Cairn Cross, Co-Founder of FreshTracks Capital, spoke with MFN about the importance of strategically sharing your deal room with investors. We asked him to share advice for founders who may be apprehensive about sharing sensitive data with third-party individuals. He offers practical tricks for sharing and storing confidential information.

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Cairn Cross: You know, if they’ve got information that somebody could take, an investor could take and utilize to reconstruct what they’ve done. It’s that kind of like they’ve got something that’s you know if you think about the trade secret of Coca-Cola that you know the recipe that theoretically has been preserved for you know 100 plus years. They managed to do all that just by convincing folks to you know treat it treat it like the crown jewels and um you know you you wouldn’t you know you wouldn’t stick that in a in a in a folder and have it open to open to everyone. I think you have to pick and choose what you put in there, that would be number one.

The second thing would be I think it’s a really good practice that every single document in there has “proprietary” and “confidential” written on it, a disclaimer at the bottom of every page that says this is proprietary and confidential not to be shared, it’s a reminder and then if somebody blatantly is going to take that and do it at you know at least you’ve got the ability to well at least you understand in that is who you’re dealing with.

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