By no means depend on exterior sources to do your fundraising for you

Often, in my position as a guide, I’m approached by corporations which have a plan in place for his or her fundraising that doesn’t contain the CEO or a member of the founding workforce working level on the fundraising course of. From one perspective, I can perceive that: VC fundraising does, from the surface, look so much like gross sales, and if in case you have salesperson, why not allow them to do what they do finest?

The problem is that whereas salespeople are nice at gross sales, the VC fundraising course of could be very completely different than touchdown a buyer. You’re looking for an alignment between the corporate and a long-term associate who may have a big quantity of enter into the way forward for your startup. And if there are discrepancies between the gross sales course of and the deeper due diligence into the corporate (and there will likely be, as a result of the gross sales workforce has a special long-term perspective on what success appears like), that may make the entire deal disintegrate.

There are a number of actually good explanation why, on the earliest phases of fundraising, the founding workforce needs to be working the fundraising course of. On this article, I break it down and clarify why it’s an terrible concept to let anybody however the CEO do the fundraising.