- There’s nothing magic to it, really.
- First thing, pick a valuation for your company
- This is basically your asking price
- Do some market research into what other startups are getting
- Manifold started on $10m, then went up the $15m
- Then figure out how much you need for the next 12-18 months
- Heuristic: $200k per FTE, hiring 6 = 1.2M Plus a bit more for overhead
- Use an Angellist RUV to make things super easy
- Ask for intros shamelessly
- Fundraising is like interviewing for a job
- Taking a bunch of calls, screening people, convincing them to come on
- Schedule all your offers to come in at once (these are VCs)
- Try getting your friends to invest first
- Your memo = your resume
- We spent a ton of time on this, and tried to make it really good (eg with embeds)
- Very shareable document that we’ve used in a bunch of other contexts too