How to Leverage Zoom to Close your Seed Round of Funding, with Will Sacks

Hey everybody, welcome to this Founder Institute webinar. My name is Jonathan Gritchen. I'm a co-founder of the Founder Institute, and today we got a very interesting topic, and I already see a lot of people joining. We had over, I think, over 300 registrations around the world because we are broadcasting this event here in the morning in the US, or in most of the US. I do, I'm expecting a lot of people to be joining from Europe and places all around the world. So don't be shy, let us know where you are joining from. This is, so let me spotlight my video here. All right, so let us know where you're joining from, all right? The whole value of all of these events that we run at the Founder Institute, all of these online events is the interaction between you, the audience, and us, the speakers here, right? It's all about answering your questions. So please, At any time during the webinar, you can start asking the questions now. You can start asking the questions during the presentation, and then we're going to have a long Q&A portion at the end as well. But please just don't be shy. And I already see here Atlanta, Berkeley, Boston, Kent, England, Calgary, Rio de Janeiro. I was born in Rio de Janeiro, actually. I'm a carioca, although I'm probably not saying that correctly. Warsaw, Poland, Hamburg, South Africa, Castle Rock, Colorado. All right, I'm in Colorado as well. So People from all over the world are joining, which is awesome. And I'm surprised, I'm not surprised that people from all over the world are joining because we have a very interesting topic today and that's how to leverage Zoom to close your seed round of funding. Myself and Will, who I will introduce here in a second, we were joking, you know, leading up to this that it is, you know, we live in the Zoom world now and so many of the important things that we used to do are now done like this, right? And that changes the dynamics of everything, right? It changes the dynamics, prob— of, you know, the relationship that you have with your family in some cases that you're not seeing. But, uh, in the concepts that we're going to talk about today, it really does change the, um, the whole structure, the dynamics, the process, um, and everything around startup funding. So we're going to talk today about how to leverage Zoom to close your seed round of startup funding and For anybody else that's also interested in this topic, we did run a webinar with Will Sachs, who I'll introduce in a moment. We ran a webinar back in June similarly as well about kind of— it was more of a larger kind of meta-webinar about how coronavirus in general is changing the dynamics around startup funding. So if you are interested in that, everybody that registered to this webinar, we'll include the link to that video in your follow-up email as well. But today we're going to really dive into, you know, kind of the Zoom aspect and how you can leverage Zoom to, and leverage the Zoom world to find startup investors, to engage with them, to build those relationships, and finally to close that round of seed funding. So before I introduce Will here, just a quick 5-second marketing spiel that I'm obligated to give you as a marketer. So the Founder Institute is the world's largest pre-seed startup accelerator. Pre-seed startup accelerator means that we help founders at the idea stage and when they're at any point before they're ready to raise seed funding. That's where we work with founders and we help you do that and we help you get to funding and traction through a very structured approach and through constant mentorship and feedback from startup experts and startup investors. So we're enrolling, I believe, in over 80 cities at the moment. So you can see all of the enrolling cities at fi.co/enrolling and you can apply at fi.co/join. Alright, so why don't I bring in our speaker here today? So I'm going to take myself off the spotlight here. So Will Sachs is a Founder Institute alumni out of New York City. And this was, was it 2012, Will? It was a while back.

Yeah, I think 2011, maybe. Okay, 2011 or '12 in there. It was a while ago, almost 10 years ago now.

Yeah, and Will created one of, honestly, and we have almost 5,000 alumni now at Founder Institute, but Will's company was a company called Kindara. And it's something to be said these days about building, a lot of startups get built, but Will's startup was actually solving one of the most important things in the world, which was fertility, right? So I'm sure Will will dive into that a little bit, but yeah, so Will built a successful company, raised a bunch of money, sold that company, and now, now he is, you know, kind of devoting his time and spirit to helping other founders go through that same journey. So yeah, with that being said, Will, I'll hand it off to you. And just as a quick reiteration, Will's going to give a little presentation here, and then after that, we're just going to go through a long period of Q&A. All right, so if at any point you have questions, you can ask them now, you can ask them in the middle of Will's presentation, whenever. We are in the chat, we are listening to you, and we're going to queue up all those questions and we'll tackle them at the end of the presentation. Presentation. Okay, all right, well, I'm gonna hide my screen and, and I'll leave it to you.

All right, thank you, Jonathan. Hi everybody, welcome. It's a pleasure to be here today and have the opportunity to hopefully contribute in some way to your journey as an entrepreneur. I'm going to share my screen here and go through some slides, and then my favorite part is the Q&A at the end. So here we go. All right, so today we're going to be talking about how to leverage Zoom to close your seed round of funding. Move this widget out of the way a little bit. There we go. So like I said, my name is Will Sachs. I'm an entrepreneur based in Boulder, Colorado, in the United States. It's really cool to see people from all over the world joining us today. I founded a company called Kindara, which is a reproductive health tracker for women, helping women get pregnant or avoid pregnancy or just understand what's going on with their bodies based on tracking their data. We also did a hardware device, a thermometer that synced with the phone. We had a— so we had hardware, we had software, we did stuff on the web, we did mobile. And then after Kindara, I founded Fulcrum Venture Accelerator just last year. To use what I learned building a company and specifically raising money, to use that knowledge to help other entrepreneurs raise their seed rounds and get out there and build something awesome. So Fulcrum is based on my experience of raising money and really understanding that there is a system to raising money and there's a way to do it well that makes it way easier, and there's a way to do it poorly that makes it take a really long time and adds a lot of frustration. An expense to a founder's life. So we use that system to teach inside Fulcrum. We teach entrepreneurs how to be really good at raising money. And we've had some successful raises, Nori and Expectful and Capsulely and Butterflies are a sampling of them. And we're working with about 35 companies right now. So that's my experience in a nutshell. I'm gonna tell you a little bit about my story so you get a better understanding of where I come from. And then I'm gonna go through how I see Zoom as a really incredible tool that has, has upsides to it and downsides to it, and how we can use Zoom as founders to raise money. So my story, also known as how I went from knowing nothing about business to raising $9 million and creating a company that impacted the lives of millions of people. So back in 2009, I met my wife Katie, and she introduced me to fertility charting, and I fell in love with fertility charting because I felt like I understood her better, As a woman, she understood her body better. We were— we could use it together to manage our fertility and avoid pregnancy. And it just blew my mind that this technology existed, but nobody knew about it. So I went out and raised a friends and family round, and we built our first version of our app. And then we started getting some users with our app, and we started telling people about our app. And then we started getting more users, and we went through FI. Actually, we went through FI before we started the app. And then after FI, we raised a friends and family round, and then we raised a small $350,000 angel round to grow our user base.

