Well, not actually eat since there wouldn’t have been an receipt for an expense report, but they did try to hire them.

I’ve talked to other entrepreneurs and they have reported similar experiences. You go in and do your pitch. You know the drill - polite interest, somewhat random questions from the recent MBA grads gunning for a partner slot, promises to call, etc, etc. You pretty much know the next stop is the closest place you can purchase alcohol based numbness. Then one of the older guys takes you aside.

“Have you ever seen a grown man naked, Timmy?”

Sorry, that was Peter Graves in Airplane. What he says is: Do you think you’d be open to looking at one of our other portfolio companies?

I swear to god, the first time that happened I thought they wanted me to do some consulting. So I said “Sure” and was horrified when I figured he wanted me and my tech team (but not my co-founder) to dump our current company (and investors!) and go fix some POC company that simply couldn’t deliver. I was horrified, and offended, and felt stupid because I just didn’t get it at first. I still remember the stupid feeling, actually.

This happened several times. It also happened after an on-site Dog And Pony when one of the VC’s made a move on my technical team. They all forwarded the emails to me - they wanted to know if they could flame the sender. I told them go-ahead and they spent a happy few hours using the thesaurus to find high falutin words that meant: jerk.

The last time that happened to me was in England and I just blurted out: This is some kind of test, isn’t it? They assured me that no, it wasn’t - it was just an easy way to recruit management.

We’ve talked about the risks of taking venture money and the difficulty of negotiating your term sheet. I guess you can add the worry of losing key staff during the run up to taking the money!