A few Fridays ago, I had the fortune of reconnecting with a founder, backed by some of the most recognizable names in the Valley and exited his business last year to a juggernaut in the data space. Now working on his second startup. And he brought something extremely curious to my attention. “Investors shouldn’t be too founder-friendly.”
I’ve talked to hundreds of founders and seen thousands of pitch decks in my short 4 years in venture capital. Yet, that Friday was the first time I’d ever heard that. And it was too bizarre for me not to double-click on. The fact that the sentence also came out of a founder’s mouth and not an investor’s bewildered me even more.
A number of founders ask me for fundraising advice. While they come in different magnitudes, one of the common themes is: “I’ve had many investor meetings, but I still can’t get a term sheet. What am I doing wrong? What do I need to do or to say to get a yes?”
To preface, I don’t have the one-size-fit-all solution. Neither do I think there is a one-size-fit-all solution. Each investor is looking for something different. And while theses often rhyme, the “A-ha!” moment for each investor is a culmination of their own professional and life experiences. This anecdote is, by no means, prescriptive, but another perspective that may help you when fundraising, if you’re not getting the results you want. This won’t help you cheat the system. If you still have a shoddy product or an unambitious team, you’re still probably not going to get any external capital.
One thing I learned when I was on the operating side of the table is: When you want money, ask for advice. When you want advice, ask for money. It’s, admittedly, a slightly roundabout way to get:
Investor interest,
And reference points for milestones to hit.
But it’s worked for me. Why? Because you’re fighting in a highly-competitive, heavily-saturated market of attention – investor attention. This method merely helps you increase the potential surface area of interaction and visibility, to give you time in front of an investor to prove yourself.
Investors are expected to jump into a long term marriage with founders, while, for the most part, only given a small cross-section in your founding journey to evaluate you. It’s as if you chose to marry someone for life you’ve only met 60-90 days ago. While angels and some people have the courage and the conviction to do that, most investors like to err on the side of caution. Contrary to popular belief, venture capitalists are extremely risk-averse. They look for risk-adjusted bets. And if you can prove to them – either through traction or an earned secret – that you’re not just a rounding error, you’ll make their lives a lot easier.
So, let me elaborate.
When you want money, ask for advice.
As you’re growing your business and you want to show you are, ask investors for advice. Tell them. “So I’ve been growing at X% MoM, and I’ve gotten to Y # of users. I’m thinking about pursuing this Z as my next priority. And this is how I plan to A/B test it. What do you think?”
And if you keep these investors in the loop the entire time and ask and follow-up on their advice, at some point, they’d think and ask, “Damn, this is an epic business. Will you just take my money?”
So, what are good numbers?
The Rule of 40 is a rough rule of thumb many investors use for consumer tech markets. Month-over-month growth rate plus profit should be greater than or equal to 40. So you can be growing 50% MoM, but burning money with -10% profit, aka costs are greater than your revenue. Or you can be growing 30% MoM, but gaining 10% profit every month. And if you’ve got 10s of 1000s of users, you’re on solid ground. Better yet, one of the biggest expenses is increasing server capacity costs.
For more reference points on ideal consumer startup numbers, check out this blog post I wrote last year.
For enterprise/B2B SaaS, somewhere along the lines of 10-15% MoM growth. With at least 1 key customer logo. And 5 publicly referenceable customers.
Of course, the Rule of 40 did not age well for certain industries in 2020.
When you want advice, ask for money.
When you ask for money most of the time, investors, partners, and potential customers will say no, especially if you’re super early on and don’t have a background or track record as an entrepreneur. So when they do say no, I like to ask them one of my favorite questions: “What do I need to bring you for you to unconditionally say yes?” Then, they’ll tell me what they want to see out of our product or our business. These, especially if they’re reinforced independently across multiple different individuals in your ecosystem, should be your North Star metrics. And when you do put their advice to action, be sure to follow up with the results to their implemented advice.
You either do what they recommended. And show them what happened. And what’s next.
Or you don’t do what they recommended. But show that you heavily considered their recommendation. What you did instead. Why you chose to do what you did instead. And what’s next.
