Live panel discussion (SaaStr Europa 2022) offering practical investor-engagement and fundraising advice. Key recommendations: include your dream investor early in the first wave of outreach (but not necessarily first), give prospective investors a rough ARR level (e.g., ~1M vs ~4M) rather than exhaustive detail, and expect typical dilution ranges ~20% for Series A and ~10–20% for Series B depending on competitiveness and round size. Also covers currency conventions (USD vs EUR) as conversational rather than prescriptive.
Questions this video answers
Give a rough indication (e.g., 'we're at ~1M ARR' vs 'we're at ~4M ARR') so investors can decide whether to spend time.
Often around 20% (speaker gives a range: roughly 15–25% depending on competitiveness and round size).
Typically slightly less than Series A; speaker suggests roughly 10–20% depending on size of the raise and competitiveness.
Chapters
First, I think your dream investor shouldn't be your first chat, but it should be among the first batch of chats you have among the first wave. And as I try to have that in the first week, let's say maybe on the first two, three days of your week, it's not your number one pick, but on day four or something like that. And so keep it short in terms of amount of time, but keep them in the beginning as well. So I advise to keep them in the first wave. And your first question was optimizing for high conversion fit later on in your process. Right. Okay, there we go over there. You said that you shouldn't necessarily divulge too many numbers before your fundraise. But how do you think about it when you, for example, do monthly updates like how transparent should you be with an investor that's not your current investor? I mean with your existing investors you should share everything, of course, with the new ones, I think it's good to have to let them know which rough level you are. So I think it's good to know if you're at 1 million ARR or at 4 million ARR because this defines of if it actually makes sense to spend time with this investor or for him to spend make spend time with you or not. But I think it should be a rough indication. Hi, sorry, late night. Can you give an idea in the series A, Series B, what's the average dilution we should be expecting to kick in? And I've seen wildly different. How much you need to raise 2 million at series A? Or is it 10 million? And I saw your things. Do we all have to talk in dollars? So if you're doing a cross Atlantic raise, do you convert everything to dollars for your British or European partners? Okay, on the dollar question, last year it was worth it to convert to dollars because it sounded much bigger. But with the current exchange rate it doesn't make a big difference. So you can keep it in Euro then? For, for the typical dilution, I think it's series A stage, it's often somewhere around 20%. And it, it depends on your competitiveness of your process. If it's a little bit less competitive, it's 20 to 20 or 20 to 25%. And also about the amount, if you want to raise a large round, the dilution might be above it like 20 to 25. If your round is not huge, it might be also somewhere between less than 20%, like 15 to 20%. But I think in the current market right now around 20% slightly above or slightly below is something which makes sense for series B. It also depends on the total amount you want to raise and if it's sort of like in the standard range or not, but I think its dilution is typically slightly less. I would put it anywhere in the range 10 to 20%, depending on how much you want to raise and how the competitive situation of it actually is. Yeah, thank you so much.
