Negotiating for people pleasers: How to get the best investor deal – without causing offence

Negotiations with investors can be tricky. On the one hand, it's important to get the best possible deal. From a startup's perspective, that means getting as much money as possible for as few shares as possible. Therefore, founders and teams must be able to negotiate hard.

On the other hand, this is where the foundation for a potentially decades-long partnership is laid. And if one of the parties feels cheated (sooner or later), this can put lasting strain on a relationship.

Martina Pesic claims to have found a solution for these situations. She has been advising people on important negotiations for 17 years. She says: "It's not about how big a piece of the pie you get in the end, but rather how the participants feel about the negotiations."

Unlike the classic compromise , in which negotiations are successful when everyone is dissatisfied in some way at the end, she aims to achieve the opposite—that is, that everyone is satisfied. Is that possible? According to Pesic, yes. To achieve this, she pursues the so-called "value negotiating" approach.