Yes, Fundraising Is Painful
But that’s part of the game.
Going into fundraising always feels to me like going into sparring: you get hit. Blood and sweat and tears fly. It’s necessary for growth, but it’s unnecessarily painful.
By structure, fundraising involves a lot of Nos. To raise a round, you need to speak to 40–100 VCs and get only two Yeses. The rest will be Nos.
“Unfortunately, we were not able to reach the right level of conviction” says many VC emails.
When you fundraise, you get that a lot. Only hiring a C-team — which, in my case, means looking for 2–3 late co-founders — truly unpacked the meaning of that phrase.
Choosing a partner for the next several years — a company to invest and support or an executive to hire and empower — you have to be super-picky. This is why I was fortunate when my co-founder (and pre-seed investor) Georgy Babilashvili joined our team. He took care of parts of the business I didn’t have the bandwidth to — compliance, licensing, etc. — while I focused on fundraising.
And within a very short period of time — it only works if you’re building a funnel — a deal flow or a pipeline of candidates.
As a result, you punch away a lot of Nos.
Getting refused sucks. It’s painful and self-doubting. I hate it. We all hate it.
But I guess some sports — boxing or business — are meant to be hard.
