Hey - it’s Jason Yeh 🕺🏻

This is my Friday recap of thoughts I’ve had while helping founders solve their fundraising challenges this past week (1.7.22)

If you have any questions, please reply! I try to get to every comment/question I get :)

On to the Fieldnotes for 1.7.22…

How Fundraising Skills Lead to Successful Recruiting 

Last week I tweeted an observation about founders who are excellent at fundraising

Throughout my career I’ve consistently seen founders who are natural fundraisers also excel at recruiting top talent. 

One of the popular replies to that tweet observation was along the lines of “Yeah well once you raise money, the talent comes to you.” In response, I maintained that these founders are excellent at recruiting even before they close funding. 

This type of founder can make candidates lean in and get excited to join even before funding hits the bank.

I’m excited to highlight this reality here because it’s just another incentive to spend time improving fundraising skills.  

First, why the overlap?

When a venture capital investor evaluates a deal, she is looking for an opportunity to invest her fund’s capital at a valuation and experience a liquidity event where she can return a multiple of the investment to her limited partners.  It’s not an easy task, especially the earlier stage you go.  There is very little hard data for an investor to analyze that will help determine the chances of it being a successful investment.

Job market talent has an oddly similar experience.  They’re looking for an opportunity to invest their capabilities and time with the hope of some sort of future payoff. It’s just as difficult, if not more so, to determine whether the experience will be worth the investment for them.

Once you realize that new hires and VCs are both investing in companies, one with money and the other with time (opportunity cost), the overlap becomes very clear.

Interesting, but why is this important?

There is a ton of anti-VC and anti-fundraising attitude on the internet. You don’t have to look far to find a blog post, tweet, or comment that essentially says “why do we have to go through this artificial song and dance?” The underlying sentiment is that the work is all a huge waste of time. In a longer response (an essay for another day) I would go deep into the logical reasons why the idiosyncrasies (i.e. “song and dance”) of investing exist and how to address them.

My shorter response is that the work done preparing to fundraise effectively is not all wasted effort. In particular, because of the aforementioned similarities, so much of the work can be translated into how you recruit top talent! This is especially important because once you land a round of funding, the first thing you’ll deploy your capital around is hiring. (continue reading…)

Notes from the field…

You’ll definitely run into this when fundraising. VCs have to make quick decisions nowadays - can’t fault them too much for this!

Confidence!

Till next week. Stay adamant and be chased.

Jason

In case you missed it…

Last week’s article summarized 2021’s most important fundraising concepts / frameworks

Small asks!

If you thought this was helpful or enjoyable in anyway, I’d love for you to:

• Forward this newsletter with others who would enjoy it

• Follow me on Twitter where I’ve begun building in public (my course, my podcast, etc)!

• Listen with a friend to Funded, my podcast that tells the rollercoaster stories of how founders raised millions (and subscribe🙏)

• Ask me your fundraising questions so I can help you and cover them in a future issue