In case your CEO is not pitching to VCs, you may by no means elevate cash • TechCrunch

By no means depend on exterior assets to do your fundraising for you

Often, in my position as a advisor, I’m approached by corporations which have a plan in place for his or her fundraising that doesn’t contain the CEO or a member of the founding staff working level on the fundraising course of. From one perspective, I can perceive that: VC fundraising does, from the skin, look rather a lot like gross sales, and in case you have a very good salesperson, why not allow them to do what they do greatest?

The difficulty is that whereas salespeople are nice at gross sales, the VC fundraising course of may be very completely different than touchdown a buyer. You’re looking for an alignment between the corporate and a long-term associate who may have a major quantity of enter into the way forward for your startup. And if there are discrepancies between the gross sales course of and the deeper due diligence into the corporate (and there shall be, as a result of the gross sales staff has a distinct long-term perspective on what success seems to be like), that may make the entire deal collapse.

There are a number of actually good the reason why, on the earliest levels of fundraising, the founding staff ought to be working the fundraising course of. On this article, I break it down and clarify why it’s an terrible thought to let anybody however the CEO do the fundraising.