One of the things we take very seriously at Zelkova is being able to get together with our companies. In order to make this happen the majority of our portfolio is centered in three cities: San Francisco, New York and Boulder.
Prior to investing in seed rounds we tend to have several in person meetings and both Larry and I meet the teams. Occasionally there comes an hurdle that not everyone is able to meet in person. To get around this we try to use technology to help bring everyone together, but it never works as well. For a while we were doing live skype calls, which area always awkward and marred by technology issues. Lately we have been asking companies to do intro videos, which seem to work better as they can be watched anytime, multiple times and are less awkward on both sides.
One of these deals is Rapportive, in fact this is the only deal we have invested in without meeting in person prior. Here is their video, as you can see it very much focuses on who they are, which is a critical element of seed stage investing.
