The Inside Track to Venture Capital: Keys to Raising Money for your Startup or Investment Funds

"RAISE CAPITAL LIKE A LEGEND: https://offer.fundraisecapital.co/free-ebook/"

Anupam is the General Partner at Emergent, a VC firm with $140M+ under management that focuses on Augmented Intelligence, Enterprise Automation, The Future of Work, and Cloud Infrastructure.

What this means is that Anupam is about to walk us through the details on how to raise capital, how to pitch a VC properly, and finally how to build your product market fit with a solid Go-To-Market strategy in your pursuit of Making Billions.

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[THE GUEST]:  Anupam is the General Partner at Emergent, a VC firm with $140M+ under management that focuses on Augmented Intelligence, Enterprise Automation, The Future of Work, and Cloud Infrastructure.

[THE HOST]: Ryan Miller is an Angel investor in technology and energy.

Transcript

Ryan Miller  
Hi, my name is Ryan Miller and for the past 15 years have helped hundreds of people to raise millions of dollars for their funds, and for their startups. If you're serious about raising money, launching your business or taking your life to the next level, in the show will give you the answers so that you too can enjoy your pursuit of making billions. Let's get into it. 

So if you're starting a business, raising capital or building a product, then I have a treat for you. In this week's episode of making billions I have the legendary venture capitalist, Anupam Rastogi, from Emergent VC, peel back the curtains on how to pitch and how to land that sweet VC investment. So the question is, what are you doing to position your product so investors are lining up to help all this more coming right now. Here we go. 

Hey, welcome to another episode and making billions today I have my dear friend and Anupam Rastogi. And upon is the general partner at emergent, a VC firm with 140 million plus under management that focuses on augmented intelligence, enterprise automation, and the future of work, cloud and infrastructure. So what this means to you is that Anupam is about to walk us through the details on how to raise capital, how to pitch a VC properly, and how to book and build your product market fit so solid that you're gonna have an awesome, go to market strategy. So Anupam, welcome to the show, man.

Yeah, man, thank you very much. Yeah, we've been very fortunate to be the top 2% in the world. And it's because of an amazing guests like yourself, and many that have come before you. So it is truly my honor to have someone with your caliber and your background. Maybe you can help me understand how did you even get into this industry? And how did you become an expert in venture capital?

Anupam Rastogi  
Yeah, I, you know, I grew up in India, I studied computer science. So I was always into technology. And I started off my career as a inventor initially and researcher researching new ways to make internet faster results that probably some patents and papers and quickly realized that I wanted to be actually at the forefront of putting these things out into some of the work I did, by the way, this was now 20 plus years back, that didn't see light of day, but 10, 15, 20 years later, so I was a little bit early to the market, I wanted to be much closer to the market. So I moved into product management and worked for a couple of startups that good scaling over time and had good exits, big acquisitions, and then got into venture about 14 years back after going to business school transitioned over into venture capital. And I saw that as a way to I really enjoyed my startup and product journey. And that's all venture capital as a way to work with multiple startups and founders at one time. That's how I see venture even today is really an opportunity to partner with founders closely, work closely with multiple companies at a time and bring that horizontal view and skill set of having worked with a number of different companies, you know, in the same space have been investing since 2009. So we're multiple cycles, and have been fortunate to see a number of different journeys have been involved in our 30 different investments personally, and then, you know, hundreds with firms that have been involved at then off, the ones have invested in, you know, the big couple of IPOs, several m&a exits, and, of course, some failure. And so there's learnings from all of those that I bring to what I do

Ryan Miller  
perfect. You launched emergent with the partner, maybe you can walk us through about the the inception of emergent after all that experience, now you're putting it into into the single house and known as emergent, maybe walk us through a little bit about emergent, what it does, and more importantly, why startup founders and even investors should care.

