Messaging market fit is making sure that the right people are hearing your message, but that it also fits with their beliefs and what they want to hear.

CDFIs are an excellent place to get support, connections, and possibly funding.

Plan B is another way to make Plan A work.

Don’t waste time trying to convince non-believers, find your true believers.

Anybody should be able to create the future, wherever they exist. They just need opportunities, and so we have to make opportunities easier for them to capture.

Investors have to believe in you. Don’t fake it, don’t hide it. Be you.

You cannot possibly over-rotate when trying to compensate for something that you’re not.

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You know your business so well, that you personally don’t need visuals to explain it. But your audience doesn’t share your knowledge.

A venture fund’s most trusted source for referrals is its portfolio. Stand out from the crowd by getting an introduction through a fellow founder.

Don’t get sucked into these toxic myths of entrepreneurship.

The Conscious Entrepreneur Summit was created to build a community of people who are entrepreneurs, founders, and CEOs who are committed to their personal growth.

How do you recognize signs of your own burnout? What do you do about it?

“IF this thing happens, THEN I’ll be happy.” How many times have you fallen into the If-Then Mindset trap?

Alex Raymond, host of the Conscious Entrepreneur Summit, joins us this week to cover imposter syndrome, toxic myths, burnout, and more.

Dama explains how she used “unbiased” opinions (of her strategic investors) to help new investors reach conviction.

Sometimes your choice is between taking any money and running out of money. In those cases, you can’t be selective. But if you can optimize for one thing with your investors, optimize for trust.

Dama identified her weak point in investors minds and forced herself to lean hard into the other direction. It worked.

The three things Dama would do differently if she could re-do her first fundraise.

Dama, the CEO of our portfolio company Manatee, pulled a fundraising rabbit out of her hat. She shares her fundraising advice this week… and it’s good!

Why do you get a lawyer? It’s because you need a guidepost, and you need someone who’s going to help you navigate the parts of your business you don’t even understand.

Does your lawyer know what NVCA stands for and where to find the NVCA standard docs? If not, they’re going to make you look like a fool in term sheet negotiations.

Your lawyer should be a resource who can help you achieve your strategy, making the law work for your business.

Great lawyers will help founders find and understand the things they don’t know that they don’t know.

SpringTime’s lawyer, Carlos Cruz-Abrams from Cruz-Abrams Seigel is joining us this week to share his insights on why startups need a startup lawyer.

I want to hear your insights on the VC Minute. What can you share about your fundraising journey for the VC Minute community?

Learn, in excruciating detail, why you should never raise a Bridge Round, then why & how it should be an Insider Round.

Here are my four steps to successfully raising an Insider Round

The story of a bridge round is always the same from an investor’s perspective. You raised money. It wasn’t enough. And now you’re coming back to raise even less money…

In a world of information asymmetry, your current investors have the most information. And if they’re not willing to step up, that is a very bad sign.

Seed investing is a team sport. The fewer team members you have around the table, the weaker position that you’re in and the less likely you’re going to get to the next level.

This week we’re covering that Dreaded Bridge Round – why it’s the hardest round to raise and how you can avoid it.

How do you generate your Aha Moment? With practice and iteration.

The best pitches create Aha Moments You’ll know when you’ve hit it because the tone of the meeting changes. It becomes a true dialogue,, the questions come from a place of curiosity, or it turns into a brainstorming session.

As the CEO of this business, you are going to be responsible ultimately for every aspect of it. Show that you know your numbers and it shows that you know your business.

Put the focus on what the business is and the vision for its future. Use the past and the pivot to support that story.

An investment in your startup is an investment in you.

Men get funded on potential and women get funded on proof.

Giving up equity is like getting married. You have to be transparent with your partner in a relationship in order for it to be successful.

You can get investment from someone who is not an actual user of it. Founders need to be educators.

An investor buys into YOU before what you do. Lead with your story to build credibility showcase your qualifications.

I’m stoked for this week’s episodes of #VCMinute. This is the first of many weeks with a guest on the mic 🎙 Kat Weaver is a pitch coach with Power To Pitch and she has fantastic advice. Today’s focus is on tailoring your pitch to specific audiences.

