, we heard, was 3 months of downtime.
That would've been a death blow.
One of many "hail mary" lobs was a panic email to our investors:
"Hey all,
PayPal is trying to shut us down. Do any of you have connections at PayPal or eBay? If we don't get back up, we will lose months of revenue.
Please help :)"
We had sent about 10 investor emails at that point and rarely ever got more than 2-3 responses. We didn't even know if some of our investors read our updates.
Turns out - they did.
Within hours, @jeremys got connected with the CEO of eBay who happened to be on a different time zone in Thailand at the time.
He sent the order down to PayPal, and we were back online within 24 hours.
We went on to raise our Series A 3 months later.
If you are lucky enough to raise from great investors, do yourself a favor: keep them updated and engaged.
They may not engage often, but when they do, it could save your company.
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