And so, hey, well, sorry to, sorry to interrupt here for a sec, but I think this, the slides on our end are still stuck on the title slide. Oh, I'm not sure. Yeah, thank you, Jennifer, for, uh, oh, that's perfect. Okay, cool. Thank you for, Jennifer, for pointing that out. I will, I'll shut up now.

Thanks, Jennifer. So I don't know what you guys missed, but I was just gonna— so I'll keep going. So we built the app, we started raising money, we got more users, I raised another $600K angel round, and we hired a team. And then, and then we raised another $700K angel round, and then I decided that, that we wanted to do hardware because we saw this— how we could integrate fertility charting for women and make it easier. So we started building the hardware. We went out and hired people, started getting molds made. Here we are at CNET. We hired more people. We raised another round of funding that got covered in TechCrunch, which was a cool personal milestone for me. And then we continued to make everything better. And then finally the company was acquired after I had left as CEO and we hired a new CEO and I helped him raise money.

Yeah, we're still stuck on that other slide. Oh no, which is weird. Yeah, why don't we just do it from here?

Yeah, okay. All right. Um, so yeah, here's our thermometer just in case anybody wants to see it. Um, so yeah, then we were acquired in 2018 and just an overview of fundraising at Kindara. So we did a $100,000 friends and family round and then a $350,000 angel round, $650,000 angel round, $700,000 angel round, and then I got tired of angel rounds we did a $3 million seed round, then I left as CEO, I stayed on the board and we hired a new CEO and I helped him raise another $4 million, and then we were acquired. So it's more rounds than any company should probably raise, like more seed rounds or pre-seed rounds, but it did give me a lot of experience on how the dynamics work at this early stage. But then I was like, what am I gonna do with myself now? And I thought, well, I really love helping entrepreneurs create something from nothing. Like, that was my favorite part of building Kindara. And so I founded Fulcrum to help entrepreneurs do that, specifically in the realm of fundraising. And we do that by running a 3-month accelerator program that's just focused around the skill of fundraising and getting really good at fundraising. And so based on what we've learned inside Fulcrum, I'm gonna go over my, my thoughts on how to leverage Zoom to close your seed round. So at the, at the base of it, raising seed capital is pretty simple. It's about getting meetings, doing meetings, getting people excited when you're doing the meetings, and then just rinsing and repeating on that process. And so some thoughts about getting meetings, and then I'll talk about doing meetings. You know, getting meetings, the world of raising capital runs on warm introductions, and warm introductions come through your network. So getting meetings is all about networking, networking, networking. And the great thing about the world we live in now is that Zoom has made networking easier than ever. There's no pressure to meet in person anymore. You— no one's flying across the country to do a coffee meeting because somebody knows some VC or some angel that they want to get introduced to. Everything is done on Zoom. So in a way, this has made it way more— way easier to get meetings with people all over the world. A 20-minute check-in meeting. So some thoughts on that are make it easy to schedule with people, like have a Calendly link that just makes it super easy. Use connectors. So identify people in your world that know a lot of people that you wanna get in front of and call those connectors, and then make a big long list of all the connectors in your life and just start doing meetings with them. And when you're doing the meetings, you're, well, I'll talk about that in a minute, but you're getting them excited and then you're using, that excitement to get introduced to people in their network. Number 4, it's a volume game, like get used to rejection when raising money. It's just part of the process. The more you get rejected, the better you're getting. The more you get turned down, the more you're learning. Every time you get turned down, you're gonna learn something, you're gonna get better. Use a CRM to track connectors and investors, tap your local ecosystem. You know, everybody has some sort of local ecosystem, that they can use, and then do, you know, 20-minute calls, just super low overhead, to see if there's some alignment and excitement, and if so, then you can move forward. And then just start doing meetings, you know, any meetings really. We tell people, like, if you're shy about doing meetings, start doing meetings with your Facebook friends and just see if you can get them excited in the meeting about what you're doing, and if you can get them excited, they're probably gonna introduce you to somebody else that they know. And if they introduce you, that one first meeting can turn into a second and a third meeting. And then you do those meetings, they can turn into two meetings, and then those meetings, they turn into two, and then those meetings, et cetera, et cetera. And so one meeting can easily turn into 30 meetings. And then you do that a few times and, you know, 4 times and you've got 124 meetings. And I have yet to see a company that's done 100 meetings or more than 100 meetings that hasn't closed their round. I'm sure they're out there, but a great way to think about it is, if I do 100 meetings, I'm going to close my round. And— sorry. Yeah, so let's talk about this process of doing meetings. It really is a 3-step process: meet the right people, get them excited, and then meet their friends. And so some places to meet the right people. A, do it systematically with investor and connector funnels, so you're tracking all these people. And then B, there's so many places: Facebook, LinkedIn, AngelList, Twitter, mentors, accelerators. Funded CEOs are a great connector because they are by default connected to their investors. Your local Chamber of Commerce, your local angel groups, events online, CEO groups. And then number 2, When you've met these people, work on getting them excited and use your own excitement and energy and your story, your demo, and the future that you're creating with your company to get them excited, and then meet their friends. Who do you know that I should— who do you know that I should speak with? It's a great question to ask in connector meetings. And then we play this game called the 100 Meeting Game inside our program, and it's essentially you take a slide, you put 100 squares on it, and every time you do a meeting, you put a name in one of the squares. And don't even worry about if it's a yes or no, if it's a terrible meeting, if