MassRobotics was pleased to host Paul Maeder, Chairman and Founder of Highland Capital Partners for an information discussion around how VCs decide to make investments in companies, the challenges hardware and robotics companies present and learnings from Highhand’s ReThink and Nutonomy investments.

Our engaged residents and friends had terrific questions and dialogue with Paul, which continued into the networking session.

Some highlights and advice from Paul:

• Your relationship with a VC is like a marriage, you have to like each other and work well together. Not all VCs are a good fit
• When investing in robots you have to build out an ROI story and be able to back that up with facts. In general were aren’t interested in robots replacing low paying jobs because it is tough to come up with a reasonable ROI.
• “We are investing in people and investing in the future”
• Start EARLY, not when you are going to run out of funding in a few months
• At your initial meeting, limit your team to 1-3 (they will have plenty of time to meet the team, and will want to meet the entire team eventually)
• Reference check your investor, see who else they are investing in and who else they are working with
• When it comes down to it, they chose the individuals they like to work with