All of the associates we talk to seem to have three goals in mind when they contact us:
To put us into a database of companies their firm is aggregating. From what we understand, most VC firms send out an army of these associates to just gather basic research on companies, but for some reason, their flavor of choice for data collection is via a phone call rather than actually using the Internet to scrape most of the mundane stuff that they're asking us. We've actually had conversations where we can hear them typing into a spreadsheet in the background as we talked to them.
To regurgitate the firm's history and mission statement from their web site. We noticed this early on and that's why we started going over them ahead of time so we could skip it, but apparently this information must always be passed on orally to a potential company regardless of whether the company is able to finish their sentences.
To let us know that they were different, that they give more than just money and that we should keep them in mind when we do decide to take on more funding. Needless to say, we find it very odd (if not funny) to hear every firm state how different they were in exactly the same way as everyone else.
