In this advisory monologue, the speaker outlines eight key factors that influence a founder’s success in fundraising: story, demo, traction, charisma/excitement, communication of the opportunity, fundraising process, network access, and presentation. He categorizes each factor as either fully controllable, somewhat controllable, or largely out of the founder’s control, emphasizing that six of the eight are fully within the founder’s influence. The core recommendation is for founders to tighten and perfect the controllable elements—especially story, demo, charisma, messaging, process, and presentation—to stand out to investors, a strategy that is especially critical during the COVID‑19 fundraising environment.
Chapters
So for me, these are the 8 success factors or fundraising factors, and I thought it'd be interesting to put them on a little chart here and just talk about which of these are controllable, which of them do you have control over, and which of them are kind of out of your control. Okay, so story. Your story is fully in your control. As a founder, we have ultimate control over how we tell our story and the words we use, the way we do it, and we can practice it as much as we want and dial it in so that it's really strong and tight. Same with the demo. We can make a really impressive demo that communicates clearly what our product does and the opportunity that it creates for the investor and for the market. Traction, not so much. Traction is somewhat uncontrollable. There's some things you can do that we can talk about during the questions, but I say it's somewhat controllable. Your charisma and excitement is fully under your control. The way you communicate your opportunity is fully under your control. The fundraising process that you run is fully under your control. The kinds of people you have access to, I put somewhat. You know, you can definitely expand your network, but it's not everybody has the same level of access. And then finally presentation, how everything looks, it's fully under your control. So if we take these 8 factors, 6 of them are fully under our control as founders. And so getting those as tight and as dialed as possible is what I, you know, it's the same advice I would give to anybody raising money, but especially now. I would say make sure all of that is as good as it possibly can be, and then you're going to stand out and be perceived as the best, head and shoulders above the rest.
