Raising Money

Raising Money is a series of posts with advice for anyone thinking of raising venture capital or angel money. Previous posts:

• Find credible sponsors: if you can get credible sponsors, you obtain a low risk way to transfer other individual's credibility to yourself. Perhaps more importantly, you will have passed the first in a series of tests to successfully raising money.
• Do homework: doing your homework is another great test of your raising money process. If you get to a meeting and it's a bad fit, it reflects poorly on you as the entrepreneur.
• Use both coasts: after pitching on the opposite coast, take the feedback you received, iterate quickly, and schedule for the coast your company will be on.
• Schedule meetings in batches: you want VC’s and Angels moving at the same pace. This lets you create demand in the market so that you can have them compete against each other. To do that, you have to schedule in batches.
• Control your introductions: to solve this problem, you need a 3-5 sentence “blurb” to send along with your request for an introduction. Make it memorable, interesting, and emphasize how big of a market opportunity you're going after.
• Never pitch over the phone: pitching over the phone just gives someone two opportunities to say no.
• Better reputation is less time wasted: when I pitched less reputable firms, I noticed that more often than prestigious firms they asked silly tactical questions and were much more skeptical about credible facts.
• Use VentureHacks: if you're raising a round of financing, use VentureHacks. Looking back on it, going to Angel List was one of the best things I did when raising LearnBoost's first round.