Catherine Bell contrasts retail fundraising, which demands heavy storytelling, with institutional capital raising, which requires verified data and rigorous scrutiny. Institutional investors are skeptics who demand the "God's honest truth." Bell argues that focusing on hard metrics could make fundraising less stressful than the emotional narrative approach.
Today in the Deal Room.
An amazing day yesterday. Learned a lot about stuff in the, what's called the commercial or the institutional level of capital raising. It was a pretty good lesson in the difference between retail, retail capital raising and institutional capital raising. There's a significant difference. And Catherine and I talked about that difference this morning in the fact that there's a significant amount of people who do not engage on an emotional level in the institutional space, right? In the institutional space, they're looking at the numbers and stats, like they want to know the metrics. Got to know your numbers. Numbers tell you what to do. This is something Catherine's been preaching forever, but what she does is when she preaches it, she kind of like a preacher in that she gets people to emotionally connect to that, you know, to that, to those numbers. So, but when we tried to, when we tried to understand the Ecosystem yesterday, it's basically one expert in front of another verifying and validating what they read was the God's honest truth. So that's what they're after is God's honest truth. Because the room's full of liars. The room actually is full of liars, villains, and thieves. Because at the end of the day, we all have the propensity to be that. So since we have the propensity to be it, it takes a conscious effort to not be it. And that's what the point for this whole damn event was, was that they're trying— it's called due diligence conference, basically saying we're going I can call you on your shit. So what are we doing? I don't know. I get, I get all confused when you're moving around. I don't know what to do.
Everybody can see you. So everybody's watching you here.
So anyway, see, I don't think you want to spotlight it. It gets funky dunky when you do that. So you want to talk about what happened yesterday? I know you're still playing tech, so let me know.
Yeah, we can talk about the difference between retail and institutional capital. So here's what's interesting. So I've been raising retail capital for easily a good 15 years and raised millions and millions and millions of dollars doing the retail investing because everybody's told me that was in that space. Don't do institutional. It's too hard. It's too complicated. Blah, blah, blah. And what's interesting is I found retail to be really hard. So retail raising capital is all about the story. Institutional is all about facts. So it's interesting, my whole thing is do the numbers, numbers tell you what to do, and it turns out that had I actually just gone into the institutional world, I probably would have found it way easier and way less stressful than having to have the brain damage of having to tell the story.
