Sagar Yarnalkar started DailyNinja in 2015 as an online platform that delivered milk and groceries to customers. The company, which went on to raise funding from individual angels and Sequoia, made pitches to well-known investors in the early days. Yarnalkar says he’s had a lot of strange conversations with investors, and often found that they’re wary and say no to an idea immediately. He is now able to laugh at the strange experiences, and says they’ve taught him how to say no. He relates one such experience here:
“We approached a very well-known investor at the time we were doing 1,000 orders a day. He told us to get back to him when we were doing 10,000 orders a day. A year later when we returned, he sent us back, saying 10,000 wasn’t enough, we should meet him when we reached 25,000 orders a day. Now, we’ve touched that, and I’m sure he’ll give us our next moving target. I call this the ‘English way of saying no’. Another time, an investor said he would give a commitment of funding only if we convinced our existing investors to fund his portfolio company. That time, I found my own English way to say no.”
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