When you’re talking about the reasons why you’re fundraising. I want to be sure that you have the right reasons. The wrong reasons to fundraise are to make hires, to extend your runway and to get to a Series A.

If the investor who takes your first meeting can’t explain your business back to their partners, you’re not going to get a second meeting.

Fundraising is a function of your job as a startup CEO. If you don’t do it at the seed stage, you’re going to suck at it the Series A and beyond.

One of the things that I see founders trip up on all the time is they get going and they are a runaway train.

If you keep going back to the same investors with the same story and without significant progress, it’s a negative signal. You need to cross those investors off of your list.

There are three things that I’m looking for in a cold email. 1) What is this business? 2) Is this for me? 3) is this interesting?

There are three things that I’m looking for in a cold email. 1) What is this business? 2) Is this for me? 3) is this interesting?

Go back through your deck and apply the principles of essentialism. What is absolutely essential? And I’ll give you a hint, it’s way less than you think.

What is the thing that you are so desperately clinging to? Is it relevant? And is it going to help your business get through these next few turbulent weeks and then through the next trying months? Find those sacred cows and banish them.

Regardless of your situation, the startup world fundamentally changed on Friday. I have two pieces of advice for you. The first is: acknowledge your reality.

“This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end — which you can never afford to lose — with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.” – James Stockdale

Whatever your reality is, own it.

To be the best at fundraising, start by taking care of yourself.

I saved the best for last and it’s possibly the hardest. The number one thing you can do for yourself is practice self-compassion.

Lack of good deep sleep impacts your physical health, your mental health, your mental acuity, and even your reaction times. To keep your productivity high and your mental health strong, create a sleep routine and get good sleep.

While I’ve spent the last week and a half talking to you about tips and tricks for mental health, I’m not a trained professional, but I know the benefit of having one. I strongly encourage all founders to find a great therapist.

When was the last time that you gave yourself permission to spend time on yourself? It’s not enough to just spend time doing something that you want– to take a break one night and then fret all about the things that you could be doing or should be doing. This is completely counterproductive. Giving yourself permission is the critical part of this.

There are some inputs in your life that you can control such as food, drink and exercise. And there are some things that you can’t control, like your chronotype. And if you fight against this, you’re just going to make yourself tired and miserable.

Why is it so hard to ask for help?

Asking for help is important for everyone, doubly so for founders. We live in a society that values independence and self-sufficiency so many of us still struggle to ask for help, especially for our most vexing problems.

I’m here to tell you that asking for help is a sign of strength, not weakness.

Prioritization is knowing the destination. Relentless reprioritization is continually navigating along the way to the destination.

It’s apropos that I’m releasing this episode today because Wednesdays are my GSD days. My Get Shit Done day. Taking time boxing to its logical extreme is the GSD day. No scheduled meetings are allowed on GSD days. None.

Kicking off a focus on founder mental health, my first suggestion is Timebox. You’ll hear me say this all the time: time is our most precious asset. Maybe a corollary to that is focus. I found that I can create focus by time boxing.

Kicking off VC Minute Season 2 with a quick update on the market and ready to roll with advice from guests as well as yours truly.

Thank you for your patience. It will be worth the wait!

VC Minute is quick advice to help startup founders fundraise better. This is Part 2 of the Season 1 complication, covering Episodes 26-50.

VC Minute is quick advice to help startup founders fundraise better. This is Part 1 of the Season 1 complication, covering Episodes 1-25.

If you’re struggling to raise venture capital, take heart. It does not invalidate your business. If you truly want to build this business, then you must focus on creating value for your customers. That is what matters.

The vast majority of investors you pitch will pass, so use the time to ask for input & feedback. Ironically, it reflects better on you to ask questions than just pitch the whole time.

SpringTime’s Allyson Plosko shares three things that erode investors’ confidence in founders, and actionable steps that you can take for each to build, rather than erode, confidence.

What happens when you miss your milestones? Can you pause the VC Treadmill? Of course. Here’s how one company did it.

