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Fundraising is a Full-Time Job

Name: Fundraising is a Full-Time Job
Uploaded: 2014-12-10T20:11:42+00:00
Duration: 1 min 43 s
Channel: Royston G King
Description: In this monologue, the speaker emphasizes that startup fundraising demands a full‑time commitment. He estimates that founders should allocate at least 20…

10 Dec 2014 · 2 min

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In this monologue, the speaker emphasizes that startup fundraising demands a full‑time commitment. He estimates that founders should allocate at least 20 hours per week while actively raising capital, and about 10 hours per week after securing funds. Fundraising activities occur at all hours, requiring meetings and calls across time zones. The speaker argues that the CEO must lead fundraising, as reliance on third parties is ineffective. He outlines a typical fundraising cycle of 3–6 months, with legal expenses ranging from $5,000 to $15,000, and claims the effort yields roughly $1,000 per hour, making it a worthwhile investment of time.

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Fundraising is basically a full-time job, guys. You're going to need to be spending at least 20 hours a week, at least, right? Now, once you raise money from the outside world, maybe not your friends and family, so call professional angel investors or seed stage venture funds or whatever, you're going to start spending a portion of every week forever raising more money or dealing with the money you've raised. So at a minimum, you can expect to spend 10 hours a week when you've raised money, and then when you're raising money, it could be 20 to 40 hours a week. It's going to happen during the day, it's going to happen at night, you're going to need to go to meetings at night, in the morning. We're raising money for the venture fund, when you do that you're on calls with people all around the world, you're midnight sometimes, 6 AM other times. I mean, you're going to be raising money all the time, which again, why the person who's doing the fundraising needs to be the CEO. You can't rely on third-party people to do the fundraising for you, and that person needs to be full-time. And depending, it's going to take you 3 to 6 months. You're going to spend, you know, $5,000 to $15,000 in legal, but the time invested is pretty good. You'll be earning about $1,000 an hour, so it's not a bad use of your time.