As I prepare to attend another conference with Goa Internet Services, I can’t help but remember the very bad-tasting experience that we had last year at Innovate!Europe ‘06. First of all, I must say that Chris Shipley is one of the nicest, most honest and straightforward people that I’ve met in this sector. Chris and her team did a great job with Innovate!Europe ‘06, and the event itself provided us with much needed feedback about our strategy and our product. We learned that we had a great product, but we also learned that perhaps the product could be optimised if we changed our approach and focused more on the international marketplace. We honestly wouldn’t be the company that we are now if we hadn’t attended Innovate!Europe ‘06.

When we got to the conference we were really excited to meet one VC that marketed itself as Skype’s original investor. Before the conference, we thought about how cool it’d be to meet them, and at the conference we got really excited when the PR rep told us after our presentation that this important VC wanted to meet us. The VC rep questioned us for about 1 hour about every aspect of our business, and as dumb, eager entrepreneurs in that moment, we gave him a lot of information about our company and our strategy. We had specifically asked the rep if the VC had a competing company, to which he had responded no. At the dinner that night, Chris and her team announced that the VC had just informed them that they were going to invest in a Barcelona-based company focused on a vertical search engine for property. We got so excited, imagining our surprise Hollywood ending until we saw the rep with whom we’d been chatting patting another young entrepreneur who hadn’t even attended the conference on the back. The VC’s rep had simply used the conference as a press op (meaning that this had been planned well in advance–we later noted that the new company was already included on the company’s website as belonging to its portfolio of companies; we hadn’t noticed earlier because the description of the portfolio company had been pretty limited) and had simply pretended to be interested in us so as to collect information about our plans. After the conference, I sent the VC rep an email and he never even responded, despite apologizing to me the day after the conference for any “misunderstandings” that might have taken place given the embarrassment of the night before (by that point, everyone at the conference knew that we were the only vertical search engine officially registered at the event and many people had come up afterwards to express their condolences.) He told me that he hoped I didn’t think he was an asshole, and on the bright side, he had given us a lot of valuable feedback.

As we prepare for this new event, I can’t help but wonder: how much information should we give to a VC that is supposedly interested in our product? VCs officially note that they won’t signed NDAs or any other such agreement, which means that the entrepreneur’s only protection depends on: i) his own discretion; and ii) the VC’s good faith. On the one hand, you want to “sell” your product and highlight the interesting opportunity that your product represents. On the other hand, it seems that some VCs are less than fully honest and in some cases, borderline unethical.

After my experience last year, I will try to be more vigilant to protect ourselves from giving away too much information to the VC (and by extension, to the VC’s portfolio company), even as the VC peppers me with questions as to why he should invest in our product and as to what our strategy is going forward.