To take it one step further, once I ask the above question to have a reference point for growth trajectory, I ask: “Who is the smartest person(s) known to achieve X (or in Y)?” with X being the answer you got via the previous question. And Y being the industry you’re tackling.
Then, go to that person or those people and say, “Hey Jennifer, [investor name] said if there’s one person I had to talk to about X, I have to talk to you.” Feel free to use my cold email “template” as reference, if you’re unsure of what else to say.
If you use this tactic again and again, eventually you’ll build a family of unofficial (maybe even official) mentors and advisors, even if you never explicitly call them that. Not necessarily asking for money all the time. But asking for money might help you ignite the spark for this positive feedback loop.
In closing
When I was on the operating side, a brilliant founder with 2 multi-million dollar exits once told me: “Always be selling. Always be fundraising. And always be hiring.”
I didn’t really get it then. In fact, I didn’t get it the entire time I was on the other side of the table. What do you mean “Always be fundraising”? Should I just be asking for money all the time? What about the business?
It wasn’t until I made my way into VC at SkyDeck that I realized the depth of his words. Keep people you eventually want to fundraise from and hire in the loop about what you’re building. Keep them excited. Build a relationship beyond something transactional. Build a friendship.
Jeff Bezos put it best when he said:
“If everything you do needs to work on a three-year time horizon, then you’re competing against a lot of people. But if you’re willing to invest on a seven-year time horizon, you’re now competing against a fraction of those people, because very few companies are willing to do that.
“At Amazon we like things to work in five to seven years. We’re willing to plant seeds, let them grow and we’re very stubborn. We say we’re stubborn on vision and flexible on details.”
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In the venture world, startups have another alias. 10-year overnight successes.
For the majority of the world, we hear about startups through a Thursday morning TechCrunch article or by way of the Friday Happy Hour gossip stream. Well, okay, I’m not being time sensitive. We’re not going out for Friday night happy hours these days. But we might spy something in our social feeds after a startup hits 5 million users or they just raised $50 million from a top-tier venture firm.
And these TC or Forbes or NY Times articles paint these founding CEOs to almost be perfect individuals. Good news. They’re not. They’re human – just like you and me. Over the years, the more I’ve gotten to know these leaders, the more I realized how similar we are. How similar they were when they were where I am today. And even now, how they still feel the unease in the uncertainty in the world. My study last week on how people are living through the pandemic – what inspires them or what frustrates them – further illustrated our similarities. An animator who’s fought against doubt. An executive who lost his grandpa, broke up, and felt lost in the corporate politics. A founder who was forced to make the tough decision of leaving his team. And much more.
What’s that one analogy people use again – to show that everyone is living a life we know nothing about?
A duck, above the surface, perfectly calm and composed. Underwater, furiously paddling to stay afloat.
The double-edged sword
The good news is that most VCs know that founders aren’t perfect human beings. The bad news is the irony. On one hand, they know that founders aren’t perfect and should be willing to be vulnerable. On the other hand, too much vulnerability means that VC’s say, “I’m out.”
In many cases, investors may seem hypocritical. And arguably, there’s a handful of them who don’t even know what they’re looking for themselves. Yet, in most scenarios, the bargaining chip is on the investors’ end. Not with the founders. It’s frustrating. I know. I’ve talked to founders and will continue to talk with founders who feel that way. So, what is that fine line between the showing “perfection” and embracing imperfection?
Making the blade that works for you
When founders ask, this is what I tell them.
Be upfront with your investors if you’re incompetent on an aspect or aspects of the business.
Show them you’re competent… in finding a way to be competent.
Be upfront with your investors if you’re incompetent on an aspect or aspects of the business.
Address the elephant in the room. If you don’t bring it up, they’re bound to ask. Or worse yet, if they don’t ask, it’s going to be gnawing at them in their minds. And may end up being the main contributing factor to a “No”.
Show them you’re competent… in finding a way to be competent.
Early-stage VCs usually take between 2-4 months before they go from “Hi, my name is Buttercup” to “Take my money”. And here are the steps:
Coffee chat, aka “Hi, my name is Buttercup” (If you’re wondering why “Buttercup”, there’s a story behind there, but another day. Or if anyone’s dying to know, DM me or ask me in the comments below.)
