Nathan Beckord, CEO at Foundersuite.com and Fundingstack.com, a "wingman to startup CEOs".

Fundraising is different from sales. It war. It runs on the intro.

Right.

The warm intro is how fundraising works. Now I would argue with you a little bit. I have seen cold work. If you're very thoughtful about cold. Right. If you're. Now, let's not get too sidetracked on cold versus warm. Warm is always better. And I'm going to get to your answer. Cold can work if you're very thoughtful in who you're in your research, investors, finding the right people, they're looking for your type of deal in really thoughtful outreach them start thinking about this literally six or even nine or even 12 months before you plan to raise capital. So bear with me. What I actually recommend doing, of course, signing up on FounderSuite. But then, you know, even if you don't. Right. Start building the target list of investors and then try and, you know, you could reach out to them. Cole, you could say, this is what I'm doing. I'm not pitching you right now. I just want to kind of show you what, what I'm doing.

Hello. Today we have an amazing guest.

Who.

Created very specific and very interesting tools that I think any startupist should use and raise capital using these specific tools. So his name is Nathan Beckord. Please meet Nathan.

Hello. Thanks for having me here. I appreciate being on the show.

Hey, Nathan, good to have you on my show. You know, show is called Venture Growth with Leon Eisen, but actually I want to rename it Vengeance Grow with Friends of Leon Eisenhower. Because everybody who come to my show I consider like my friend after that. And I think this is our first meeting. We met at some conferences, online meetings, I remember, but it's actually our first one to one meeting. And me and I think my audience, which are amazing startups and investors, looking forward to learn about your success and actually value that you deliver to your clients, to your friends and something more and some life hacks. So please start about yourself. How did you come to understanding that this exactly these tools I'm going to build will make difference for many startups?

Sure. So thanks for the question. It goes back, I'll go back in time a little bit. I got out of college, I went to work in investment banking. I thought I wanted to be an investment banker. It seemed really glamorous and sexy and all.

They lost their reputation. Right?

Well, I mean, you know, it's before the, the, the meltdown of, you know, Salomon Smith Burning or what was the other one, you know, before the meltdown of some of the big banks that had to be bailed out. And so I did that for a little while and I was helping companies raise capital, you know, as an investment banker. And that was usually helping later stage companies raise capital. Series C D, mezzanine pipes, public investments in private equity, things like that.

Right.

So helping companies raise capital. Kind of learned how that, how that works. But I really wanted to be an entrepreneur. I wasn't really, it didn't fit right to be an investment banker. So I left that and then just went out to Silicon Valley, San Francisco and started helping companies raise capital because that's what I knew how to do. Right. So I would get a startup as a client. I build them a pitch deck, I'd build them a financial model. I would build them some target lists of investors. I'd load it all up into a spreadsheet, and then I would kind of coach them as they go out pitching investors. And that was fun. That was exciting work. Sometimes I would go to the pitch meetings with my clients and be the CFO guy in the room. Um, but I really wanted to be an entrepreneur, not a consultant. So one day, I don't remember when exactly the light bulb finally went off. Like, why don't I build some tools for this process? Because we're using spreadsheets, we're using, you know, seven different tools to, to run a fundraise. Many of them weren't really built for that.

Right.

They were like sales tools and things like that. So that was the aha moment. Let's build some tools for this. And so we launched our, we kind of had a first iteration of founder suite that was a bunch of different tools, but really we kind of honed in on the investor CRM of CRM specifically for managing a pipeline of investors. And so we, we launched that 2016.

The difference, what's the difference? Because, for example, like a startup, I cannot invest in many tools. I, I want to buy HubSpot for startups or I can have, I don't mind this. So I, I, I actually have a lot of tools I can just adapt like to build the funnel, investment funnel. Why do I need in addition to pay for your funding stack of fund, Funding suite, funder suite. Why?

Yeah, you know, Yes, a hundred percent. A lot of people are using a spreadsheet or they're using HubSpot or they're using, you know, a hundred other different CRMs that they use for their sales. And that's okay, but it doesn't, you know, it's kind of using a hammer to work as a screwdriver. It's like not exactly designed, but a lot of nuances. Is the answer to your question right. In our CRM, I mean, our stages are things like contacted research, got, got intro sent, pitch deck followed up with a pitch deck. You know, it's things like that got into due diligence. I mean, so like the workflow is specific around fundraising. The, the way you tag investors, it's like, are they a lead investor or a co investor? I mean, things like that, that don't apply in sales. And sure, you could spend time and effort customizing your CRM to kind of almost replicate what we've built, but ours is very specific. It's got a lot of thought and insight into how fundraising works, and it's built around that. Now, the other answer to that question is beyond just the CRM and not to, you know, make this too much of a sales pitch, but under the CRM, we have a database of 227,000 investors for you to search from. Right. No CRM, no other CRM has that. So you can go in and prospect and find target investors, angels, VCs, family offices and directly feed them into the CRM. And then the other tools are all kind of complimentary around.

