Tommy Dobczyk explains why founders shouldn't lead with a fundraising ask. He spent 22 minutes listening to a founder repeat "I'm trying to raise money" until it sounded like Charlie Brown's "wah wah wah," then diagnosed the pitch's actual problems and offered real feedback.
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Are you in the deal room? It's not actually— we're trying to sell nothing. What we're doing is we're trying to find clarity behind our idea and our thought about what we're trying to do, what we're trying to accomplish. If you can't— like, I talked to somebody yesterday and they're like, I'm trying to raise money for— and that's the last thing I heard for the next 22 minutes. Literally for the next 22 minutes, my brain turned into a 1978 cartoon of Charlie Brown where I heard wah wah wah wah wah wah wah wah for 22 minutes. And you let— I let it, I let it, I let it go because I heard, I need money for. And when I heard that, I was like, I was like, I know this is going to be horrible. And that's why I guess I turned my brain into wah wah wah. I just let them go, right? And I just let them go more or less for my own, my own sake of knowing that I let them talk all the way through because at the end, and I care about this person, I wanted to say to them, your idea sucks. Here's what you need to do. So in order to be able to do that, I had to let them wah wah wah for 22 minutes in order to go, bad idea.
