Below the Line with James Beshara

Today's episode is another deep-dive (meaning it's a little bit different than the regularly scheduled episodes), and it is with a founder, Diego.

This was recorded as we met and chatted about his startup.

About three minutes into meeting / him pitching me his company, I said, “Hey, hold on, hold on. Could we record this? Could we actually sit down and record this as a podcast episode and just release it to the world so that people could see what it was like to have an angel investor coffee.”

Many people think that these things are like a shark tank pitch — and that it's adversarial or that the investor sits there wanting to poke holes to fluster the founder.

But for angel investors and very early stage investors, even through series A or B investors, they want people to understand that they're not trying to poke holes to try to undermine the founder or try to catch them in a crazy scenario. Great investors want to imagine what the world could be like with that founder. That was what I loved about my favorite angel investors, like Naval Ravikant or Sean Parker, and it's how I approach meeting with founders as well.

So I thought, “Man, I've never come across an actual investor founder conversation. recorded before so I would love to record this” and because of time and not wanting to condense the coffee down to around 30 minutes that day, I invited him to do this episode with the right podcast equipment the next day. Diego was really kind enough to do this and to allow it to go out into the world publicly.

This was recorded six months ago because he asked for it not to be released until they had formally launched their company, Panchama. You can read about their eventual public launch here: https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/03/pachama-launches-to-support-global-reforestation-through-carbon-markets/

You can email James questions directly at askbelowtheline@gmail.com or follow us on Twitter @ twitter.com/gobelowtheline — “Below the Line with James Beshara" is brought to you by Straight Up Podcasts LLC