2nd meeting with same individual partner (maybe a +1)
Full partnership meeting
Diligence
Term sheet, aka “Take my money”
Lesson 1: Don’t skip steps (for the most part). What do I mean? When you’re having a coffee chat, your goal should not be to get a term sheet there. Your goal is should be to get to meeting 2. Think of it like a sales funnel.
Lesson 2: Learn and grow during the time you get to know an investor. Doers > thinkers. Hustle. Be scrappy, resourceful. At each step, the VC(s) are evaluating if you have the acumen, competency, and what Sequoia Capital calls it – a bias towards action.
Let’s analogize with the equation of a line: y = mx +b. We measure a founder’s competency not just at “b”, but a greater emphasis on “m”. And over the course of the time we get to know each other, if a founder can prove that to us. For me, after the first meeting, I usually give a couple pieces of advice. “Oh, you should really talk with Sarah. She’s really good at sales.” Or. “Have you thought about this UX improvement in the user journey?”
What I’m looking for, by the time we have our second meeting, is what have they done in the mean time. And for a great founder, there are 2 possibilities:
They acted on the advice, and they come back with the results.
They heavily considered the piece of advice. Did something else. Explained to me why they did something else. And also share the results of that decision.
In both scenarios, they have new results by the time we meet. They don’t have to be “right”, as if I’m even a person who can evaluate what’s right versus wrong. But they do have to learn fast. Hustlers make mistakes. And through the mistakes, they learn. Fast. It’s a preamble to what working with a VC looks like.
If you’re curious, Chris Moody at Foundry Group has a brilliant 3-part series of why you shouldn’t take money from a VC. In his first reason to not, if you want to build a lifestyle business. Otherwise, you’ve got to learn fast and be scrappy.
Here’s an example of scrappiness
When I was an operator, we were strapped for cash and looking for cash, so we didn’t have much of a budget for marketing and advertising. Admittedly, we also didn’t really know how to market the business. Minus a few theoretical classes, we knew nothing.
We used free student printing (for us up to 10,000 pages) to print out flyers we made by ourselves. Given that our audience included both SMBs and millennial/Gen Z’s looking for jobs, as much as we wanted to flyer to college students at the plaza or in front of local businesses, we knew it wouldn’t be smart. ’Cause everyone else was doing so.
So then it came down to the question: where do people have plenty of attention to spend but have not yet been saturated with information. For us, it was the bathroom. Specifically, in the stalls. When you’re locked inside the bathroom, doing your business, you either look at the door in front of you and/or at your cellphone. And the doors were often blank canvases. So we decided to stick our flyers on the backsides of these stall doors – both in the dorms and in public restrooms, which inevitably got our websites 10s of 1000s of views early on.
That said, the janitorial staff tore down our flyers every night at 11pm. So we had to be back on the streets and sticking in flyers in public and dorm bathrooms every morning at 5am. And it so happens, I once talked to one of the university’s janitorial staff members and he actually said thanks. Since he found his new job via a flyer he kept having to rip off.
As the economist Herbert A. Simon says, “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” As an entrepreneur, you’re looking for the margins, where there is a poverty of information and a wealth of attention.
In closing
I can only speak from my perspective and what I seek in founders. But having talked and learned from a number of investors who have a track record for returning >5x MOIC (multiple on invested capital), I know I’m not alone.
It’s okay to be vulnerable of the potholes ahead – to not know how to do certain things. We’re human. It’s okay. But show that you have at least have a hypothesis on how to learn those things.
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“Hey, y’all wanna hear a joke?” one of my teammates in my lane asks during warm-up. If there was the equivalent of a class clown in the pool, that’d be him.
“Why not?” the rest of us answer, hoping to spice up the impending 2-hour practice.
“So, there’s this guy who’s about to ask this girl out to the school dance. But to do so, he’s gotta ask her out on Valentine’s Day. So the day before, he goes to buy a Valentine’s gram during lunch. Turns out – there’s a long, long line.”
Our coach blows the whistle, and we sprint off. When we touch again, he goes on, “And there’s a separate line to buy the roses. So, he heads over, and turns out – there’s a long, long line.”
