Over the last 35+ years I have seen so many truly awful applications for funding. What I’ve realised from the sea of sameness in all of those applications is that all of the owners and founders are generally really passionate about their business venture or business idea. Unfortunately though many are totally lacklustre when it comes to presenting it in a way that will persuade investors to back their idea, back their passion, BACK THEM!! … and ultimately to part with capital and provide access to other resources to assist them in the process of growing the business.
They get stuck in their own story, and while part of pitching is to know how to bring an investor into your story, you first have to meet them where they are. As my mentor and later business partner said to me back in the late 80’s … “You have to sail into their waters before inviting them to explore your shores.”
This program is the exact same type of training content (only updated) and support that I and my partners provided to founders and management of our portfolio companies so that the companies we invested in would be better prepared for the subsequent funding rounds.
Here’s how it came about.
Together with my mentor and six other partners we ran an investment company providing venture capital and private equity investment. In the early stages we were heavily involved in helping the portfolio companies to raise the next round of capital. So we decided we needed to teach the founders and management of our portfolio companies how to do this. How to prepare for and successfully execute in each of the next funding rounds, so that when they wanted to go to the next stage of funding, whether Series, A, Series B or Series C, we didn’t have to do the heavy lifting. They were prepared and ran with it, … and that’s exactly what we did!
‘From Seed to Series C’ is one of the elements we taught them. It provided them with a comprehensive understanding of the different types of funding rounds, the types of investors they would be pitching to, the expectations of those investors and what they would be looking for so that the Pitch Deck and their pitch could be positioned in a way that was relevant and tailored to their audience.
We prepared them for and trained them to gather and compile in advance the exact information that would be required for the Due Diligence of whichever round they were going for. Actually we had them compile a Data Room so comprehensive, so well indexed and easy to navigate that it made other investors’ heads spin.
In other trainings we taught them how to create a killer Pitch Deck and how to pitch, how to present, how to read the room, and how to compile that extraordinary Data Room. But it started with the contents of this course, from Seed to Series C.
