The first time I had to build a data room was for an accelerator — and it felt unnecessary
In 2024, while applying to my first pre-seed accelerator, they asked for a data room.
I knew roughly what needed to go in:
Financials
Legal docs
Pitch materials
Nothing surprising.
But what really made me scratch my head was this: Why isn’t there a standard version of this already?
Investors ask for the same things.
Accelerators ask for the same things.
Yet every founder builds it from scratch.
And I didn’t want to pay for another tool just to upload documents — especially when I didn’t even know if I’d get accepted.
So I created a shared Google Drive folder.
No tracking.
No visibility.
No real control.
Just a link sent into the void.
Looking back, it felt inefficient — not hard, just unnecessary.
Curious:
Did you build your first data room reactively, or did you have a structure ready beforehand?