Again, the whistle goes off, and upon return, “So, he finishes buying his gram and roses. On the fateful day, she gets it all and says yes. Super excited, the guy prepares for the school dance. First he goes to buy his tux. When he arrives at the tailor-“. He pauses, beckoning us to finish his sentence.
“There’s a long, long line,” we chime in. In the distance we hear, “Lane 1. Stop talking!” Whistle blows, and we go…
And return. “He gets his suit tailored. Now he goes to Office Depot to buy his cue cards and markers to ask her out. But when he gets to the cash register…”
“There’s a long, long line.” And a kickboard comes flying in and smacks two of us in the face. “Quiet!” a distant shout.
“Day of the ask, he assembles all his friends, lines them up for a dramatic prom ask. And what do you know?”
“There’s a long, long line.” Another one of us feels the sting of hard foam across our face.
“The girl says yes. And now, finally the day of the prom arrives, and he picks her up. Together, they take pictures with everyone else, in a-“
“Long, long line.”
“Then they all drive to the destination of prom. But turns out they’re not the first ones there. Ahead-“
“There’s a long, long line.” At this point we were too vested in the joke. Each of us with bruises across our face – just short of our coach dragging us out of the water to discipline us.
“So the boy and girl finally make it into the dance hall, and while they’re waiting for the dance floor to open up, the boy asks us the girl, ‘Can I get you something to drink?’ And she says, ‘Sure.’ So, he goes over to where the fruit punch is. And, turns out…”
“There’s a long, long-“
“Nope, there’s no punch line.”
The bigger picture
I hear so many founders tell me they’re pursuing this billion dollar market. Or even a trillion dollar one with a capital T. And how they plan to capture 10% of this huge market in 5 years. I mean, c’mon, how awesome would 10% of this billion dollar market sound for our returns?
For an investment of anywhere between $1 and $10 million, let’s say $1 million (’cause this is usually something people raising a pre-seed/seed say), 10% of $100B market is $10B. And for the ease of calculation, let’s say by the time the founders exit, we still have 10%, 10% of $10B is $1B. For only $1M invested, $1B is a 1000x return. Wowza!
The true let-down happens when they finally share what their solution is. And it turns out to only address a small fraction of their total addressable market (TAM). Here’s a hypothetical example. A team is tackling a TAM for events of $1.1 trillion (2018 number). They talk about how awesome a CAGR of over 10% is. And how virtual events are the new trend and might accelerate that number even more. I’m thinking, “Hell ya, this’ll be epic.”
Then their product – the punchline… an app that streamlines coffee service at events in 2020. While this may or may not be an exaggeration, many startups find their pitches in a similar format. On one end, as a founder, you want to tackle the biggest market you can – to attract investors hoping to make large returns. On the other end, you want to be realistic with your expectations, as well as your investors’. Often times, it’s a fine line. I get it, which is why I suggest approaching market-sizing from the angle of pragmatic optimism.
The GTM strategy
After you share such a lofty goal, the inevitable question comes along: “What is your go-to-market (GTM) strategy?” The usual answer is some permutation of the below:
Google/Facebook/other ads,
Get it on the App Store (and/or Play Store),
(Pay for) SEO,
Hire a C_O (fill in the blank)
Hire a growth hacker,
Or more engineers, or for that matter, anyone,
We were hoping you (the investor) could help us with that, once you fund us. 🙁
But who are we kidding? No one. While none of the above answers are unilaterally incorrect, all the above show characteristics of someone who isn’t a hustler, who isn’t scrappy, and who probably isn’t one to scale a business. A pitch deck is designed to be short. I get it. There’s a lot you can’t fit on to it. But I’m not alone when I say this, we want to see the why and the how behind the what. A bit of Simon Sinek‘s two cents – start with why.
Why are you hiring more people? To do what?
Why did you choose Google over Facebook ads? Over Reddit, Instagram, Tiktok, you-name-it ads? Over traditional billboards?
What is the end goal?
What is the core metric you’re optimizing for? In the near term? In the long term? Before your next fundraise?
Just to be clear, just because a founder approaches market analysis from a top-down approach doesn’t instantly disqualify him/her. But it is a red flag. That’s why I’m a huge proponent of bottoms-up market-sizing.
