Gil Belford

One of the best ways to understand a founder better is to try to do a bit of research. Whether that means looking through the founder's public persona or going through your network - it's a great way to start to build an idea of what the founder is like. But it's very important that you don't form a crystallised view from just a couple sources, before you actually have the opportunity to meet and speak with the founder. Your research findings should help you form hypotheses, and in your direct contacts, you should aim to validate those hypotheses, or be prepared to learn more in case they turn out not to correspond to reality.

People who are able to master this principle add an incredibly powerful tool to their negotiation toolbox. When used wisely and timely, it can help accelerate closing or intensify interest from prospects - but when used at the wrong time it comes across as trying too hard, and may cause the person using it to lose credibility. The reason it works is because it taps into some of our most primal desires, and into a psychological bias called loss aversion which is incredibly powerful. For those who want to learn more, there is a lot of great work already created around this, most of it from the realms of psychology and behavioural economics - some good author recommendations are Robert Cialdini, Dan Ariely and Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky.

It's crucial that you have a very good understanding and alignment on why you are seeking to do the transaction, as that will guide your goals during due diligence. If you're making an aqui-hire, then you need to focus a lot of your attention on the team. If you're looking to acquire a company for its company base, assuming that they'll be a good fit for your product, then you need to make sure that you understand the customer profile and their behaviour extremely well. For this - it's essential that the deal team is aligned with management and other business leaders, and that different people are brought in early in the design and definition of the due diligence process, so that they may contribute their expertise.

In the VC world, a firm and its team's reputation is probably going to be one of the key factors in ensuring good deal flow and deal access. It's important for the communication strategy to have clear goals set: Are we doing it to help boost our profile? To set ourselves as experts in a particular field? To help promote and boost our portfolio companies? To get deal flow? Based on that goal (it can be more than one) - you should then set the right strategies for your firm. Another point to take into consideration is also the tone and type of communication that you use, which should be aligned with your identity and positioning as a VC.

In Business Development and partnerships, it's often as much about the data that you bring to the table as it is about the story and narrative behind it, and how you use data to effectively strengthen an angle. The best BD professionals are able to combine persuasion, story telling and meaningful data and statistics to effectively communicate and influence other stakeholders. It is equal parts science and art.

I believe that being able to consume and extract insights from large quantities of information is a key skill within BD. It's often how you will understand patterns and detect opportunities both within your own business and in your potential partners'. The best BD professionals are able to create frameworks and systems to keep tabs on what's happening in the market, and understand where there is space to build together or complement a partner's strategy through a partnership.