it's a great meeting, your only goal is just to get to 100. And I— we have yet to see a company that finishes their 100 meeting game, game yet that doesn't have a lead and is closing their round. So you start to think about it just as a game and it's fun. And how many meetings can you get? Uh, and then the last tip to meet investors, you need to target investors where there's great alignment. So, and same with connectors, if there's alignment, uh, everything just flows. They're going to introduce you to people they know. If you impress those people, they're going to introduce you to more people. So if you're in real estate, meet with people that are interested in real estate. If you're in food, meet with people that are interested in food. If you're in consumer internet, meet with people that are in that world. The more alignment there is, the easier it's gonna be to get meetings and to get excitement and to grow your network inside the sphere of people that you wanna be inside. Okay, so that's getting meetings. So now let's talk about doing meetings. The first thing is you gotta get in front of the right people, like we talked about, and alignment is your friend there. And then in the meeting, you need to impress those people, and then you need to get to the next step in the process. Mistake that a lot of entrepreneurs make is thinking they have to pitch somebody and get an answer in the first meeting. That's not, that's not what goes on in a first meeting. The first meeting is just you're feeling each other out, you're getting a vibe, you're understanding, is there alignment here? Is this something I want to spend more time on? So in the first meeting, that's all you need to do. You just have to convince the person that what you're doing is worth them spending more time with you, and also you can qualify them and see if if what they do is worth you spending more time with them. But then the big difference now is that the old way of doing business was face-to-face meetings. And so I remember at Kindara flying all over the country, meeting with people face-to-face, because that's how raising money was done. Now we have this little square that is our portal to the world of fundraising. The old way, let's talk about what has changed, what has stayed the same, and how should founders adapt. The old way was face-to-face, in person, and co-located. The new way, we're screen-to-screen, like you and I are right now. We're remote, we're distributed. And so when I thought about this and thought about how to encapsulate what has changed, what has changed is the medium. The medium has changed. Communications expert Marshall McLuhan said, "The medium is the message," and he proposed that a communication medium itself, not the messages it carries, should be the primary focus of study. So the question is, how is this medium of Zoom different in the realm of fundraising, and how can we as founders use it to our advantage? So this is the medium. It's very different than a face-to-face meeting in the top right, or a phone call in the bottom right, or a text message in the bottom left, you could say that in a face-to-face meeting, chemistry is what's most important. If there's not chemistry, then not much is happening. In a phone call, it's all about listening because it's just audio. So if listening is not happening, it's not going to be an effective phone call. In text messaging, brevity is key. If you start writing these long text messages, people will just zone out. And it's my assertion that in Zoom, engagement is the most important thing. It's most important that we keep the people we're talking to engaged throughout, because if they're not engaged, we don't have their attention and we can't actually sell them anything. And so the message that we craft to deliver through this medium should fit the medium, and the strategy we use to raise money should fit this medium. So there's 5 aspects of this medium that I want to go over now quickly. I believe Zoom is intimate in some ways, more intimate. It's opaque in some ways. It's boring. It's impatient, and it's tiring. So I'll go through these one by one. So first, intimate. Zoom, in a weird way, is like more intimate and it's less intimate. It's more intimate because you're in someone's home most of the time. And so by just by virtue of the fact that you're talking to them in their home, there's a permission that exists to potentially make more of a connection and get more intimate faster. So you can ask people about their kids, you can ask people about quarantine, if their cat walks in front of the thing, you can ask them about their cat, if you also have a cat, et cetera, et cetera. There's just these intimate opportunities to make a personal connection and start to build that rapport that is the foundation of trust and an actual commitment from an investor going forward. So I think it's important for us to focus on those first few minutes of every Zoom call, like use it to build some rapport. And you know you have rapport when you've got a smile or there's some emotion that comes up like a laugh. And you can start to find out what they want and qualify them and understand, like, what is this person looking for out of this phone call and how can I deliver that? On the flip side, Zoom can also be less intimate if you just dive right into the pitch and there's no rapport. Because you're not face-to-face, if you just dive in and there's no rapport, someone can easily just zone out, and then you lose their attention and their engagement, and it's unlikely to be a successful meeting. The second aspect of Zoom and how it's different is that it's opaque. And what I mean by that is that investors like face-to-face meetings for a reason, because in a face-to-face meeting, you can look for all these cues, like you can get body language cues and style cues, and notice just more in 3D how the person talks and get a better sense of them. All that is lost in Zoom. We just have this flat screen and we have to communicate our opportunity and ourselves through this flat screen in a limited, in a limited amount of space. And so what this means is, as founders, let's be really good at using Zoom and let's present ourselves in the best light. I did a little test just for you guys for this webinar is I went out and bought a green screen setup and I bought some lights off Amazon for $10. Show you these. So I don't know if anybody's watching here. These are $10 on Amazon. I don't know if anybody's watching thought that this was my home in the back. It's not. It's a background. And I just did this as a test. It cost me like $60. The key is good lighting and a nice background that matches the lighting of the space you're in. I happen to be visiting my parents in Toronto this morning. So I think things like that are— they end up communicating a lot. Like, investors