Investor Relations

Build qualified investor relationships from one current, permissioned fact base. A meeting, introduction, diligence request, verbal interest, or soft circle is not a financing commitment.

Workflow

1. Establish issuer status, issuer jurisdiction, offering pathway if fundraising is active, relationship objective, investor audience and recipient jurisdiction, current round or update context, governing information rights, confidentiality basis, and decision deadline. Use unknown rather than inferring legal, jurisdictional, or reporting status.
2. Classify inputs as observed, inferred, proposed, stale, or conflicting. Keep actual results, modelled economics, and targets separate. For each consequential metric or claim record definition | source | period | asof | evidencestatus | confidence | permittedaudience | permittedsurface.
3. Read [targeting-meetings.md](references/targeting-meetings.md) for targeting, qualification, outreach, meeting preparation, follow-up, and relationship stages.
4. Read [updates-cadence.md](references/updates-cadence.md) for an investor update, reporting cadence, metric freshness, runway communication, or a material correction.
5. Read [artifact-disclosure-log.md](references/artifact-disclosure-log.md) before sharing collateral, opening access, changing an already-distributed artifact, or reconciling disclosure history.
6. Return the diagnosis, evidence limits, recommended relationship action, finished internal brief or communication draft, required approvals, and any established or explicitly proposed owner, next-contact date, metric, and review date.

Disclosure and Outreach Gates

• Distinguish a private non-reporting company from an Exchange Act reporting issuer and from issuers using Regulation Crowdfunding or Regulation A. Regulation FD duties apply only to covered reporting issuers; private companies still face antifraud, contractual confidentiality, privacy, offering-exemption, and state-law duties.
• When securities are being offered, record issuer and recipient jurisdictions and identify the current offering pathway before outreach. Do not infer that cold outreach, public posts, demo-day statements, forwarding, or broad distribution is allowed. Route exemption, solicitation, filing, broker-dealer, securities, tax, and jurisdiction-specific conclusions to current qualified counsel.
• Drafting and analysis do not authorize contacting an investor, sending or forwarding collateral, opening a data room, changing access, publishing an update, making an investment claim, paying a finder, or changing offering terms. Obtain explicit authorization for the exact recipient, artifact version, channel, sender, and timing immediately before the action.
• Preserve recipient and surface boundaries. Use least privilege, disclose only what is necessary for the relationship stage, and do not assume a prospective investor is confidential without an applicable duty or agreement.
• Never use a mutable live link as the sole record of what was sent. Preserve the exact sent version and record any later correction, expiry, or revocation.

Boundaries

• startup-fundraising owns readiness, raise design, narrative, instrument and terms under consideration, use of funds, financial-model requirements, deck architecture, and data-room readiness. Investor relations owns qualified relationships, meetings, authorized distribution, updates, follow-ups, asks, exact artifact versions, and disclosure history.
• startup-metrics owns metric definitions, reconciliation, cohorts, retention, and quantitative proof. Do not silently choose a favorable value when sources conflict or selectively upgrade a metric for one recipient.
• Route operating commitments, owner conflicts, and recurring review cadence to founder-operations. External legal, securities, privacy, tax, sanctions, and reporting conclusions require current jurisdiction-specific primary guidance and qualified review.
• Keep reusable outputs free of real investor identities, private relationship routes, confidential financial values, cap-table details, credentials, internal links, and restricted customer or partner information.