How to prevent fundraising from burning you out
I’ve raised three rounds of funding for my startup now. Here’s how I’ve prevented myself from completely burning out each time.
This is one of the first things we learnt when we got into Y Combinator: don’t ‘average’ advice. We were told it’s ‘bad decision hygiene’ (and a waste of time) to ask or even process (sometimes unsolicited) advice from a lot of sources. It’s best to pick the one or two people who have the widest range of knowledge and experience to answer the question, and to stick to them.
That person could be an investor who’s already on the cap table, so that your interests are aligned, who knows (i) your industry very well, and (ii) the deal size and stage you’re raising for. They could also be a founder who recently raised a similar round in a similar industry and has collected a lot of data points about what makes VCs tick and what gets done in the current market.
Fundraising rarely happens without a fair share of ‘rejections’. ‘You only need one ‘yes’, is a very common mantra. I like to visualise fundraising as a sales funnel that has a drop rate at each step. With that in mind, each rejection is less nerve wracking.