are going to judge you based on your entire presentation. So if you don't have a nice place to do Zoom calls, either make it nice. I think make it nice is the number one option. And if you can't make it nice, have a nice setup so that you're communicating your brand just visually before a first word comes out of your mouth. And then investors are gonna extrapolate based on what they see, so just sweat the details, make sure your presentation is really compelling and that you can keep their attention the whole time. Number 3, Zoom is boring. The real world is much more engaging than a screen. So if something happens out here, it's taking up way more of my visual space than what's happening on the screen here. So the simple tip there is notice when an investor is looking at something else and just stop talking. And if they don't come back in a, in a, in a suitable amount of time, start asking them questions or use their name to bring them back so that you get their attention again. Because again, that attention is the most crucial part. It's the foundation that is gonna, is gonna allow either information to get communicated or not. The fourth way that Zoom is different is that it's an impatient medium. What I mean by that is there's 100 distractions that are just one click away. Like, literally, there's 100 different apps on my phone, on my computer, that can distract me. So as founders, we have to get attention and we have to keep it. And a good way to do this is to have a presentation that is very compelling, that tells a story, that hooks somebody in emotionally, and then keeps them hooked through the entire presentation. We've got a company started by a founder that was out of her journey with cancer. She got cancer and skincare— she started realizing how toxic skincare was, and her company came out of that experience. And so she tells that story and it hooks people right away, right at the beginning of her presentation, and it keeps them engaged all the way through. I think that's very important. And then you might notice somebody's like not listening, they're like on their phone or something. As soon as you notice that, you gotta grab their attention back. And so usually I stop talking and I start asking them questions or use their name, and that's gonna bring their attention back. And so you have to, through Zoom, become an expert at hooking and holding attention. And then yeah, who knows how to sell people stuff through their laptop screen? As founders raising money, you're essentially selling shares in your company. And social media companies have gotten really good at selling people stuff through the laptop screen. And they're obsessed with engagement. You need someone's attention to sell them something, and losing someone's attention is losing the sale. So you must keep their attention. And then lastly, Zoom is tiring. Zoom fatigue is a thing. I think we can all feel it some days when we've got 5 or 6 or 8 Zoom calls, it's like, oh my God, more Zoom. So the way I would think about that as a founder is how can I, A, make this my most fun meeting of the day, and B, make this the most memorable meeting for the investor? And ways to do that are to bring excitement, bring some humor, bring good energy, like bring good excited energy. And tell an impactful story that they're gonna tell at the dinner table when they get home that night. If you can be this, the topic of their dinner table conversation when they get home, you're gonna stick in their brain and they're gonna think, oh, I did that meeting and I remember that it was compelling, I'll probably do a second meeting. And then the last thing, show an impactful demo if you have one where you can really hook them and get them emotionally. So in summary, Zoom is intimate, it's opaque, it's boring, it's impatient, it's tired. There's more openness to create intimacy early in the meeting. Investors are looking for cues from, from you. They will get distracted, and so you have to get their attention back and really monitor, do I have their attention? Are they engaged in this meeting? And a great way to add some, like a cherry on top of the cupcake, is to tackle Zoom fatigue by being their most interesting, exciting, or memorable meeting of the day. And I've got some, this is like the summary here, if anybody wants to take a screenshot or check out the replay, you can see, put this, you know, put this up on the wall and before you walk into a meeting, you can just be like, okay, here are the 5 things that I need to remember. And then the last thing I wanted to go over is, What I mentioned earlier is that a lot of founders think they need to focus on, like, closing an investor in an initial meeting or getting through their entire pitch and all the details in the first meeting, and that's really not how fundraising works, and especially not now over Zoom. Over Zoom, you've got to build a relationship virtually, and so that's gonna mean, like, you're probably gonna do an initial meeting of 30 minutes, then you'll send some info, then you might do a longer meeting of 60 to 90 minutes, send more info, then another meeting, you know, then maybe a call, send more info, and it'll take a bunch of steps in order to get to a commitment and eventually an investment. And so the way to think about this is just in every meeting, like, what's the next step? If it's initial meeting, the point of the meeting is to impress them, get a vibe, have them thinking about you, and impress them enough and establish enough rapport and trust to get to the next meeting. That's it. That's all you have to do. You, if you just do that, the meeting has been a success. If you try and do anything else, that's not really the point of that first initial meeting. So it's going to be a series of meetings with each investor and you just need to get to the next step, get to the next step, get to the next step in each one of those meetings. So those are my thoughts on raising over Zoom. It's definitely different. Engagement is the most important thing and you just got to get to the next step. Is what I would say as a summary. We do have some free resources for anybody attending today. We have a free training, How to Raise from Angel Investors, and we are just about to open up our next cohort of Fundraising Mastery, which is opening up next week, but we decided for anybody on this webinar, you're gonna get early access, and we will look at your application first, so you'll essentially get in the front of the line of anybody who's applying and have the greatest chance of being accepted, so To apply or just learn more about the program or get this free training, How to Raise from Angel Investors, you can go to fulcrumventureaccelerator.com/FI and check that out. So that's what I got for you guys today. And yeah, I'd love to do a whole bunch of Q&A now.

