Comments on: 99.99% (or its totally going to happen but isnt signed yet)

By: Top 50 » Top 50 Venture Capital Blog Posts of 2009

Top 50 » Top 50 Venture Capital Blog Posts of 2009 — Mon, 10 May 2010 06:50:49 +0000

[...] 99.99% (Or It’s Totally Going to Happen But Isn’t Signed Yet) [...]

By: EricFriedman

EricFriedman — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 04:32:53 +0000

Ha – whatever your 100% is then yes.

I would tend to agree though, perhaps a signed deal is not enough.

By: Alex

Alex — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 04:22:39 +0000

I've definitely had this problem before. One big sale which was 90% there… for 3 months. For those 3 months, they were just getting the budget cleared, smoothing everything over, etc. Every time we talked it was a slam dunk, that is until his boss suddenly pulled the plug.

For that reason, I would venture to go one step further than you – a deal isn't done until money is in your bank account.

By: EricFriedman

EricFriedman — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 22:32:53 +0000

Ha – whatever your 100% is then yes.

I would tend to agree though, perhaps a signed deal is not enough.

By: Alex

Alex — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 22:22:39 +0000

For that reason, I would venture to go one step further than you – a deal isn't done until money is in your bank account.

By: Spencer Fry

Spencer Fry — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 15:45:58 +0000

I lol'ed.

By: EricFriedman

EricFriedman — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 15:43:08 +0000

I am 99.99% sure you should use it less.

By: Spencer Fry

Spencer Fry — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 15:36:34 +0000

Haha. I find myself using percentages a lot. I wonder why. I do think that it does give more context to how complete a deal is than just saying “it's close” or “we're almost there”.

By: jonsteinberg

jonsteinberg — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 12:31:34 +0000

Awesome post. So true. I'm fond of saying the likelihood of anything happening is very low. It's just so hard to bring things to definitive closure.

To get an individual deal of any kind done has extremely low probability. Hence the need for diversified options in all cases