

Fundraising Will Take You 3 Months - eladgil
http://blog.eladgil.com/2012/09/fundraising-will-take-you-3-months.html

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gregcohn
There's an important difference between a fundraise actually taking 6 months,
and a fundraise that you started several months before you were ready (ie,
before your company has a "market-clearing" offer).

If, in parallel to fundraising, you are spending months demonstrating
traction, preparing decks, modelling out potential outcomes, launching a
product, or whatever, the problem isn't "fundraising takes longer than it
looks on tv", but rather, "fundraising requires clearing higher standards that
it seems to on tv".

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eladgil
Good point. I see a lot of entrepreneurs start with a bad pitch. A few weeks
in they will stop to regroup. They will refine the pitch, and start again.

In parallel, they may get more aggressive about coordinating all the meetings
into a short window of time / pushing people to meet sooner.

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dm8
Elad, I agree with you on this point. Question being, should entrepreneurs get
more agressive about co-ordinating meetings into a short window of time? How
do investors react to that?

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Eduardo3rd
It is probably because I'm not in the valley, but I would have loved to have
been finished in 3 months. We closed our seed round 6 months after pitching
our first angel group. Granted, we had a few bridge notes to get us through
and we were pretty picky about the money we took, but still. Fund raising
takes forever.

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jusben1369
I have to admit I found myself wanting to tell the author that his article
about the unrealistic expectations about the time it takes to raise funding
had some very unrealistic expectations around the time it takes to raise
money!

All good points. I would just add that I'd double the time here. Secondly,
time is to some extent on the investors side. A lot of folks burn out quickly
so seeing you still dedicated and (mostly) telling the same story 3 to 6
months later is important.

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eladgil
Ha ha. Yes, it can take even longer. But I think even 3 months is much longer
then most people expect. :)

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mwillmsn
Couldn't agree more! I constantly see startups underestimate the amount of
time it will take to raise and then make suboptimal decisions because they are
in a rush

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tedkalaw
It's also a bummer when startups don't factor the time it takes to fundraise
into their calculations when figuring out how much cash they need.

Live and learn, I guess.

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eladgil
David Lee had a good recent post on this: <http://daslee.me/6-months>

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peterlalonde
3 Months would be great. Raising angel money in Canada is a little slow. (I'm
being kind)

