TBC: The Fundraising Equation [T(G) - T(TI)]

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All right. Welcome to another episode of the Back Channel. In today's episode, I want to talk through one of the challenges that I've had working within fundraising and one of my goals as I do deeper analysis of how to support founders around fundraising. And one of the challenges that I'm talking about is this feeling that fundraising. Advice and fundraising education has always been a more of an art than a science. People would ask you questions of like, well, should I go out at this time or that time? Am I ready now or will I be ready in a week from now? What are the main KPIs that I need in order to convince somebody who are the best investors that I should talk to?

What order should my slides go in? All of these questions always felt like, oh, it depends, and it feels like, I'm not sure, but I can give you some directional feedback, and that's never sat well with me. I have a math and science background. I studied computer science in undergrad and it's always bothered me that my chosen [00:01:00] profession and the subject matter that I've been focusing all my expertise around has always felt so squishy and non-scientific.

And so I challenge myself to really think about the levers that impact whether or not a fundraise or a fundraising conversation will be successful. I've always felt like sometimes when people say, well, it's hard to really. Fully define it or it's fully, it's, it's hard to say for sure in black and white, it's more of a gut feeling.

I've always felt like if there was a repetitive gut feeling that it actually could be scientifically described, it actually could be defined within a framework. ~It's just people weren't taken in as enough banana. ~It's just that people weren't taking enough time to do the hard work of thinking about this, and so.

I did spend some time thinking about an equation which would help define whether or not a founder would have success in a conversation with an investor. It's the first part of a larger set of [00:02:00] equations that I think will help more fully define.

Where any founder is in their ability to raise capital, and the reason I actually got to this point ~was interacting banana.~ Was going through a personal experience of meeting a founder and going through multiple conversations where I, I questioned myself. I was like, why did this even happen? Why did it get to this point?

Why was he able to get to a successful conversation after so many days? And so before I reveal my equation that helps define fundraising success, I wanna tell you this story. So a few months back. I was at a friend's party, happened to be a venture capitalist friend. It wasn't a work party, it was just a party that this venture capitalist was hosting at his house.

And while at this party, I was in line for food, I. Um, and I had piled the plate that I was using full of food because the spread was amazing. There was like incredible food from, from caterers, amazing desserts, [00:03:00] and being the glutton that I am, I had this high pile of food and a guy comes by and makes a joke.

Makes a joke about my, my food, how much I'm eating, how skinny I am, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And it kicks off this conversation, um, that lasted, I dunno, 45 minutes. I ended up hanging out with this guy. Turns out the guy, uh, had a very interesting background having worked in tech, being a senior leader.

Uh, he came from New York. I had spent time in New York. We had a bunch of overlaps, socially and interests, and I just had a really good time with this guy. In the middle. It came out that he was a startup founder, and when he described his company, I remember thinking like, ah, I don't think this is a good idea.

I don't want to talk about this anymore. So we kind of like went off of that and no harm, no foul. We just kept talking about other things. You know, at the end of the time, hanging out at the party, he was like, you know, I'm in town for a few days. Let's grab coffee. I had such a good time with this guy. I was like, this guy's super interesting.

Yeah, I'd love [00:04:00] to grab coffee with him. No thoughts around, um, business, no thoughts around investing. No thoughts about anything, just other than, yeah, you know, I'll probably be in his neighborhood. We should definitely grab coffee. So three days later meet up with this guy for coffee. And we kind of pick it up exactly where we had left off.

Talking about our interests, talking about collecting comic books as kids, what sports teams we like, you know, the people that we know in common in New York and LA having a great time. Again, about 15 minutes into the conversation, the topic of his startup comes up and he describes it slightly differently.

Same exact response in my head of like, man, this is not a good idea. I don't know why this talented guy is, is doing this. And so we move on, we move on to different topics, and at some point later in the conversation I end up bringing up this idea about a psychological effect of X, Y, and Z. Doesn't even matter what I talked about.

I said, you know, there is this psychological effect that people have [00:05:00] when X, Y, and Z happens. And the founder goes, you know, that is exactly why my company works so well. That is the dynamic that we're leveraging when we. Deploy this technology and A, X, Y, and Z, and all of a sudden it dawned on me, wow, this is actually a really interesting idea.

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And I tell you this long drawn out story because this founder took, let's see, a full hour at [00:07:00] a party and then three days later and another meeting, and another 45 minutes before I finally got to this point where I was like, this is. Actually an interesting company. And when I realized that that had happened, I ran to my notebook to sort of jot down what happened, what were the inputs here, why did this happen?

~Because he had the banana,~ because he had the luxury of taking all that time with me in order to describe his company in a way that finally resonated with me. And what I can pull out from that is that he wasn't great at describing his company, but. What he was great at was the amount of time he was able to extract from me that I was willing to give to him for a number of reasons.

And I realized that these are these two dynamics that we could build an equation around that help define founders, that would help define four founders. All right. What it is they need to work on, what they might have opportunities to do when talking to investors and why certain things are [00:08:00] happening for them but not others.

Okay, so here's the simple equation. It's TG minus TTI. TG is time given TTI is time to interest. And what we're talking about here is if TG is greater than TTI, as in TG minus TTI is greater than zero, then you have an opportunity to actually get someone to consider investing. But if it takes too long to get the investor interested, more so than they're willing to give you time, then you'll never have a shot at getting an investor interested.

So what goes in those two variables of that equation? Well. TG time given is impacted by a number of things. It's impacted by the credibility that you bring to the table. What have you done in the past that makes people go, oh, this guy could be interesting? How? How was this person introduced to you? Was there credibility shared based [00:09:00] on someone who ushered them in to start talking to you?

Are they charismatic? Are they likable? Do they just make you wanna spend time with them? Because you know what? Regardless of what they might be doing, this seems like a good person that I wanna spend time with. These are all a bunch of things that go into the variable time given, and then there's TTI time to interest.

This has a, this has everything to do with the core of your company and how you describe it. The story you tell. How good are you at telling your story in an impactful, punchy way that gets an investor to quickly go, this is interesting. I'd really like to learn more. That can be everything from How do you describe your blurb?

You know, how good is your deck? How, how structured is the way you tell your story? In most cases, when people are trying to work on things, they are trying to get their deck be better. I would say that they are trying to lower TTI. Okay. And everything that you're doing in terms of network, relationship, building, even building [00:10:00] up your company, such that people hear about it the right ways, that is all trying to increase TG or time given.

Okay, so think about those, that two variable equation of TG minus TTI, and tell yourself what do I need to work on? Do we need to increase TG or do we need to be decreasing TTI. Alright. I'm looking forward to figuring out how to incorporate this small fractal of an equation into a larger set of equations that more clearly define whether or not I can say funded or not funded, but for now, I think this gives you directional insight in a more mathematical way of what might be stopping you from getting an investor to really consider investing in your company. All right. Hopefully this story and this equation is very helpful and I'll see you next time on the back channel.

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