Yeah. And here, in here, I see some problem because cold I have, I have a list of 250 investors by myself and I do not share it. I don't share it because no, but people, it doesn't work. So cold call and cold mail doesn't work at all with investors at least. So how to solve this problem? Is your funding stuck? Could solve this problem with cold calls to connect to this investor, not just give a list. And then I take the list, I make call, put in funnel, and then conversion rate is zero. So how you solve this problem? Could you help people?

Sure. You're identifying a very key part of fundraising. Fundraising is different from sales. It runs on the intro.

Right.

The warm intro is how fundraising works. Now, I would argue with you a little bit. I have seen cold work. If you're very thoughtful about cold. Right. If you were. Now let's not get too sidetracked on cold versus warm. Warm is always better. And I'm going to get to your answer. Cold can work if you're very thoughtful in who you're in your research investors, finding the right people that are looking for your types of deal in really thoughtful outreach them. But let me answer your actual question. You know, once you built a list of call it 200 investors, maybe 300, the next step is to figure out how to get in touch with them. Some of that is going to be done offline, right? Maybe you have a LinkedIn network, some of that. You might have to hustle for those intros. One of the tactics I always tell founders is, you know, look at the portfolio companies of these investors, reach out to one or two of the founders they've invested in, get to know them, get on a zoom with them, take them to lunch, use that to get the informant trope. But. Drumroll, please. Just yesterday we released, it's kind of a beta, alpha beta, but we released a Get Intro feature that looks at all your contacts, your calendar, who you've had meetings with, your calendar, your LinkedIn network and some other sources. And it helps you map your connection pass to every investor.

Oh, that's amazing. This is very important.

Yeah. So, you know, and that's, it's, it's. I wouldn't, I don't want to oversell it. It's not fully baked. It's getting there. It's, I would say it's like a beta product right now, but it's, it's pretty cool, right? Because that is. You've identified one of the hardest parts.

About fundraising is maybe it's even more value than just all your software, because your software do some technical stuff, funnel these, that marketing, I don't know. But without the first thing like connection, your funnel doesn't work. Your software doesn't work, actually.

Right, well, that's not really true because people find ways to get those intros and you still need tools to manage it and send out your pitch deck and track who's opening your pitch deck. I mean, all the other stuff still applies. But yes, getting the warm intro, which, you know, listen, let me answer this a different way. We've been around almost a decade and it does work. The, the get intro just came out yesterday. The other nine and a half years, it's worked pretty well. We've had almost a hundred thousand startups use it. You know, I would argue with that statement that doesn't work because it works really well. But you're right, getting that intro is a critical key to unlock the, you know, unlock your fundraiser.

So this is the main problem you, you're going to solve for fundraisers, because really this, you know, instead of doing the company and doing the product this, they get into the big numbers of fundraising and try to, to, to get fundrised and put their product aside. So definitely you can reduce big number to some specific numbers, small numbers. If you have specific tools that excite me, like investor, I'm investor. I, I got everyday messages and 99% they sent me deck immediately. We do this, we do that, this is deck. Please give me feedback. What do you think? And then another 3, 5 messages in a row. Yeah, that's crazy. So they don't understand and they spend their very valuable time on doing this bullshit. So yeah, if they will send me something or somebody else whom I know maybe met somewhere, some middleman who can send say you. I know him, I know me. I have a lot of people like these. So these are on position like CEO of some company. A lot of accounters, a lot of account CPAs, they do this, they send me every day. Some companies they are working with lawyers, they send me companies they are working with. They know exactly what, what, what kind of company I'm interested in, what kind of revenue I'm interested in, if there is a lead investor or not, what stage of the company. They know these and they connect me. So would you like to get introduction? And I answer always. If it feeds, I answer. Okay, I would be, I would, I would love to some introduction. It works this way very much, but not directly. Yeah.

Well you've also identified, I think reading between the lines of what you're saying here, you get a lot of cold email, cold outreach coming to you. And why is that? One of the problems, one of the hard parts of fundraising is identifying the right investors to, to target. Right. And that's, that's a hard thing and that's why so many startups will take a spray and pray approach or like a kind of spammy approach. Yeah, thinking and that. And you're on the receiving end of that. That's one of the problems. If we can help founders identify, you know, out of like a, like we have quarter million investors in our database, 227,000. If we can help them identify the right 100 out of that whole database, that, that saves them time, that saves you time because you're not getting you know, spam emails from companies that are completely irrelevant.