Bottoms-up… and Cheers!
How many customers do you plan to have by the end of this year? By the end of next year? The year after?
How much do you plan to sell your product/service for? How will customer acquisition cost (CAC) get cheaper over the next few years? What will you need to do for CAC to get cheaper?
Eventually, you build out this road map of what the next few quarters and years will look like. You, effectively, plot out, here are the next few milestones we need to hit as a team. And those milestones are quantifiable and actionable – a clear sense of direction for your team and for your investors. Of course, as any road map goes, all subject to change depending on the situation.
In closing
Just like a great joke, you, the founder, need to be capable of delivering the punchline in your pitch deck. The build-up is the problem in the market and the world-class team you’ve assembled, as well as why it means so much to you. The punchline is the solution you’re building. Always, make sure your punchline delivers.
It’s relevant to the rest of the (comedic) routine.
When it hits , it’s at the minimum, satisfying, as a climax. At the maximum, like a world-class punch, it knocks the wind out of your audience.
In the words of Robert McKee, a Fullbright Scholar who’s coached over 60 Academy Award winners, 170 Emmy recipients, among numerous others,
“At story climax, you must deliver a scene beyond which the audience can imagine no other.”
Your punchline, your product, by the time you deliver your pitch’s climax, must deliver a utopia beyond which your investors can imagine no other.
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I hear so many founders in their pitch decks say: As soon as they raise funding, [blank] will happen. [blank] could be: hiring that CTO or lead developer or an operations lead, getting to X0,000 users, or going “all in” on growth (often heard as Facebook and/or Google ads). That line by itself really doesn’t mean much. So I always follow up, with: “How do you plan to achieve [blank] milestone after you extend your runway/receive venture backing?”
Then this is when I start thinking, “Oh no!”, especially as soon as I hear, after I partner with X investor, they will help me do Y, or worse, they will do Y for me.
And I’m not alone. So, what signals does that response give investors?
Alright, Investor A, I’m planning for you to do the legwork for growing my business.
I don’t know what I’m doing, but please invest in my naivety.
I haven’t thought about that problem/milestone at all, and I’ll worry about it when I get there. So, take a big risk in me.
Why I love athletes, chefs and veterans
There is no white knight in shining armor when you’re raising a round.
This is the reason I love athletes. And for that matter, veterans and chefs, too. Each of them chose a career where they are forced to deal with adversity. Personally and collectively. To a level, most of us might call inhuman. While I’m sure I’ve missed many other industries that also sponsor such arduous growth, and yes, I know I’m generalizing here, these 3 industries seem to have a higher batting average of producing individuals who can find the internal grit to overcome almost any obstacle.
“They’ve trained themselves to be better at doing things that are hard.”
While he wasn’t necessarily talking about professional athletes, chefs, or veterans, the same is true. The people who are better than you at doing something don’t have it any easier than you do. Rather, they’ve developed a system, or mental model, that helps them conquer extremely difficult obstacles. And because it’s become muscle memory for them, it seems easier for them to accomplish these goals. At the same time, we should never discount their blood, sweat, and tears, or what some of my colleagues call scar tissue, just because we cannot see them. It’s why we in venture call startups “10-year overnight successes“.
To founders
Bringing it back full circle, a great founder (as opposed to a good or okay founder) never completely relies on an external source for the growth of their company. By the same token, a great founder also never blames the failure of their startup because of an external source. A great founder – regardless of the business’s success or failure – learns quickly to not only repeat the same mistake again, but also develop insights and skills to push their business forward. While you as the founder isn’t required to be the best in the world of a particular skill, you will need to practice and accel at it until you can find the best in the world. But to hire the best in the world, you also have to be reasonably literate in the field to differentiate the best from the second best.
The solution
Here’s what investors are looking for instead:
We’ve thought about the problem. We’ve A/B tested with these 3 strategies (and why we chose each strategy). Numbers-wise, Strategy B proves to: (a) have the most traction, and (b) is most closely aligned with our core metric – revenue.