Awesome. All right, that was, that was great, Will. And we have a lot of questions here, but as the host, I get to ask the first questions. It's just one of the One of the perks of the job. So, um, so I, uh, by the way, like, so the first thing I wrote down that you said was, you know, that it's the whole concept of the, this 100 meeting investor game, right? The more you get rejected, the better you are. Like, or the more you get there, the more you get rejected, the better you're getting. For everybody on the line, like, I, if there's one thing to understand with fundraising, it is that you are going to get rejected. You, if you don't have the tough you will not be successful. And I think, Will, I think it's kind of brilliant that you've turned this 100 investor meeting thing into a game because you're going to lose most of it, almost all the time. But if you look at it as a game, are there other ways that you've seen to, besides like, okay, you made it into a game, you're kind of making it like, look, you're just learning, you didn't lose the game, you're just learning how to go a little bit further on the next round or whatever. Are there other tactics that you use with some of your the companies you're working with to really to kind of drive that home.

Yeah.

Yeah.

The other, another one is what did you learn? Like we have people make that 100 meeting game slide and then the next slide is lessons learned. And so, because every meeting you're going to learn something like you might learn that person is a jerk and I never want to do business with them might be what you learn. Or you might learn like, I need to research my market more. Like I got asked a bunch of questions that I didn't know the answers to. So we have them make that slide and then you do the meeting, you get rejected, but what did you learn? What did you learn? What did you learn? What did you learn? You know? And then it's almost like a rite of passage. You need to get, you need to get 20 nos before you're going to get a yes for most people. Yep. And that's because there's 20 things that you don't know the answer to, or there's just, there's just, it's not dialed yet. And so if you do 20 meetings and get 20 nos and learn from those 20 nos, then you'll be dialed on meeting number 21.

Yep. And I know the one thing I remember too, just so there's an F5 mentor, Scott Painter, this guy, he's raised over a billion dollars in his life. And what he always tells people is, look, fundraising, even though I've raised over a billion dollars, it never gets easier. And what he says is, There was that movie, the— was it The Edge of Tomorrow? Do you remember that movie with Tom Cruise where every single day he's just trying to get one step further? It's like a video game, right? So I think the concept of using it as a video game, understanding that almost every time you're going to fail, and that's fine because you can't win every game. You're just trying to learn to try to win the next one or the one after that or the one after that. And I think that's an incredibly valuable mindset to have when you're fundraising, especially for first-time fundraisers, because it is— it's going to be nonstop rejection. And that doesn't mean that you don't have something that's worth investing in. That just means that this is the first time you're doing it, and it's kind of a shock.

Yeah, totally. And another mantra that I used when I was raising and that I like giving to people is, the unit of progress is the unit of process. So the unit of process is just meetings. So as long as you're doing meetings, you're making progress, even if you get 10 nos in a row, that doesn't matter, you're just following the process. And it's kind of, I haven't found anything else where you get as much rejection as fundraising. So it is, you know, if you can do it and take the rejection, like you can pretty much take any kind of rejection, you can do anything.

Yeah, and honestly, if it was easy, everyone would do it, and that's why it's not easy to take rejection, and so fundraising is hard. So I'm gonna get into some audience questions here, and we've got a ton, so please keep them coming. We got a bunch of time here. Obviously, we reserved about half the time on this webinar for questions, so I'm gonna start here with a question from Abby. Hey, Abby. I know Abby. She's a crowd from Silicon Valley, but with pitching on Zoom and global access like you mentioned, Does the old advice about focusing on investors in your geographic region still come into play, or do you think that, you know, that that's breaking down the barriers? You know, what are you seeing with some of your companies?

I mean, I think geographic region still matters a lot. I think because there's a foundation of rapport and trust that already exists. Like, if you find out that if someone is in your town, or in your state or in your country, there's a whole set of cultural assumptions and realities that are already there that you don't have to work to establish more rapport on. So I think it's easier, it's still easier to raise from people who are closer to you, but at least now you have access. If you wanna raise from somebody across an ocean, you don't have to get on a plane and fly across the ocean, sit down with them, you can actually, do 5 Zoom calls before you decide like, oh, maybe now we've got to do something in person.

Right, okay. And then, um, let's see here. So, um, I guess, uh, let's see, Gabby's asking, I'm trying to raise money with my company. Is it a good idea to raise a small amount initially from angel, um, or a big quantity of money with a goal to be reached in 2 to 3 years?

I mean, I think I would say, have you— is it your first time raising, and do you have traction? Do you have a prototype and traction? If you've raised before and you have a prototype with traction, you probably can go and raise the bigger amount. If it's your first time raising and you don't have a prototype and traction, probably the smaller amount is going to make more sense and be easier. I would say. What do you think, Jonathan?

Yeah, I think always you want to start small, right? And I think that the— and this is the kind of a second question that I had for you was on this, the, you know, kind of the funnel, right? I know I've seen you talk before about how fundraising is sort of— it's not, you know, you can't boil the ocean in a day, right? I think the metaphor that you that you have used that is that it's like planting a farm and that you have to prepare the soil and then you put the seeds in and then you till the seeds and then you water them and then you prune them and then you water them again, right? And then it's kind of playing the long game. So I think with any of these things, and that's right, that's why we have all of these different kinds of rounds of funding is because it's really, you're just trying to get to the next stage. It's just like you're trying to level up, so to speak, if I want to use that game analogy again, at every stage and get to the metrics that you need to be able to get that next round of money that you need to get to the next goal in your business.

Yeah. One of our investors at Kindara, who is an FI mentor, said every round should de-risk the business. So raise enough that you can significantly de-risk the business so that you can raise more later. And so if you can raise a smaller amount and de-risk things, then your valuation will go up and you'll give away less of the company in the next round. And I think the exception is founders who have already raised, maybe already exited, and they can then go and raise like a big, bigger round just based on what they've done previously. But it's a lot harder for founders who don't have that track record to do that. So what I see—

I got a couple of just while we're on the topic here of like the different rounds, I got, there's a couple of questions in here, 'cause you mentioned in the beginning, like you did way too many angel rounds, I think is what you said, right? And there's some people in the audience that are kind of like, okay, you know, what does that mean? You did way too many. Why do you think it was too many? What's like, you know, like what did that look like? And I think, Yeah, I'd love to hear your answer to this too, because I think it could probably illuminate some of the mechanics of how this stuff works.

Yeah, for sure. Great question. So what I got into the trap of doing was I'd raise like $600K, and then 3 months after that money was in the bank, I realized, crap, we've got 6 months of runway again. And then I would go out and start raising again. So I got into this thing of like perpetually raising, I think that's not a good place for founders to be. I think it would have been smarter with hindsight for me to have focused on how much— like, let's do less of the company and raise enough so that we have 18 to 24 months of runway. I can spend the 6 months raising it, and then when we get it in the bank, if I've got 18 months runway and I know it's going to take me 6 months to raise the next round, I've got a year where I can stop fundraising and I can just focus on derisking the business and accomplishing milestones. So if I do another venture-backed startup, that's what I will do. And I— because perpetually raising, it's exhausting.

And it's a full-time job.

It's a full-time job.

