We’re one week away from the longest day of the year, which also means that soon you will received a lot of out-of-office replies when you approach VCs. Summer just isn’t the best time to raise your round.<\/p>\n
Of course, planning and preparation are key. Raising a significant Seed+ round can easily take 6 months or more. And if you start just before summer, it will most likely take even longer. So how to deal with this?<\/p>\n
In our Startup Funding Book we give some examples of how to plan your fundraising process. Some best practices are:
\n– build relationships with investors early on
\n– try to build momentum in a round to create investor FOMO
\n– keep performing as a company<\/p>\n
As Sunkanmi Ola, co-founder and CEO of our portfolio company Propel, puts it:
\n“We actually put a lot of work into identifying VCs that align with us. But no matter how long it takes, as a company you always have to keep growing, that is non-negotiable. It helps to keep the train moving! You essentially need to find a way to combine fundraising with growth. This also shows your ingenuity.\u201d<\/p>\n
VCs are almost real people – they also need a break during summer and spend time with their families. Many will take some weeks off, many of them are still available for their portfolio companies.<\/p>\n
But getting new deals done? Not so much. Investment Committees that give the formal approval for a deal might not even come together in summer, so you will have to wait until everyone’s back.<\/p>\n
On the other hand, VCs have less distractions during these summer months: less networking events, less panel discussions, less internal meetings and emails, etc. \u00cdf they work, they are maybe less busy. In other words: there is also an opportunity to have some first meetings with VCs in this period.<\/p>\n
So it will for sure be harder to get to a definite “yes” from a VCs but my advice would be to use summer to build or improve the relationships to eventually close your round later this year.<\/p>\n
And of course read that ff’ing book to prepare yourself \ud83d\ude18<\/p>\n
Read more insights in Startup Funding book, the book about investor readiness, fundraising and deal terms that I wrote together with venture capital lawyer Sjoerd Mol to help founders to nail their fundraising process. Order it via\u00a0bol.com<\/a>,\u00a0Amazon<\/a>\u00a0or your local bookstore.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" We’re one week away from the longest day of the year, which also means that soon you will received a lot of out-of-office replies when you approach VCs. Summer just […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":6771,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"content-type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[197],"tags":[392,213],"class_list":["post-6773","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog-en","tag-funding-friday-en","tag-fundraising-en"],"yoast_head":"\n