Here are the 2-3 core milestones we plan to hit once we get this injection of capital. And we will do what it takes to get there. In order to get there, we’ve thought about hiring an expert in operational efficiency and purchasing these 5 tools to help us hit these milestones. For the former, here’s who we’ve talked to, why we think they’re a perfect fit, and what each of their responses are so far. For the latter, each tool in this short list can help us save X amount of time and Y amount of burn. Do you think we’re approaching these goals in an optimal way?
Note: The signal you’re giving here is that you and your team are results-/goals-oriented, while the process of getting to those goals are fluid and stress-tested.
In both cases, you’re showing your potential investors that you’ve done your homework already (versus a Hail Mary). But at the end of the day, you are open and willing to entertain their suggestions, which, ideally, come with years of experience in operating and/or advising other founders who have gone through a similar journey.
So, stay curious out there! Always question the seemingly unquestionable!
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I recently read Mark Suster‘s 2018 blog post about startups on “Remind me why I love you again?”. As an extremely active VC, he specifically detailed why, unfortunately, by meeting 2, 3, and so on with a founder, he may forget the context of reconnecting and why the founder/startup is so amazing. And, simply, he calls it “love decay”.
Mark Suster’s graph on ‘Love Decay’
The longer it has been since a VC/founder’s last meeting, the harder it is to recall the context of the current meeting. Though I may not be as over-saturated with deal flow as Mark is, it is an unfortunate circumstance I come across in meeting 5-10 founders and replying to 100+ emails a week.
Friday last week, I jumped on a phone call with a founder who reached out to me after checking out my blog. In my deep fascination on how she found and learns from her mentors, she shed some light as to why she feels safe to ask stupid questions. The TL;DR of her answer – implicit trust, blended with mutual respect and admiration. That her mentors know that when she does ask a question, it’s out of curiosity and not willing ignorance – or naivety.
But on a wider scope, our conversation got me thinking and reflecting. How can we build psychological safety around questions that may seem dumb at first glace? And sometimes, even unwittingly, may seem foolish to the person answering. The characteristics of which, include:
A question whose answer is easily Google-able;
A question that the person answering may have heard too many times (and subsequently, may feel fatigue from answering again);
And, a question whose answer may seem like common sense. But common sense, arguably, is subjective. Take, for example, selling losses and holding gains in the stock market may be common sense to practiced public market investors, but may feel counter-intuitive to the average amateur trader.
We’re Human
But, if you’re like me, every so often, I ask a ‘dumb’ question. Or I feel the urge to ask it ’cause either I think the person I’m asking would provide a perspective I can’t find elsewhere or, simply, purely by accident. The latter of which happens, though I try not to, when I’m droning through a conversation. When my mind regresses to “How are you doing?” or the like.
To fix the latter, the simple solution is to be more cognizant and aware during conversations. For the former, I play with contextualization and exaggeration. Now, I should note that this isn’t a foolproof strategy and neither is it guaranteed to not make you look like a fool. You may still seem like one. But hopefully, if you’re still dying to know (and for some reason, you haven’t done your homework), you’re more likely to get an answer.
As a footnote, I wasn’t able to predict the COVID crisis, so my thoughts in this last piece are as evergreen as an oak tree is. Specifically, my lack of foresight on increasing startup valuations and the return of consumer social.
Despite that, the final 2 questions of the piece are still very much pertinent now.
For the most part, founders are pretty cognizant of this X-factor. B-schools train their MBAs to seek their “unfair advantange”. And a vast majority of pitch decks I’ve seen include that stereotypical competitor checklist/features chart. Where the pitching startup has collected all the checkmarks and their competitors have some lackluster permutation of the remaining features.
There’s nothing wrong with that slide in theory. Albeit for the most part, I gloss over that one, just due to its redundancy and the biases I usually find on it. But I’ve seen many a deck where, for the sake of filling up that checklist, founders fill the column with ‘unique’ features that don’t correlate to user experience or revenue. For example, features that only 5% of their users have ever used, with an incredibly low frequency of usage. Or on the more extreme end, their company mascot.
To track what features or product offerings are truly valuable to your business, I recommend using this matrix.