Yeah. And that's where a lot of founders— you see a lot of founder burnout because it's like, as if being a founder of a startup is not enough of a full-time job, then you tag this whole other full-time job on top of it.

Yeah, I think Paul Graham said, raise money and then don't spend it. And I think that's good advice. Like, yes, what he means by that is don't say, great, now we raised this round, now we can do this other initiative that we had, that we've been thinking about, and that would be great, or we can build another product. Like, it, it really helps to focus in on what's the one thing this round has to accomplish in terms of, like, we need to double our engagement rate, and that's the only thing we're going to focus on because we know if we accomplish that, We're gonna be able to raise another round, or like, we need to sign on our first 10 customers, and that's all we're gonna do, and really focus in, because I think that's where I got in trouble, and I see other people get in trouble, is you've got all this money, and then you think you can accomplish all these things, but you can't, because everything takes twice as long and costs twice as much as you think it's going to. So it really requires discipline to raise the money, and then really focus on what are the one, what's the one or two things that are gonna make the biggest difference.

Yeah, I know a common concept up there is, I think 500 Startups might have been the first ones to really put it out there, but it's like, what's the one metric that matters? All right, and kind of focusing on those things. So there's a lot of questions here into the mechanics of Zoom and stuff, so I'm gonna kind of dive into some of those things 'cause I thought it was super interesting. And for everybody, a bunch of people were like, when are we gonna get the recording? 'Cause yeah, there were a bunch of slides in there that had a ton of information. So don't worry, we're gonna send out the recording. It's gonna take us— within 48 hours you'll get the recording for everybody watching. But yeah, there were a couple slides in there. I think you really broke down how the medium changes exactly how you should do these kinds of things. So Egalis asked, in your experience, do pitches to a group on Zoom work? Like, is that something— now sometimes you don't have a choice, right? You jump into Zoom and there's 20 people on or whatever, like, okay. You know, at a high level, like, what are your thoughts on the Zoom kind of group pitches? And if it were up to you, would you, you know, what, which way would you want to go on that?

Man, Zoom, like a group Zoom pitch feels so out of my control if I'm raising money because there's, it's like if you have a one-on-one, I can monitor the person and see, are they paying attention and are they getting, are they picking up what I'm putting down? And in a group, It's so many, so many. And so you can kind of monitor like, how is this landing? How is this going? So that's tough, but I think that sometimes you won't be able to avoid it. You might get a partner meeting where they're like, we want you to come pitch to the partnership and it's over, which is a good thing, which is awesome. Great thing. But yeah, it's, it's, yeah, I think on Zoom, I haven't done this personally, but you can get a second screen and probably have the people's faces large on one screen and the— your presentation on the other. Is that— I don't know if that's possible, but that's— that would be nice because then you can see the people's faces and you can read the room a little more.

Yeah, yeah, that's, that's an interesting thing too because I, I know just working with a lot of FI grads when they're pitching, I mean, a lot of them are— yeah, we almost, at least in, in like demo day kind of formats and stuff, we tell them don't pay attention to the chat, like just do your thing, right? But if you're at a partner meeting, those faces are actually like the most important thing, right?

They're giving you information. Yeah.

Yeah. That's an interesting question.

Yeah. I mean, it's contrived like Zoom. We're trying to get all this information that we would get in a face-to-face meeting through this little screen. So yeah, it's a little bit out of your control as a founder and you can just do your best and try and Keep your energy up and be charismatic, I think, is something that we can all remember. That's important because it's not as engaging as a face-to-face, so you have to bring the extra oomph.

Yeah, I did a presentation yesterday morning and I felt like I didn't have that oomph, as you said, and I felt like the next time I'm the one doing a presentation, I'm gonna set up a thing and stand up and just, you know, early morning kind of thing, you just, you need to bring the energy, right? Yeah.

And like do 50 squats before you jump into the meeting, you know? So you like, I think that stuff matters.

Yeah. So Gabriel was asking with this new medium and nonverbal communication being very important, like, and now we're getting into some of the mechanics here, right? So distance to camera, body language, um, formal or casual dress. And Dr. Akuma here was also asking, like, so, you know, background. Well, Dr. Akuma was asking, did he buy his background? No, I don't think you bought that.

No, I didn't buy it.

You can go just Google search good Zoom backgrounds and you'll find thousands of them. But you did get a green screen, you said, right?

I did. Yep. And what I noticed with the background is if the lighting in the background match it, if your actual background lighting conditions match your Zoom background more or less, then it'll work better, the green screen will look better. Do the call in front of a window, so there's a big window here that's providing me with lots of natural light. I think the question of like casual versus formal, that's like, what is this investor, what do they wanna see? Like what kind of person are they? What would they prefer? And what kind of business is this? If it's like a cybersecurity company or a medical device company, should probably have a collar, I would think. If it's like consumer internet, maybe it's a t-shirt is more fitting for who they— 'cause they're thinking like, okay, it's a consumer internet company. Are these the next, like the hot new TikTok? And so I would say like, look at it through the investor's eyes and decide like, what would they, What are they expecting? And give them what they're expecting up to the point where it still feels good for you.

Yeah, because I think in that respect, like you said, with Zoom, and it's sort of when you were talking about that, how it's like Zoom is almost, it's more personal, but also less personal. It's kind of the same concept as like podcasts and radio. If you look at podcasts and radio as a medium, yes, they're less personal in the respect that you don't see the face, but they're more personal in the respect that people, they're listening to you when you're in your home and you are doing your thing. And so they're in your ear. So yeah, I think being as natural as possible in that respect. But unfortunately, and as an investor, you have to align to of what you think they might, I don't know, maybe they might think natural, maybe.

Yeah. I don't know.

I may be overthinking it, but the medium is super important. So I think it's something worth discussing, right?

Another thing worth mentioning, I think, is the microphone. Like you've got your mic is on your ear pods, right? And my mic is right here by my mouth. The closer you get your mic to your mouth, the better the sound will be. So if you're using your, microphone in your computer and it's 3 feet from your face, it's not gonna sound as good. Just as a nuts and bolts point.

