How to raise money?
Observing my founder
The Difficulty of Fundraising
My friend has been doing a YC startup for 5 months with a good product, and she says that it's super painful to fundraise. When you talk to investors, 9 out of 10 times you get rejected.
Even another YC friend who has built products for more than a year only raised 1.7M for their seed round.
However, for our company, we are still at our seed stage (we are still selling hope at this point), and my founder has already raised 3M for us. How did he do that?
The Story of Golf
This morning, my founder said he got another investor. When I asked how? He told us how he met the new investor at a golf club (I imagined these were all rich people's interests).
In a game, my founder was the last person to take the shot. People were shit-talking around him to distract him, but he shot it at the last moment! Anyhow, the investor drunk-called him that night and said he wanted to invest.
Ahh... it makes so much sense. A rational thinking brain will go on thinking and thinking when spending money, but an emotional or drunk brain will make the decision for you.
Ultra strategy: Make Friends outside of work
Based on my understanding, our biggest investors seem to be his good friends. Once, I asked him how he found all these people, and he said, "Oh, I went to my son's school's parents' meetup, and you meet people there."
It's a very informal yet intelligent way to meet people. But it makes so much sense. Finding other places where people will trust you and make friends with you is much smarter than begging for money.
Yesterday, he was also jogging with a German movie star, and he posted about him, gaining him so much traction all of a sudden.
So what did I learn about fundraising from him?
Having diverse rich interests to connect with people (think about rich people’s hobbies), being a charming white man (because rich people are mostly white men now), having a likable personality, and being in a city with many investors to befriend (aka San Francisco).