igorlev

I'm a co-founder at a small NYC startup and, as is usual, sometimes random VCs reach out to chat or ask questions. Most of the time I either ignore or have a short conversation.

A few months ago, a relatively well known (though not huge) west coast firm reached out and based on their brand I answered and had a short and cordial chat. They seemed pretty helpful and at the end asked if there were any types of customers we were interested in connecting with. They followed up with an introduction to a (real, well known) company that fit our profile and I had a decent, though, in retrospect somewhat peculiar, conversation with someone who worked there (verified through LinkedIn and company email address) and was looking to address a problem that our product solves. Nothing came out of that lead and I quickly forgot about it.

A few days ago I realized that the potential customer I was speaking with was actually a buddy of someone at the VC firm and left their job to start a company that's pretty much doing the same thing we are. Not only that, but in retrospect, their questions now seem clearly designed to try and understand some of the unique propositions of our product.

Now I know that VCs will often take meetings just to ask lots of probing questions for their portfolio companies.

My question is, how widespread is this extreme tactic of going as far as offering a fake customer intro just to get deeper information on your product? Do other folks have even worse stories than that?