Thread by @msuster

1/ I had "strategic" investors at my first startup. I learned first hand what a bad idea this can be, even when they're good people. A thread ...

2/ I use quotes for "strategic" because it's really an oxymoron. Most industry investors are the opposite of strategic. They have vested interests and sadly this plays out on their board and investor participation

3/ Many strategic / industry investors are bad for startups even though it's no fault of their own. They often have different incentives, different expectations and are playing a different game. Let's examine this ...

4/ Strategic investors have different incentives:
- they often care more about your product than your growth (if they're a user)
- they care more about keeping your valuation LOW (if they want to be a buyer)
- they care more about looking good internally than shareholder value

5/ Strategic investors have different expectations because they measure success based on internal, big company, slow growth metrics. They see every downside case, not what could happen if the growth case happens. Because that's what life inside a big company looks like

6/ Even if you have a relatively progressive, thoughtful, open-minding "strategic" board member who loves innovation, they have to report back to a public company CEO who is complaining to them that all tech startups are overvalue & overhyped

7/ I once had an amazing strategic board member who was a co-investor with me. Still, he always looked through the lens of the world that "was" (media) vs. the world that "could be" (tech-enabled social commerce). So we were forced to double-spend to appease both arguments

8/ I have watched "strategic" investors try to block financings at startups because they want to buy the company one day so they don't want dilution, don't want a high price, don't want fast growth

9/ I wrote about many of these problems publicly in 2009 having run a startup who raised strategic money & having lived through the problems directly. So I've lived through this for 20 years, not 2
bothsidesofthetable.com/is-strategic-m…

10/ It reminds me "plus ça change" ... the more I experience this wave of strategic investors entering the bull market for tech/startup investing the more I am reminded that they can't help themselves. They're scorpions. As this great parable goes ...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scorp…