Triaging the right partners

When you work at a startup, time is the most valuable resource. There’s just simply too many things to do at once and you need to prioritize accordingly. It’s always going with the highest value projects and deals.

We’re always trying to make sure we triaging the best deals. There’s always a trade off between amount of work and deal impact for us and finding that balance can be hard. Doing a sizable deal into a target company is always ideal, but if there’s complications that’s going to require a lot of work, we need to weigh that. Same goes for any projects we take on as a company.

One area that I need to really get better with is making sure we triage the right partners. Put simply, there’s some partners we work with that are great and worth the effort of building a relationship. They see the mutually beneficial aspect of working together and we help each other.

There’s others that are purely transactional and only come to you when you need help. Like in life, you don’t want to be friends with that person that only comes to you when you need something.

We’ve historically cast a big net here at Secfi in terms of our partners, but we’re at the point where it’s time to pick and choose better “friends”.