So a couple of other things here. So let's see, Ed is asking, I have a very real fear of approaching hot prospects early. I might even question just that. If it's early, they may not be a hot prospect, but anyway, Ed, I have a very real fear of approaching hot prospects early and blowing them with poor presentations. So those hot prospects be saved for later in the game using weaker prospects for practice.

Yeah, I think so.

Yeah. And I think I wouldn't even use those words too, because it makes it almost sound kind of like, like, I don't know, mean almost, but it's, it's just, yeah, you should practice. Like the people that you really want to close, no, you shouldn't pitch them first. Right.

I mean, yeah. Make sure that your stuff is really dialed and like pitch whoever you can, like your family, your friends, you know, do 10 friends at the very beginning of the process and you'll learn a lot about how your stuff is resonating, how it feels to give, and then do 10 people that are potential investors that aren't your best prospects and like use those initial meetings to learn and then You'll— what I've found and what I see with founders is you'll get the confidence and the certainty will come once you feel like your presentation is good and you have all the answers to the questions and it's all thought out and you have a good plan. At some point you'll start to feel unassailable. You're like, this is happening. Like, I have all the answers, my plan is good, I just need to—

You've heard every question that can help you on anything.

Yeah, right. You've loved every question, and then so you've had to come up with a better answer.

Yeah.

And then you're like ready. And then when you're ready, then go after— like, that's when the fundraise really begins. And it might take like 30 or 40 rejections for you to get to that point, but you'll get to that point eventually, and then you'll go out and you'll succeed.

I love that too, Will. And literally the whole time where I'm looking at your question, Ed, I'm just like, remember what we said in the beginning? The more you get rejected, the better you're getting. Right. So if that is the case, and it is, believe me, then yeah, you, you, you, there's no way in hell that you want to pitch the people that, that you think are really like the people you want to close in the beginning. Right. Because you're not going to be good. You want to put them at the later end and it's just, you have to, there's no shortcuts. Right. You have to go through that process. People are going to, you can go into a meeting in the beginning and think, oh, I have the answer to every question. You don't.

Right.

You could only will gain that knowledge. By going through 30, 40, 50 meetings. And what was that? So you said the fundraise doesn't start until like, what would you say? Like, I mean, one meeting.

Yeah. And so like this is maybe we'll incorporate this going forward, but yeah, 20 or something.

Yeah.

20, 30, something like that.

I think that's good. Yeah. I mean, and it's, and for anybody in startups, like there should, you know, it always surprised it's customer development, right? And customer development, like, you're, in this case, your investors are your customers, right? You're selling them on something. So it's the same process. Like, you have to be willing to fail. You have to try different things and incorporate feedback and kind of build up from there. Yeah. All right, so let's see. We got 10 minutes left here. So, Will, thank you. I'm gonna try to go through some more questions here. So let's see here. Okay. Ollie asked, would you advocate like— okay, so Ollie's asking around the slide deck, like length and that kind of stuff. You know, in a Zoom world, I think, you know, length is one component, right? But are there other things with the slide deck? You know, how you come out firing in the beginning, I know, is kind of what you're saying, energy, right? But length is also one of those factors. What are your thoughts on that?

Yeah. So what I find works the best is before you even think about slides, write out your pitch script, which tells the story of what it is you're doing and why it matters and answers all the questions that an investor might have and try and put that on 1 or 2 pages. And then practice the script with people until the script feels like clear, concise, and compelling. People know what you're doing, it's not long-winded, and it's compelling. And usually it's compelling because there's the story you're telling about how your company fits into the bigger picture of what's happening in your industry, or some personal story. And then once you have that doc, think about what slide would best illustrate this. Pitch, and then create that slide and do that to create your presentation deck. So we actually have companies create an email deck, which is something you'd send somebody, and then a presentation deck, which is what you're actually gonna have on the screen while you're giving your pitch. And I think even more so over Zoom, the presentation— if you build your presentation that way, it will be way more engaging than you just walking through your email email deck that's got a lot of words on the screen because they'll be reading the words so they won't be listening, but they won't be able to read quite because they'll be hearing your voice and they'll be trying to listen to your voice, but they won't be able to, you know, so you're like, they'll be in a dead zone. But if you do your pitch first and then create your slides to illustrate your pitch, like think of it like a TED Talk, it'll be much more engaging. And for Zoom, people will be engaged because you'll hook them with the story and you'll keep them all the way through. So that's what we're doing right now to, to accord to this new reality. And it seems to be working well because people like stories and we're sick of Zoom. So like your pitch can be more like a television show where they learn about a cool company and a cool opportunity. Like that's better than you just walking through something that's dry. Right.

Now, I think that makes a lot of sense. It's, and this is sort of, and I've done a lot of stuff in PR, right? And it was always like, okay, what's the difference between like an investor pitch and a PR pitch, right? And it was always the PR pitch needs to be much more story-focused, like around an individual person. And I actually think in the Zoom world, they're becoming much more meshed together a little bit, just because it's, it's human nature. Like, when we look at a screen, like, we want to be entertained almost.

Entertained, it's like that.

Yeah, like, because this is a screen, you know. I have a TV over here that's also a screen which has Netflix and all this stuff, right? Like, it's still, at the end of the day, it's a screen. And there are these, these basic things about what we expect when we look at a screen, um, that, that certainly come into play. Now, if you're, you know, if you're growing 10,000%, you know, a year, none of that really matters. But for the people that aren't doing that, like getting that story and selling it as a story that really engages people's emotions, I think is incredibly important.

Yeah.

So Matt was asking, you know, so Matt's getting here into kind of the mechanics, right? So, okay, I've had a meeting. Now I'm in this portion where it's send info between the meetings. To keep that engagement going, to get to that next step, as you were saying, right? Get to that next meeting. You know, in general, what is some of the best info to send to the investors to this meeting? And, you know, going deeper, do you recommend different types of info depending on the stage of meeting? So, okay, so if you're early, you've just had that coffee or whatever, right? And you're not trying to sell them because again, It's the beginning, right? You're just trying to build a relationship. And then like, you know, like what do you see just roughly of sort of that lineage of the info you should be sending and how you build that relationship?

