by Never depend on exterior assets to do your fundraising for you
Occasionally, in my position as a marketing consultant, 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 operating level on the fundraising course of. From one perspective, I can perceive that: VC fundraising does, from the surface, look loads like gross sales, and when you have salesperson, why not allow them to do what they do finest?
The difficulty is that whereas salespeople are nice at gross sales, the VC fundraising course of could be very totally different than touchdown a buyer. You’re making an attempt to discover 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 might be, as a result of the gross sales workforce has a unique long-term perspective on what success seems like), that may make the entire deal disintegrate.
There are a number of actually good the explanation why, on the earliest levels of fundraising, the founding workforce must be operating the fundraising course of. In this text, I break it down and clarify why it’s an terrible concept to let anybody however the CEO do the fundraising.