“The optimal strategy is to assume that everybody that is competing with you has found some unique insight as to why the market is addressable in their unique approach. And to assume that your competitors are all really smart – that they all know what they’re doing… Why did they pick it this way? And really picking it apart and trying to understand that product strategy is really important.”
So, I have something I need to confess. Another ‘secret’ of mine. There’s a follow-up question. After my initial ‘unique insight’ one, if I suspect the founder(s) have fallen in their own bubble. Not saying that they definitively have if I ask it, but to help me clear my own doubts.
“What are your competitors doing right?”
Or differently phrased, if you were put yourself in their shoes, what is something you now understand, that you, as a founder of [insert their own startup], did not understand?
In asking the combination of these two questions, I usually am able to get a better sense of a founder’s self-awareness, domain expertise, and open-mindedness.
Last week I spent some time with my friend, who joined me in my recent social experiment, brainstorming and iterating on feedback. Specifically, how I could host better transitions between presentations. She left me with one final resonating note. “Maybe you would’ve liked a creative writing class.”
I’ve never taken any creative writing courses. I thought those courses were designed for aspiring writers. And given my career track, I never gave it a second thought. Well, until now. I recently finished a brilliant fictional masterpiece, Mistborn: The Final Empire written by #1 New York Times bestselling author, Brandon Sanderson. So, that’s where I began my creative journey.
In my homework, I came across his YouTube channel. One of his lectures for his 2020 BYU writing students particularly stood out. In it, he shares his very own Sanderson’s Laws.
The three laws that govern his scope of worldbuilding are as follows:
Your ability to solve problems with magic in a satisfying way is directly proportional to how well the reader understands said magic.
Flaws/limitations are more interesting than powers.
Before adding something new to your magic (setting), see if you can instead expand what you have.
Outside of his own books, Sanderson goes in much more depth, citing examples from Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and more. So, if you have the time, I highly recommend taking one and one-fifth of an hour to hear his free class. Or if you’re more of a reader, he shares his thesis on his First Law, Second Law, and Third Law on his website.
But for the purpose of this post, the short form of the 3 laws suffices.
The First Law
Your ability to solve problems with magic in a satisfying way is directly proportional to how well the reader understands said magic.
The same is true in the world of entrepreneurship. Your ability to successfully fundraise is directly proportional to how well the investor understands your venture. Or more aptly put, how well you can explain the problem you are trying to solve. This is especially true for the 2 ends of the spectrum: deep tech/frontier tech startups and low-tech, or robust anti-fragile products/business models. Often times, the defensibility of your product comes down to how well people can understand what pain points you’re trying to solve. You may have the best product on the market, but if no one understands why it exists, it’s effectively non-existent.
Though not every investor will agree with me on this, I believe that too many founders jump straight into their product/solution at the beginning of their pitch deck. While it is important for a founder to concisely explain their product, I’m way more fascinated with the problem in the market and ‘why now?’.
You’re telling a story in your pitch. And before you jump into the plot (the product itself), I’d love to learn more about the setting and the characters involved (the underlying assumptions and trends, as well as the team behind the product). As my own NTY investment thesis goes (why Now, why This, why You, although not in that particular order), I’m particularly fascinated about the ‘why now’ and ‘why you’ before the ‘why this’. And if I can’t understand that, then it’s a NTY – or in millennial texting terms, no thank you.
My favorite proxy is if you can explain your product well to either a 7-year old, or someone who knows close to nothing about your industry. Brownie points if they’re excited about it too after your pitch. How contagious is your obsession?
The Second Law
Flaws/limitations are more interesting than powers.
Investors invest in superheroes. The underdogs. The gems still in the rough. And especially now, at the advent of another recession and the COVID crisis, the question is:
How much can you do with what little you have?
And, can you make the aggressive decisions to do so?
I realize that this is no easy ask of entrepreneurs. But when you’re strapped for cash, talent, solid pipelines, are you a hustler or are you not? Can you sell your business regardless? To investors? New team members? Clients/paying users?
On the flip side, sometimes you know what you need to do, but just don’t have the conviction to do so, especially for aggressive decisions. You may not want to lay off your passionate team members. Or, let go of that really great deal of a lease you got last year. You may not want to cut the budget in half. But you need to. If you need to extend what little you have to another 12-18 months, you’ve got to read why you should cut now and not later. Whether we like it or not, we’re heading into some rough patches. So brace yourselves.