Anupam Rastogi  
Yeah, absolutely. So you know, emergent, our focuses around three things that we were seeing as gaps in the market and the time and when was really coming in fairly early in the journey at preceded seed stage before this traction and momentum coming in with high conviction. So we do relatively few investments. But the ones that we do, we do those with high conviction. And we make sure we have sufficient time at the partner level to work with each of the companies that we are working with. So we have only a handful of companies that are in that first couple of years of zero to one journey where we are able to bring a lot of our prior experience and our horizontal view and skill set connections to those companies see that gap of someone that can come in very early. Second was our backgrounds have been in enterprise software. But within that we're seeing AI come on the horizon. This was six, seven years back, the first you know, sort of you can call it first but a wave of AI machine learning deep learning, we've seen that starting to form and going deeper into enterprise. So we specialize in that we have 40 portfolio companies today, across the enterprise airspace, both application layer and infrastructure layer infrastructure layer includes things like data security, privacy, cloud, other things. And then application layer being all kinds of horizontal functions, specific solutions specific to sales, marketing, HR, finance and others bringing automation to those functions or bringing automation to industry verticals. So that's that's what we do. So that's the second part of what we do. And the third piece, third piece that defines us is around cross geography type of startups. So all of our startups are US market facing. We are based here in Silicon Valley. We have deep connections here. So we help startups connect into the valley. So we only work with startups that are focused on the US market. And you believe Silicon Valley is a great place to build out the go to market for enterprise SAS startups. But we like companies, which are building in other tech hubs outside the valley. And it could either be overseas in places like India, where we have a lot of background in or we also have companies in places like Europe, other parts of us, which have similar characteristics where founders can go and build teams that can scale more. And these companies have higher likelihood of success in our experience, if done well. So those are the three things that define us coming in very early with high conviction, focus on enterprise AI for last several years, haven't seen many journeys in that space, and then focus on cross geography startups with us focus go to market, that's what we do.

Ryan Miller  
Yeah, that's awesome. And so I'm curious, any of your port-co's or for those of you that are new to VC or portfolio companies, I'm wondering if you had maybe an example of one of your port-co's that that came in that you guys were able to help out, just to illustrate a little bit behind the scenes of what venture capital does, and specifically, how emergent facilitates in that? Yeah,

Anupam Rastogi  
absolutely. For us, that's actually a core part of what we do is really helping founders in the zero to one phase. And typically, that involves three different areas that we focus on on so many different areas, but three different areas where we really go deep, and one is really helping narrow down and define product market fit your specific use cases, verticals, customer personas, positioning, pricing, all of the iterations that go into that product market fit, we want to be the first port of call for founders on any small or big decision that they're making any referrals, inputs they need, anything they want to discuss second area is on the early good market. So setting up your sales, marketing, customer success functions, who to hire, when to hire, what level to hire them at interviewing candidates for a lot of these roles. So there are several of our companies where the first five hires across sales, marketing, customer success, you know, they will either referrals from us, or at the very least folks that we help to interview and dozens of interviews for those roles and help the farm, you know, be a sounding board for the founder for those. So that's the second area go to market. And the third is Future Fundraising, we help companies connect with deeper pools of capital funds over the years pretty good relationships with all of the top 2030 enterprise investors here in the Valley. And then, you know, once we have invested in a company, they made progress, often they go on to raise series A rounds from tier one investors. And they've been many cases where the company had three, four or five term sheets, from series four series A or Series B rounds. And all of those went, you know, introductions that we had made, those are three years, we really get around, and to share, you know, a couple of examples, or one example. One of the companies we are investors we're fortunate to be investors in is a company called observe.ai, what they do is they help bring automation to the call center space, you know, I'm sure everyone has had their share of, you know, interaction with call centers. And typically in that industry, historically, you know, there's a lot of dissatisfaction customers are not happy with what happened in that interaction. A lot of the corporations, the company that you're talking to actually wants to serve you well, but they haven't had a good way to really manage and train those interactions. And then, you know, sometimes even those, the person that's helping you on the other side, they don't have the right data in front of them at the right time. So they're not able to help you even though they want to. So that's what observe helps solve for. And so we were the first investors in that company at precede stage idea stage, we were able to, you know, my partner worked with them on really helping them find, you know, narrow down on use cases, we've worked with them on their first few hires their next set of investors that they brought in, and it's a much larger company now on its way to sort of a larger potential presence in that space, bringing a lot of AI and automation into those interactions where customer agents are able to serve their customers better. Another company is a company called privado, which helps ensure privacy in data oriented applications. So you know, a lot of larger companies that serve customers, they have code, which is processing a lot of customer data, there's a lot of regulations around that it has to be processed properly. So engineers today have to manually go and look at a lot of that code and certify that, hey, we are not storing this data in this manner. Or we're handling this personally identifying information carefully in the right manner with the right regulations. So that's obviously in units or one time want to spend time filling out forms. What provider does is use AI to automate that and figure out how the data is flowing. Is it stored correctly, is it you know, is the code compliant with all the privacy regulations? So we were we call it a seed round there. You're the first US investor in the company, very early before they had revenue. We worked very closely with them on a lot of the initial sales and marketing, hiding building all those functions, they've now raised significant follow on capital and standing up open to for the customers are really just two examples. One application layer one infrastructure or developer tool related, to give you a sense of kind of companies we partner with.

