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for exceptional founders… fundraising shouldn’t suck introducing the san francisco sprint 💸 accelerate your traction. perfect your pitch. demo in-front of the best investors. close your round fast. gearing up for a seed round but don’t want to spend months fundraising? don’t want to give investors 20% of your...

59,926 views • 4 months ago •via X (Twitter)

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Peter Thiel: "The value is never a premium on the past. It's always a discount to the future." Most founders walk into a fundraising negotiation anchored to the wrong number. They point to the last round, list everything built since then, and argue for a premium on that progress. Investors push back. The whole conversation becomes a fight over the past. Thiel thinks this framing is conceptually completely wrong. Investors aren't buying your history. They're buying your trajectory. And the moment you understand that, your entire approach to pitching valuation changes. "The way I always think one should try to pitch a company or the value of a company is by explaining why it will be worth a lot more in the future. The investors are getting to invest at a point that's a lot cheaper than it will be for the share price a year, two, three years from now." He learned this firsthand at PayPal. In late 1999, PayPal closed a round at $45 million. Three months later, they raised again at a $500 million valuation. A 5x jump in a single quarter. The obvious question: how do you convince anyone to accept that? "The way we presented the round was: this is going to be the last round before the IPO." That single reframe changed everything. Investors stopped looking backward and started looking forward. "It doesn't matter what happened three months ago. You're getting in at a discount to the IPO." The founder who can paint a compelling picture of where the company is going will always negotiate from a stronger position than one defending where it's been.

Big Brain Business

17,848 views • 3 months ago

Michael Seibel on how to create a great startup pitch Former Y Combinator CEO Michael Seibel breaks down the two types of pitches every startup founder needs: a 30-second elevator pitch and a two-minute pitch for investors. “A lot of people practice 10-minute, 30-minute, hour-long, pitches. I think that’s all garbage. I think you can get all of your points across in two minutes. And one thing I like to tell founders is that the more you talk, the more you have an opportunity to say something that people don’t like.” 30-Second Elevator Pitch: You should be able to explain to anyone you come across what your company does in 30 seconds. This should be three sentences: • What does your company do? Assume the person you’re talking to knows nothing. This should be a 1-sentence explanation that your mom or dad can understand (e.g. “We’re Airbnb and we allow you to rent out the extra room in your house” NOT “We’re Airbnb and we’re a marketplace for space”). • How big is the market? Do a couple hours of research so that you can give investors a rough approximation of the size of the market you’re in (e.g. Airbnb might give the size of online hotel booking market) • How much traction do you have? Ideally you can say something like: “We launched in January and we’re growing 30% month over month. We have SX sales and Y users.” If you’re pre-launch, you need to convince investors that you’re moving quickly (e.g. “the team came together in January. By March we launched our beta. By April we launched our product.”). Two-Minute Pitch: This pitch is for people you’re actually trying to convince of something (e.g. investors, potential employees, etc.). You basically want to simply explain what you do and then ask for money. There are 5 key components: • Clear 30 second pitch (everything mentioned above) • Unique insight—what do the biggest players in your market not understand? This should be 2 sentences. • How do you make money? • Team. If your team has done something that has made investors money, you should mention that (e.g. “we’re the founders of PayPal”). If you haven’t, don’t go on about the awards you’ve won or PhDs you hold. What investors want to hear is: how many founders? (hopefully 2-4) how many of the founders are technical? (hopefully 50% or more engineers) How long have you known each other? (ideally you’ve known each other either personally or professionally for at least 6 months) Are you all full-time? • The Big Ask ($$$). You have to know what you’re talking about when you ask for money. Are you raising on a convertible note or a SAFE? What’s the cap of the SAFE? How much money are you raising? What’s the minimum check size? If you don’t know these things, investors won’t think you’re serious or that you haven’t done your homework.

Startup Archive

21,631 views • 1 year ago