Yeah, right.

That's another hard problem to solve. Right.

And what about AI based matching? I know a couple of companies, they built some engine that makes AI matching like, like, like in dating.

Totally, totally. AI is, is a huge, you know, I would say 2025 for us. We've already dabbled in AI, we've got a chat, GPT integration and things like that. But I'd say AI is probably the 2025 is going to be the year of AI for, for our platform. Because that can help.

Right?

That can Help identify the right investors. Right now you go into our database, you search by industry, location, stage, things like that.

Takes a lot of time.

Yeah, it does take a lot of time. And of course think about the scenario where I can say show me all the medical device investors in Israel that invest precede pre revenue boom. If you can do natural language queries like that and it spits out a perfect list that saves a ton of time. Right.

Okay. I tried this, I specifically tried ChatGPT on these.

Okay.

It gives us some bullshit because they take information about some funds, they don't exist already or they exhausted their funds. So they put everything in one, a basket.

That, that's going to be a problem because let's take that and unpack that a little bit. Funds are, I love, I love investors, but they're a little tricky because their website might say they invest at all stages, but they really only Invest in Series Bs. You know what I mean? They keep the optionality in case they find the next Mark Zuckerberg to be able to invest in seed round, but they really focus on this. So kind of telling the difference between what they say on their website and what they actually do.

Yes. And chatgpt cannot recognize this.

Right.

And this Canada flooring uses also this problem as well. So how to solve this problem?

We're trying to do this because we have thousands of startups out there. So we asked founders to give like reviews and insights on, you know, if you just came from a meeting with Ben Horowitz, I want you to give some notes. What, what is he looking for? What do they want? Revenue? Do they want 50000k per month? You know all that stuff that you kind of learn when you're actually meeting with investors. We're trying to gather that. It's very hard to gather that. So I don't know if there's a immediate solution on the horizon for getting that like insider scoop at scale. That's my dream. Right, but that's. Yeah, that's certainly.

But you are working towards these.

We're trying. We gotta get our users to give us more, more information because.

To build some tools. Software tools, that, that's one thing. And I think 2025 is not about building tools. Like 20 years ago everything was about building hardware, Then people moved to building software, then moved to building SaaS. So nobody talking and investing hardware anymore in general, just some outliers. And today I think software is gone and people invest in something that use these tools, take data and transform data into agencies. So this is the Future. This is 25. So how you planning to do this? With your tool? You build your tools. Okay. It's like HubSpot, I don't know, for investors, KM all these funnels. But now it's time to transform this into agent.

I was going to ask you, what would you, what would you advise us to do? I may have ideas about this. Right. Because we have, to our credit, we have a database of investors and we have users, meaning startups out there pitching. So we have data flowing through the system. Some of that, you know, we need to be conscious about people's privacy and stuff like that. Some of that we can extract kind of the metadata around like, you know, I see if, if I see Dr. Leon is like ending up in a lot of committed columns in startups. Okay. This guy's a pretty active investor. Right. I can pick up some of those clues from the activity on our system. But I don't know, what would you do if you were me, Isaac, flip the question around?

I would, I would introduce aging based on this data and that doesn't have some like today, very well defined shapes and forms and all these form factors and something that very flexible and could be designed so you can apply your data to personalize request from a founder. So if I am founder. Okay, good. I build this CRM. First of all, I'm looking for matching. You have a lot of data. So I put my. I have a bot. You have a bot. Bot takes all these questionnaires and convert these questionnaires, these answers to match with investors. So pop up, I don't know, 20 investors that really match him. And then you can, based on data and based on activity of these investors to create specific letter to these investors or mapping how to reach to these investors. And you have the bot, you have the agent and you have very personalized approach and everything goes automatically. So this is the future.

Sure. Yeah, yeah, I agree. Fundraising, I've seen it even just in the decade or so we've been in business, I've seen it got much easier. Right. It used to be so much more painful than it used to be. Even finding and researching investors was very difficult. Right. 10, 15 years ago. That's become much easier with lists and database and PitchBook and Cringebase and founder suite. Um, but all these other parts identify, you know, researching them, getting those intros, even the outreach and following up still takes a lot of time. A lot of this can be automated. Not all of it though. There's still a very, I think human element that has to be Part of it because you're building relationships. You're. You're going to build a relationship with these investors that can last 10 years. And so that part you can't automate.

You know what I mean?

