A guide to fundraising.

A guide to fundraising. Free. Okay fine, your time is money anyway.
Let’s go. First, some disclaimers:
- I don’t know how to raise from angels, funds in MENA, family offices. I can only guess that personal connections there matter even more than everything I’m going to list.
- in 2 out of my 3 companies I raised money from top-tier funds (okay fine, in the prism of term sheets it was more like I collected from everyone I could). We’ll be talking about them. The mighty top-tier.
The approach I’m describing is not a recipe for success, but it will definitely increase your odds.

1. The ability to find a point of overlap with a top fund is super important, even if you have zero chance of raising from them. There’s a whole team there basically doing market making. Meaning their projects will most likely define the landscape of your product. Wouldn’t hurt to learn their concerns and so on, right?

2. Prep stage. Probably the thing I’ll pay a million attention to.
So what does it consist of:
- Idea. I’m not judging the idea “as such,” but the level of how worked-through it is is your first output. “The idea doesn’t matter” is bullshit imo. It takes me about half a year to form the first version of the vision in my head. What matters:
- understanding the tech or the enablement factor. Because you rarely build the actual tech—well if you do, I envy you. It’s expensive. So it’s important that the market believes in this tech (both customers and investors). You can’t just whip something up fast; it’s painstaking and often technical work to figure out what exactly and which problems you’ll solve. You don’t know how attention works and you’re doing AI — it’s gonna be rough.
- testing it through your network (I usually struggle here), you go to all the meetups/chats/etc and try to understand what bothers people and why. You look for feedback. You change your beliefs almost every evening. Like gradient descent.
- team. They invest in people, and it’s important to find who you can work with for the next 10 years and who can bring the idea to life and share the vision. And yeah, any top investor instantly sees whether you actually believe in your idea and product — you won’t bullshit your way through. And basically they’re making a bet: will you pull the next three rounds, will you be able to fire everyone when needed, will you grind 24/7 and drag everyone along. Because it’s really hard.
- vision is about what the world will look like after you do what you plan to do. The job of the pitch is to make them believe in the world you’re creating. If they don’t believe in that world — nothing else matters. Honestly I think this is one of the most common reasons for rejection. It’s extremely easy to formulate in someone’s head (like damn, what a load of crap), so a clear explanation of your concept is half the success. Hence all these elevator pitches and other nonsense. It’s a check that you knoooow what you’re talking about.

Let’s say you actually listed out all the leaders in your domain and all the investors from top funds who invest in it:
- you followed them on Twitter, hit the bell, and you sit there tracking what they’re into, how they see the market and the world in 5 years
- any top fund has technical advisors or partners, you studied what they did, what they’re good at, you know how they can help you (knowledge, connections, trends in corporates etc), because the classic American question “how can I help you” is exactly about this, money needs to be multiplied by help from partners. Then the probability they’ll work with you is higher. Even 1% is already a solid uplift.

Next: trigger-based communication. You see a post/opinion/release that’s about your landscape. You write a substantial comment/email. Context works. Half of my intros are literally just a cold email at the right moment. Should I write about how to do those emails? FYI ChatGPT suggests decent ones if you give it the topic and the idea. And yeah, this cycle goes on for a month or two. Don’t think the trigger will show up immediately. Patience and work.

That’s probably enough for today. And notice — not a word about your current results. Those later.
Happy to take your questions. And don’t turn off your camera on calls plz :)

P.S.
I’ll write separately about this great tactic of sending 1000 emails
.