With a week until Halloween - I hope all of you have been prepping your costumes and kicking off your fundraises! If you haven't yet… GET GOING!

🙏🎃

ON TO THIS WEEK'S ESSAY💣...

Here’s a comforting thought for you all: you know more about fundraising than you think.

This might sound strange for me to say given my newsletter’s growth is dependent on founders thinking the opposite, but it’s true. Before I unlock your hidden fundraising abilities “Matrix Style”

Let’s talk about the evolution of founder fundraising education:

It used to be brutal

Fundraising knowledge used to be trapped, hidden away, and overall impossible for most founders to access. The expertise only existed in the minds of a select few and the only way to transfer it was via 1:1 interactions. And could you get to those select few easily? Of course not.

It’s gotten WAY better

Now, the combination of new platforms / media to share information plus VCs excitement for content marketing has unlocked access to this expertise. Between Twitter, podcasts, YouTube, and blogs, founders can now level up their exposure to and understanding of fundraising concepts without being inside the strange and obfuscated personal networks of VCs.

Here are a few of my favorites:

• Elizabeth Yin

• The Twenty Minute VC

• First Round Review

• LA Venture

• a16z

• Fundraising Fieldnotes

• Funded Podcast

But with all this free, amazing fundraising content the problem still hasn’t been solved. Even the most talented founders are struggling to execute fundraises - failing when they shouldn’t, settling for suboptimal outcomes.

Why?

The devil’s in the details

The challenge is that all the brilliantly prescribed playbooks, insightful tweets, inspirational LinkedIn videos, in-depth essays, and other published advice can’t cover every situation a founder runs into.

Fundraising is an unscientific system that can change based on market conditions, psychology, and specific situational details.

For example, a year ago, I wrote and spoke about the power of stacking SAFEs / notes with increasing caps and limited availability as a strategy almost any founder could leverage.

Today, would I encourage most founders to do that? No. Some might be able to but it really depends.

It depends.

That’s the operative phrase for most things in fundraising. And because of that, as founders find more fundraising content shared on the internet, many times it can feel like the more they know the less they understand!

• Elizabeth Yin said to do X! But… that doesn’t quite fit this situation

• Harry Stebbings mentioned Y in his podcast - … why isn’t it working for me?

• Jason Yeh TOLD me that I HAD to schedule 4-6 meetings a day for calendar density - What happens if I only have 3 on one day???

Advisors to the rescue, right???

Advisors who understand the game can be a godsend. Before you become an expert yourself, they can help you deconstruct the details and apply a more nuanced application of the playbooks and advice you read online to fit your situation.

But what if you don’t have advisors with the knowledge? And even if you have advisors with the knowledge, what about when they’re not around? … or don’t have a great answer??

Here’s the hack! – (continue reading....)

Smart Twitter Takes

Words are helpful. Storytelling is great. But it all relies on action. Doing. Just do it.

I agree. You’re going to see more moves to get liq preferences into deals. Read through this to understand…it might not be a bad thing if that’s the only way you can get a deal done tbh!

P.S. Brutal. Just brutal.