Yeah, right. Yeah, you can. I don't know, maybe you can and I haven't thought of it yet. But yeah, I think you know there's still. Even if you can automate like outreach, follow up sending deck, all this stuff there still has to like you still have to form that connection and relationship.

Which you know, in each business I meet the first thing I think about is how to automate it using AI. It's somehow you know, it's my brain just focus on this. When my wife was pregnant, I saw only pregnant woman around. So every day I saw a lot of pregnant women. What happened because my brain was in it and the same here. So my brain for example company come to me startup come to me and they immediately recognize what they can automate or what kind of industry they are going to automate. How they. It's right automation for this niche or wrong automation. I'm not talking to startups which are not doing AI at all. So they should or use AI because I don't want to spend investment LPs money on manual doing something even to play to, to pay to a counter. It could be automated instead of paying to a counter. And second if they do some AI and how deep they understand what kind of things they can automate within their niche.

Yeah, totally. Yeah. I should hire you as a consultant and help me think it through. We're, we're doing stuff. It's, it's, it's.

I, I would love, I would love to, to talk about it. So anyway I'm interested in your track record. So could you share how many companies we are working with what is story, what a history. Because we jumped into the business immediately. Now let's get back little bit and let our audience understand exactly what your track record and why they have to. To come to you for the help.

Yeah, sure. So when I, I spent a decade helping companies raise capital that was in the oh whatever we call it the oughts, the OOs 2000s, early 2000s, 2010 or I guess 2004 to 2014, something like that. Right. Anyway, worked with like almost a hundred some companies we raised about 200 million. That was, that was my consultant days that was very manual labor and that was you know, good. I mean I'd say we had about a 50% success rate. Right. And that's. That's actually pretty good because most startups money fail. That also means 50% of the clients I worked with, like we went out, we hustled, we pitched, we drove down the Sand Hill road, you know, every day of the week for weeks on end and still ended up with no money. Right. That's how it goes. I mean that's the reality of fundraising. So 50, 50% sounds bad, but it's actually pretty good if you know the numbers of successful fundraising. And then on Founder suite has really been a. Just to throw numbers out there, it's been much more of a scale.

Right.

We're not so involved but we have a lot of companies on there. I haven't run the numbers lately, but we're, we were approaching a hundred thousand startups total and then we were, the last time we ran it we were at 17 billion raised by those companies. And I'm sure It's over, over 20 by now. And then on our new platform funding stack, which is we haven't talked about but that's the one for emerging manager VCs and fundraising consultants. We have about 400 some venture funds, mostly early funds using that and that's only a year old, less than a year old. So numbers are, I don't really have numbers around that yet, but we're seeing some, some good activity around that too.

Wow. Very. And I had an interesting question. Just one second, let me get back. So ah, there is another side of the problem of how to reach out to, to clients because actually your clients startups as well and from my experience, for example last year I did unicorn pitch Africa, Pan African unicorn pitch and I just reach out to the startups, I did some list of startups I think good for us and I got zero answer. So I wrote everything. So it's a unicorn page who will win, will identify it like fund investable and will participate in Silicon Valley, something like this. And I got zero.

Interesting.

Why so why so I didn't understand why. And then my friend, that time I was working a lot with African startups and my friend told me that you know, you should find somebody who is an authority there because they don't know you and does it matter what you offer? They don't answer because they get used to Nigerian males and all this stuff, you know. Sure, yeah. So they should, they should get trust if you don't know, no trust, no answer. So how do you sell such a problem of cold call to such startups? So it's a different side of cold call?

Yeah, good question. It's gotten easier because we have been around, right. So people are, it's kind of fun. Like I'll go to Tech Week or TechCrunch Disrupt and I'll wear my T shirt and people actually recognize us. So that's easier, right? There's a brand, right? How do you build trust? Well, building a brand is one way to do that. How do you build a brand that just takes years of, you know, of being good and doing good things for your customers. Right. So building a brand helps, I mean for our to getting to get more specific for us. Like we have a podcast called How I raised It. You're going to come on there pretty soon and it's over 300 interviews with founders and just we get deep into how they raise capital for their businesses and you know, so there's, there's kind of a brand by association built from that. Right. And I think content, right. We put out a lot of content on LinkedIn. Some of it gets 200,000 views. It's all fundraising related, you know, so I think when people see these things, they, they have a trust level which you know, like you're saying, kind of adds the authority. Right? Okay. These guys know what they're talking about because they're, they're getting big name guys on the podcast and they're, they're putting out content that is widely shared and reposted. So they must know what they're doing. Right.

