Exploring the web
about venture capital partners or investors will give you a myriad of results, each
of them offering a good quality of business investment opportunities and
valuable resources in today’s market. But the challenge is how to go about
attracting these people – venture
capital investors or angel investors
– to help you with key decisions to your investments? For entrepreneurs and investors, connection is
the right key to help your business venture a success. Successful business startups
are built around innovative ideas and leading-edge technologies, yet realizing
these business plans require the right resources, information, infrastructure,
and most of all, the right partnerships.
It all comes down to
how well you click with people you first encounter. Clicking has always been a
subjective art form. There is that special moment when two people click, rather
than simply meet. Brothers Ori and Rom Brafman authored a book, Click: The Magic of Instant Connections,
and Ori shared his ideas to business owners looking to assemble an inner
circle of advisers, partners and investors they click with. He categorized the
ingredients involving clicking into the following:
- Vulnerability - Exaggerating how many people
you employ or boasting about your revenue will only attenuate the ability to
attract investors to help you. Brafman’s research found that people who
actually display their weaknesses are the best to click with. Just simply try to
hang out with these people and bring yourself a box of pizza or invite them for
a coffee without a scheduled formal meeting so you get to know each other as
real human beings, is exercising a sense of vulnerability.
- Proximity – The advanced communication
technology such as Skype, Yahoo Messenger, or Google Talk, is now widely used
for most businesses in meeting with people. But Brafman advices that it is
better to show up face to face. According to their research, you definitely
click with people you meet face to face, people who are physically close to
you. And the most important part of any meeting is what happens just before or
after the actual meeting because that is when you take the time to get to know
the people you are meeting with as individuals, and the chance to click occurs.
That is very unlikely to happen when you are talking to someone on the phone.
- Resonance – According to Brafman, people
who resonate are both Present and Flowing. Being present is about showing up as
a real person and a fully engaged human being. Flowing is about being
challenged while doing something you are really good at. He said that if you
are talking to an angel investor, and you are just going through the motions of your elevator
pitch, you are toast! People know when you are just acting rather than feeling
challenged and being fully present.
- Similarities – You best click with people when
you have trivial similarities, such as what sports they enjoy, what school they
went to, what gadgets they like and a lot more. However, the number of
similarities between two individuals is critical when you are trying to click
with someone, according to Brafman. The quantity of commonalities overrides the
qualities of those connections according to his research.
- Shared Difficulties – The experience of going through
something difficult together and coming out of the other side to safety makes
people feel as though they click. Brafman suggests that you acknowledge
difficult periods you have gone through with your inner circle in order to
stimulate this sensation in a business context.
You must take note
that above all of these categories, you must not forget that you should connect
with the right venture
capital partners in order to take
your business further; otherwise, you might just be wasting your effort, time,
and money.