My friend Eric Marcoullier, multiple-exit founder, coaches startup CEOs now, has a great post that I riff on today: A CEO Has Three Responsibilities. I’d argue the CEO has only one.

As you come into the close of your round, a classic sales tactic and can be used effectively as you wrap up it up: the takeaway.

Another fundraising red flag is the “dribs and drabs” round. With this, you don’t know if you’ll have enough capital to make those key hires or fully execute your growth plan, so your growth suffers.

The massive returns needed to succeed in venture capital is one of the key drivers of the TAM obsession. Bigger markets offer bigger opportunities for growth and bigger exits. Or at least, that’s the commonly held belief.

Building a business is extremely hard. There are risks all along the way. I dig in on this and offer some questions to ask investors to gauge their risk assessment of your business.

We invest in risky businesses, which means that we feel we’ve got a good grasp on the odds of different types of outcomes, including a zero return outcome. When we hit on uncertainty, that’s when it becomes hard to get to a yes, because uncertainty is where we’re unable to assess the risk.

I asked my teammates for their least favorite thing to hear from startups and it’s, “six months after this seed round, we’re going to raise a Series A.”

FOMO, in the VC Minute playbook, is a subtle knife that cuts through silence to elevate you in a fund’s process.

Don’t say your pro forma financials are “conservative.” They are complete fabrications! And that’s OK.

If you call your funding round a “Bridge Round” it puts you in a defensive position. Listen to today’s #VCMinute for what you should say instead.

This week I’m covering things NOT to say to investors, starting with… exits. Talking about an exit strategy at the seed stage is ridiculous.

Happy Friday, everybody. It’s a Friday in July, and do you know, what’s the perfect thing for a hot summer day? A pool party! All the reasons investors say “no” can wash away when the pool party is packed.

There’s a big reason that funds pass or ghost on investments, but they would never share it with founders. It’s entirely subjective and often just based off gut instincts.

Another common reason venture funds say “no” is because they don’t see a path to returning the entire fund from that one investment. Wondering what that means? Here’s more…

When you’re talking to an investor that writes checks at your level, and they’re telling you that you’re too early, here’s the real problem: you haven’t sold them on your vision.

Your competition in that moment are the half a dozen other startups that I have in my diligence process at the same time as you.

Wrapping up the week with great advice from @sabakarimm – don’t email people asking if you can send them the deck, just send them the deck. That’s the purpose of it. Send it!

One of the most powerful things that you can do in your email deck is to break the reader’s frame of reference. My favorite example of this is from the Allhers deck.

Pitching is storytelling, and decks are a tool to tell the story. The email deck gets to meeting, the pitch deck gets the investment.

My number one rule for pitching and pitch decks is: Don’t make me think. Don’t make me work. Here are six examples.

The point of your pitch deck isn’t to get an investment. The point is to get a meeting.

It’s just like when you’re job hunting. The point of a resume isn’t to get the job. The point of the resume is to get the interview. The pitch deck is serving the same purpose.

You never know unless you ask. How are you going to get the investment if you don’t ask for it?

Bonus content: If you’re reaching out to a small fund, don’t email, every single person in the fund.

Time is our most precious asset; I’m grateful that you’d spend of some of yours with me. Thank you.

As you meet with potential investors, your goal with the first meeting isn’t to close the deal. It’s for both you and the investor to get data points on each other.

The wrong way to ask for referrals from your network is to say, “please introduce me to investors.”

A fundraise process starts with knowing who to target. Here’s my list of VC lists—all free.

There are three types of mythical creatures: big foot, aliens, and a funding round not described as oversubscribed. It’s funny because it’s true. But it’s true because it works.

This is completely counterintuitive but the amount you’re telling investors that you want to raise is too high.

When you set out to raise a round of capital, you’ll get asked about your runway. This is important because fundraising is a waste of your time. 😁

Founders part of your job in a pitch is to convince potential investors that you will get to the next level on the treadmill. And to do that, you need to three things: Here, There and Capital.

Raising venture capital is a treadmill. One that only gets faster and only gets steeper.