Yeah. Well, I think what do they want? Like after that first meeting, they can be like, this was great. And they might say like, can you send me some more, send me your slides, you have slides, or do you have an executive summary? Or can you send me that article that we talked about? You know, whatever they— in a good intro meeting, there'll be like a next step. If you feel the vibe, the energy's good, they might be like, oh, this is great, like send me some slides. So send them what they want to see. If there was no follow-up or the energy wasn't good, you could put them on your email update list and send them your monthly update. And then in a couple months, reach back out and say, hey, you know, we've made some progress, we'd love to do another check-in with you. And see if they wanna jump back on another call with you and get them back in your process. But typically it's gonna get more detailed over time. Like maybe you send a few slides and then you send more slides and then they wanna see your financials or whatever it is. It'll get more detailed. And you wanna balance that. If they're getting serious about you, you wanna make sure that you're not, they're not wasting your time. And so you wanna ask them a lot of questions about like, what's your process? A great question for founders is, if you were going to invest, how much would you want to invest? Because it helps you know where their head's at. They might say, I'm not ready for that yet. So then you know that, okay, you got to focus on getting more excitement into the mix. Or they might say, if they give you a number, you know that they're kind of sold in some way on your opportunity. So if they're like, well, I'd probably put in $50K, and then you can ask the next question, okay, great, what other information would you need in order to make that decision? And then they'll tell you, well, I'm not convinced on the market. So now you're like, okay, if I convince this guy on the market, he's putting in $50K. So you can just like, it's called the test close in sales.

Test close. Yep.

Everybody write that down. If you were going to invest, how much would you wanna invest? It's gold while fundraising, that question.

You just, you kind of flip the equation a little bit so you can extract that information. And I would say even within that, that's that sequential thing, right? Even that question, even though it's somewhat of a soft question, like that's still several, several steps in, right? Like meetings, interactions, meaningful interactions, like that kind of stuff, right? Like that's, that's kind of mid-funnel. Is that what you would say, or even later funnel?

It's, well, so some people I think can get there like right away, but there are steps you have to get. You have to establish rapport. You have to establish—

Yeah. If it's someone you know already or whatever. Yeah.

But yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So typically like you have to get past those stages and then once there's excitement, then you can start to ask those closing questions. And sometimes the excitement is like one of, Sometimes one of my investors would call me and say, hey, like Mary told me she just invested in your company, I want to invest too. And so like at that point there's already trust and everything, they're already down the process, but other folks might take like 4 meetings to get there. Yeah. So it's like pacing them, where are they in their buying decision? I think founders can, study sales. Like, if you read one book on sales, it'll really help you with fundraising.

Yeah, it'll help you with everything.

Yeah, yeah, right. Somebody said everything is sales.

Yeah, uh, and I, yeah, I, I think, I think, um, just in general, in terms of like founder education and stuff, it's pretty well known now, or at least, you know, I mean, Lean Startup, all this stuff is basically like, okay folks, sales, sales, sales, right? And, um, yeah, it's fundraising is the same thing, even if maybe the, the people you're selling are more sophisticated or whatever. It's still sales at the end of the day. You're kind of creating this market for shares that sometimes don't even exist yet, right? Yeah. So, all right, so we're closing up here. I want to give Will a second. There's been a lot of questions about the Fulcrum Startup Accelerator. And just so everybody knows, Founder Institute is a startup accelerator as well. Founder Institute is a pre-seed startup accelerator. Accelerator, where you work with people before they're ready to raise funding. Okay, before they have— we work with a lot of people pre-incorporation, before they're even ready to start approaching investors in most cases. You know, do you want to tell everyone like what Fulcrum's about and, you know, the kind of people that you guys are looking for?

Yeah, sure. Thank you, Jonathan. So we look for founders that are building impactful companies companies that are in the verticals of environment or social justice or women or like access to technology, just companies that are doing something impactful and useful and that are currently raising money or are about to be raising money, and the founder might be struggling and wondering like, how the heck do I do this? I haven't done this before. Maybe that founder was successful in their previous career, but they've never raised money before. So those are the perfect types of people. And yeah, if you go to fulcrumventureaccelerator.com/FI, you can see our application there and apply. We're starting our early bird process next week, which gives people a significant savings on the program. So yeah, look forward, hope we meet, get to meet some of you, and hope this was helpful. And thank you guys so much for the opportunity. And do Founder Institute if your idea is staged, because we did it and it was a great, super positive part of our journey.

Thank you. Yeah, and we've had Venture, the Fulcrum Accelerator is fairly new, but I know we've had a couple of our companies go through it as well, and we've gotten great feedback. And I'm always going to be partial to the Coloradoans here, so Will is always, and Will also, he's donated honestly a lot of his time to helping a lot of FI grads as well, and we, with private sessions and stuff to really bring them through the mechanics of fundraising, which has been super valuable for a lot of our companies. So thank you, Will. So please, for everybody on the line, thank you for joining today. Thank you for your questions. Check out willsacks.com, fulcrumventureaccelerator.com within the next 48 hours. We're going to hustle. Sometimes with video production, you're literally at the mercy of just your computer processing the videos, but you will get those videos shortly. And yeah, thank you all for joining. And again, thank you, Will. Appreciate it.

Thanks, Jonathan. Thanks everyone for coming.

And I was joking in the beginning too, Will. I was appreciating his super cool apartment.

It can be yours with a Google search.

Google search videos, get a decent green screen, and you can also live in some amazing apartment and some dystopian universe where Morocco or something. Yeah. All right, thanks everybody. Take care. Thank you, Will.

Yeah, thanks, John. Bye, everyone.