First Round Capital has a great new article up titled The Fundraising Wisdom That Helped Our Founders Raise $18B in Follow-On Capital. Every entrepreneur that’s raising money, or considering raising money, should head on over and read it. Here are 20+ tips from the post:
- First, Fix Your Timeline
- Target the Right Investors
- Vet the portfolio, pick the partner
- Generate Scarcity
- Fundraise like a surfer — plan to take on investors in sets.
- Make it a race
- The Wins and Sins of Pitching
- Surface all the burning questions
- Frame your problem in an original way
- Anticipate and address any objections
- Don’t bury your lead
- Explain the customer pain point faster with emotion
- Don’t just have a dedicated competition slide
- Put your team slide toward the end of the deck
- Keep your slides simple and rely more on what you say
- Make your appendix your arsenal
- Don’t stress about slide numbers
- Don’t roll with an entourage
- Pitch to your personality
- Sync your timeline and your mindset
- Exhibit unapologetic confidence
- Build credibility through vulnerability
- Don’t trigger the bullsh*t meter
- Rehearsal Required
- Putting it all Together
Read the post and soak in the fundraising wisdom — it’s worth your time.
What else? What are some more fundraising tips?
David Cummings on Startups 
In our investor road show last year, we adopted a routine called “what did we learn today?” After each investor meeting, we would take a little time (usually over a beer) to talk about the investors’ best questions. We gave particular focus to any recurring questions that continued to surface in multiple meetings. Not only did we revise our pitch deck over time to proactively address some of the recurring questions…………we also used the recurring questions as guidance to help us evolve our KPIs and give some focus to areas that multiple investors told us were important.