I think those all about brand development and I actually recommend startups to build their brand as well. This is, they have to start from and, but they're busy with fundraising, product development. They don't have to build their brand. And then so I had an interesting conversation with one startup. They're raising money and for the year they cannot raise money. And I ask him, why don't you hire some brand brand expert to help you to build the brand so you will be, so you will have exposure for investors in your market. You invested million dollar to build your product. Why don't you invest, I don't know, $20,000 to sell this product? What's the problem? No.

Did you get a response?

No.

Yeah.

No. I don't know. I don't know. I want to do tangible things. Brand is not tangible. It's something vague. I cannot understand it, I cannot touch it. I can touch my product, but I cannot touch brand. I don't understand this. And unfortunately when they understand this, it's too late. They get run out of money and then they don't know what to do. Instead of using Money they raise to build their brand together with the product.

Yeah, you're. That's an interesting topic because brand is something you cannot touch. It's intangible. It's hard to measure. Right. It's not like Google Ads or even outbound email. You can't track open rates as well when you're building a brand. I would say something I made a mistake in my early days. I think this was like our first year after we had just raised money. I hired a PR team. I hired a PR team and I probably spent about 25, $30,000 and the whole goal was to build the brand. That was the worst money I've ever spent. Now, now I think the concept of building a brand is a good one. I would recommend don't hire a PR team. Hopefully there aren't too many PR people.

It's not about PR team because I remember in my first company we hired very good design company from Italy and they did very, very bad stuff, very bad. So we couldn't use it. It's not bad but. And not because of them, because of us. Because when you hire somebody you should provide specification and usually engineer, for example, he understands how to provide specification for the product. I hope sometimes not. But they don't know how to provide specification for the brand. So they come to PR company to brand developer and say, you know, I am xyz, I do this. Please build brand for me. They don't know what you are building, so they build something, you know, finger to the sky, something very vague and you don't like it because it doesn't work. So what I do, for example in all my business approach, I do something by myself. I start to build brand and to learn about by myself. It's everywhere. When I was CEO I did something by myself, marketing for example. And when I learned this, I hired somebody to do it. Because if I hired somebody, he should be or she should be accountable. And how can I make her accountable if. If I don't understand what she's doing? So same with brand. Try it. Learn by yourself and then go understand what you want exactly what market what product because they don't know what final product is. And then just you can hire even PR company, tell them exactly what they have to do and use them like instrument to build it.

Yeah, hire a PR company. My, my last word on PR company. Hire a PR company after you've had a couple years of of track recording or maybe just get a better one than I hired. I don't know.

Not, not hire PR company. So today you can hire Influencer. They work much better than any pr.

It's true. Yeah, Influencers.

Good.

That's true.

Nathan, thank you very much. It was amazing. Interview. What is your a life hack for founders? How you. What do you say to founders? So they should understand that funding Stack and Founder suite are the best tools for them to raise capital today.

What's the Is is it Is the question what's my life hack for founders? Or what's.

What's your life hack for founders that will bring them to your tools?

Yeah, okay, good question. I mean, I'll, I guess I'll. I've got a couple ideas, but I'll answer it. Around fundraising, I would say the life hack for founders, especially if you think you're going to raise capital, is to start thinking about this literally six or even nine or even 12 months before you plan to raise capital. So bear with me. What I actually recommend doing, of course, signing up on FounderSuite. But then, you know, even if you don't, right. Start building a target list of investors and then try and, you know, you could reach out to them. Cole, you could say, this is what I'm doing. I'm not pitching you right now. I just want to kind of show you what, what I'm doing. The reason I'm reaching out to you is because you invest. I've noticed that you invest in these companies. We're right in that same category. We're using AI to do something even more exciting. I'm not pitching you. I just wanted to keep you up to date with what we're doing. Maybe even, you know, asking the permission to send, put them on your company update, your monthly or quarterly update, you know, company update. And the whole point is starting to nurture those relationships, you know, many months in advance. So they kind of get to know you over time. And then when it's time to fundraise, they've seen the progress you've made over the last nine months. They've seen how your metrics have improved every month a little bit. They've seen you've been able to release, you know, new features or new products on a consistent schedule. They see that you're getting occasionally mentioned in TechCrunch. Right? And, and then when times comes down to fundraise, your job is going to be a thousand times easier if you've nurtured and warmed up these relationships versus starting cold the moment you need money. So that's my life hack. Start this process early and think of it as relationship building over a extended period of time.

Amazing. I hope founders will learn a lot from our conversation, from your life hacks, from your experience. So see you next time on your podcast.

Yes. I look forward to hosting you and asking you some tough questions.

That's good. That's good.