# The Best Deals Don't Look Like Deals

*August 24, 2020 · Medium · Roby John*

The Best Deals dont look like deals !

Reminder to myself from James Beshara from my YC Batch (W2012)

https://thegeneralist.substack.com/p/-the-miss-james-beshara

There are two stories that come to mind, and it really goes back to this lesson that I now think quite a lot about, which is this: the best deals often do not look like deals. Someone said that on Twitter a year or so ago — I don’t remember who it was, but when I read it, I thought, holy shit, that’s right. It was the perfect articulation of the opportunities I had missed. It was only afterwards that I realized I had been at the table when a deal was happening — the best ones just happen so damn fast.

The first one is Mighty, Suhail from Mixpanel’s new company. When Suhail and I talked about what he was building, he didn’t have a name, didn’t have this crisp perfectly polished pitch, didn’t have a demo or a cool brand. It was just an idea. He told me he was thinking about fundraising and having conversations, but mostly talking with friends to test the concept out.

I thought more about it afterwards, for maybe the next 30 days. The more I thought about it, the more I thought, this is a really, really good idea. But when I reached back out to him, Suhail told me the round had closed about a month ago. I was like, wait, while you were having that conversation with me? And he said, yeah, pretty much, three or four days later we had a lead come in and do the round.

There was no deck, no process, no email saying hey, I’m fundraising. It was done.

That was the second time I learned that lesson.

My friend Immad is the founder of Mercury; he had previously built HeyZap. I had spent so much time in the fintech space with Tilt, so he approached me with his idea to build a bank for startups. Again, it wasn’t a perfectly polished pitch; it was a kind of broken pitch really, gathering feedback as he thought about going after a very big space.

And so he asked me, would you be interested in investing? Because he’s a friend, and I believe in him, I invested $5K, a small amount. I’ve since invested more, but when I look back at it, I wish I’d had the foresight to understand that it takes time to get to that perfectly polished pitch. You have to be giving it 10 or 20 times a week. And since both of these were successful repeat founders and great communicators, I should’ve known they’d get that part down. Instead, I waited too long to think about it and didn’t anticipate how quickly they’d gain momentum around what wasn’t even a fundraising process. In this environment, I have since learned to appreciate that more…the best deals often don’t look like deals.

### ✏️ The Lesson

What I’ve learned is that if an exceptional founder is going after a big space, you can forgive them the articulation, the clarity of their positioning. It takes so many cycles to get it just right. If you wait for that there’s a very, very high chance you’re catching them at a time where your return is 1/10th what it could have been. So you build in a discount for the specific idea-related communication if you know the person is an otherwise great communicator, and it’s someone great chasing something big.

And then the second, even more important lesson is: great deals can happen so fast that by the time you realize you were at the table, it’s too late. I don’t think I was aware of just how fast a deal can happen for a great idea and great founder — and even though the story is still being written for Mighty and Mercury, I can say they have both of those things going for them.

(Source: https://medium.com/@robytj/the-best-deals-dont-look-like-deals-5c0a9f1f85b7)