But as an investor once said to me:
“Companies are built in the downturns; returns are realized in the upturns.”
The Third Law
Before adding something new to your magic (setting), see if you can instead expand what you have.
And finally consider:
Can you reach profitability with what you have without taking additional injections of capital?
Can you extend your runway by cutting your budget now?
But if you need capital to continue, do you need venture capital funding? I’m of the belief, that 90% of businesses out there aren’t fit for the aggressive venture capital model.
How scrappy are you? How creatively can you find solutions to your most pressing problems? And maybe in that pressure, you may find something that the market has never seen before.
In closing
Like a captivating fantastical story, your startup, your team, your investors, and especially you yourself, need that compelling narrative. The hardest moments in building a business is when there’s no hope in sight – when you’re on the third leg of the race. In times of trial, you need to convince yourself, before you can convince others. To all founders out there, godspeed!
And as Sanderson’s Zeroth Law goes:
Always err on the side of what’s awesome.
If you’re interested in the world of creative writing or drawing parallels where I could not, check out Brandon Sanderson’s completely (and surprisingly) free series of lectures on his YouTube channel.
Three moons ago, I jumped on a call with a founder who was in the throes of fundraising and had half of his round “committed”. And yes, he used air quotes. So, as any natural inquisitive, I got curious as to what he meant by “committed”. Turns out, he could only get those term sheets if he either found a lead or could raise the other half successfully first. Unfortunately, he’s not the only one out there. These kinds of conversations with investors have been the case, even before COVID. But it’s become more prevalent as many investors are more cautious with their cash. And frankly, a way of de-risking yourself is to not take the risk until someone else does.
I will say there are many funds out there where as part of the fund’s thesis, they just don’t lead rounds. But your first partner… you want them to have conviction.
Just like, no diet is going to stop me from having my mint chocolate chip with Girl Scout Thin Mints, served on a sugar cone. I’m salivating just thinking about it, as the heat wave is about to hit the Bay. An investor who has conviction will not let smaller discrepancies, including, but not limited to:
Crowded cap table,
No CTO,
College/high school dropout,
Lower than expected MRR or ARR,
No ex-[insert big tech company] team members,
Or, no senior/experienced team members,
… stop them from opening their checkbook. And just like I’ll find ways to hedge my diet outlier, through exercise or eating more veggies, an investor will find ways to hedge their bets, through their network (hiring, advisors, co-investors, downstream investors), resources, and experience.
So, what is that telltale sign of a lack of conviction?
I will preface by first saying, that the more you put yourself in front of investors, the more you’ll be able to develop an intuition of who’s likely to be onboard and who’s likely not to. For example, taking longer than 24 hours to respond to your thank you/next steps email after that pitch meeting. Or, on the other end, calling someone “you have to meet” mid-meeting and putting you on the line.
It seems obvious in retrospect, but once upon a time, when I was fundraising, I just didn’t let myself believe it was true. That investors just won’t have conviction when they ask:
Who else is interested?
A close cousin includes “Who else have you talked to?” (And what did they say?). If their decision is contingent – either consciously or subconsciously – with benchmarking their decision on who else is going to participate (or lead), you’re not talking to a lead (investor). And that initial hesitation, if allowed manifest further, won’t do you much good in the longer run, especially when things get bumpy for the company. Robert De Niro once said, in the 1998 Ronin film,
“Whenever there is any doubt, there is no doubt.”
You want investors who have conviction in your business – in you. Who’ll believe in you through thick and thin. After all, it’s a long-term marriage. Admittedly, it takes time and diligence to understand what kind of investor they are.
In closing
Like all matters, there are always other confounding and hidden variables. And though no “sign” is your silver bullet for understanding an investor’s conviction. Hopefully, this is another tool you can use from your multi-faceted toolkit.
From spending time with some of the smartest folks on both sides of the table and from personal observations, even if it’s anecdotal, the sample size should be significant enough to put weight behind the hypothesis. And, if I ever find myself wanting to ask that question, I aim to be candid, and tell founders that I’m not interested.
