VC Minute – quick advice to help startup founders fundraise better.
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Neha Govindraj
I think the thing about fundraising is that so much of it is storytelling and your ability to story tell, and you can really only story tell as much as you believe it.
That really comes to life in fundraising for venture capital. You have to believe the story that you’re selling.
And it’s way too easy to sell the story that someone else wants to hear because you’re probably a sharp person, can react quickly, and can tell someone what they want to hear, but the reality is that it’s just not going to resonate unless you deeply, truly believe it.
I think minimizing the reps of, okay, I’m going to change my storyline, and I’m going to try this new pitch, and I’m going to try this. When you find yourself in that rut, like spinning on how you’re going to pitch something or story tell something, just take a step back and actually realign with your mission and your vision, and then think about the most compelling way to communicate that.
And if that’s different from where you started,great,t run with v2. If it’s exactly what you started with, then stick to your guns and keep pitching it, and you’ll find the right person who believes in it.
When you’re fundraising, you’re going to get no’s, and I am someone who, if I hear the word no, then thinks about everything I could have done or said to make it a yes. I could be talking to a random person and accidentally pitch them, and then they say, No, someone that I never even wanted capital from, and I will still go back and question, Should I have told that story differently? Should I have thought about that differently?
I don’t know if that’s the right answer. There are probably people who don’t do that, and that’s probably very good for them. But I always took that as an opportunity to ask, Is there something to learn from this? Is there something that I’m not communicating clearly, or could I have framed something differently to get you in the headspace that I wanted you to be in?
And sometimes the no is just because someone doesn’t, they just don’t see it, they just don’t get it, or it just doesn’t make sense to ’em. That’s totally fine.
But it was really the dynamic between having a vision and storytelling that I really worked hard to keep close to one another so that I was always storytelling my vision, not what someone else wanted to hear.
About Bonside
Bonside is the first institution created specifically to finance brick-and-mortar businesses. Where venture capital has evolved to suit the needs of tech, Bonside’s structure (based on “Repeatable Revenue Agreements, RRAs) both leverages and encourages the distinct attributes of service-based brick-and-mortars—such as measured growth, repeat revenue, and community involvement. By providing a centralized source of capital and resources, Bonside harnesses the strengths of an age-old yet recently evolving industry in order to empower its modern growth and establish a compelling new asset class for investors.
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