VC Minute – quick advice to help startup founders fundraise better.
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Rachel McCrickard
What I feel like I could have done differently, like what I learned through the fundraising process as well, is something that I really struggled with, and I think that, you know, from the perspective of being a woman, there are studies that have shown that sometimes women have a hard time applying for a job if they don’t meet all of the qualifications on the job description. Whereas men will be like, “Oh, 70%, I’m good. I’ll do it.
I experienced that too in my early days of fundraising. I had a really hard time sharing the big picture because I only wanted to put up numbers that I 100% knew I could hit.
What I learned through the process is that a lot of founders aren’t doing that. They’re putting up numbers that, if the stars align and everything goes as planned, this is how big we can get. And VCs often want to see that. They want to see what happens if everything falls into place and you execute flawlessly. How big could this company be?
They’re also already sandbagging your numbers. So they’re already discounting it and being like, “Oh, they’re not going to hit that, so they’ll probably get to this.
For me, I really had to learn how to share the big story of Motivo and not just where we are going now, but where we could go in the next five years. What’s the big story behind Motivo? Rather than say, “Here’s what I know I can do in the next 18 months,”
That was a big learning curve for me, and I think it led to investors thinking that I probably wasn’t thinking big enough, and I probably wasn’t in the early days.
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