Ryan Miller  
I love that and I can tell that you guys are definitely pros at what you do. So for those of you who are listening to this conversation, what we're talking about here is, this is what VCs do, so a lot of us a lot of people when they're founders or entrepreneurs, they're like I gotta go raise money from VC. Well, yeah, okay. That certainly is part of it. But one of the wisdom All right, so you got bootstrapping. But you also have venture capitalists. And one of the key things to consider is not only capital, but the firm that invests in you, they're also going to help you as Anupam mentioned, they're going to help you with pricing, go to market strategy, staffing, future, add on rounds, product market fit all of these things. And so that you really get not only do you get capital when you work with the right VC firm, like emergent, but you also get a lot of expertise and the bench depth of those companies, you don't even have to worry about. So right now, they can actually help you to fill in those gaps until you can start to stabilize on your own. Would you say that's a fair statement?

Anupam Rastogi  
Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's the area that's also personally important to us, I'd say, I think that's I would encourage founders to do is work with a, you know, investor that where the model, they aware of the model, different vessels have different models. So there's some investors, which do lots of investments, and they don't want to be operationally involved, and the founders who like that sort of model, so and then there's the other end of the spectrum where we like, and we're happy to be as involved as needed in the early days on a lot of decisions. And so founders that value that, you know, that that's a that's a good mutual fit. So I think it's important to understand what does each investor you know, what, what kind of role do they play, how they like to help, there's lots of other great investors as well. So different people have different areas of strengths. So ours are the three that I mentioned are the three areas, we really double down and go deeper into

Ryan Miller  
perfect, I love that. So I'm just curious from all this vast experience that you've had, I'm wondering if you knew about two or three things that you can leave behind to just help our listeners gaining competitive advantage. So anything like let's say, being an VC, not only do you raise money, but people raise money from you. And so during that whole fundraising process, we'll say, what are some of those leave behind things? Are those best tips that you can give people who are out there trying to fundraise right now?

Anupam Rastogi  
Absolutely, yeah. So maybe you can start with fundraising, because like you said, we sit on both sides there to some extent where, you know, we see about, you know, 1000 pitches a year. So we see a lot of conference pitching to us. And then with the companies that we have partnered, and they go and pitch to others, or they follow on rounds, next rounds. So we see we get feedback from that on how that's going. And some things that, you know, we see on a recurring basis, a few refer to give a few tips or thoughts on some areas. One is, you know, run it like a tight process. So my guidance on this would be spend a few hours really getting to understand the fundraising process. Don't think of it like other processes you may be familiar with, it's not a hiring process. It's definitely not a sales process. It is a sales process to some extent, but as we learn differently, it has its own beat, you have to create a element of timeline, you have to have the right number of conversations going on in the process. And you have to have your documents ready, your T's crossed and I's dotted ahead of time, and you have to have different versions of your pitches ready, you have to have a two three minute elevator pitch, which grabs the attention of the investor in the first few minutes, because that's when they make up their mind to some extent, or, you know, lose attention, you have to have maybe a 15 minute version of the pitch where you can do a 30 minute call and still leave time for q&a. And then you should have a longer version, which you do when people are double clicking into it. Because I see a lot of investors come in with, you know, they have great ideas, they have a lot of domain expertise, but they just haven't practiced that pitch. And what happens is they may spend, you know, 30 minute call 28 minutes on their product and how good the solution is. But hey, this is not a another buyer of your product. This is not a buyer of your product necessary. Unless you're building a product for VCs that's different, but 99% of the time, the VC is not your customer. So there's a lot of other areas which you need to talk about. The most important one at the seed stage is the team. And I see that you would call it an error or omission pretty often that founders many times are hesitant to talk about their backgrounds. So that's the most important thing you have to put that upfront talk about why you are the right founder? Why did you start this company? How did you decide to work with a co founder if you have a co founder or multiple co founders put that upfront? And you know, what do you bring from your prior experiences, besides the logos really qualifies you to, you know, maybe build a large outcome here. So touching upon those things, I think it's really important to summarize on the fundraising and pitching part really understand how the process is done, talk to a few other founders, study it, run it like a process, put a timeline on it have the right number of prospective investors in your funnel, there's two different ends of the spectrum that I often see, in some cases, folks will have you know, there are three or four discussions going on, sometimes just one or two. And they think that, hey, I'm going to close around with this form, because I've had three meetings with them. But that's not how it works, you have to understand that the funnels are very steep. There's lots of companies and lots of investors, so you have to have a higher number than one, two or three in your funnel. And the other end of the spectrum is I see folks that are just feeding lists of passive investors into a sales loft or outreach or some of the sequence and just cold emailing the whole world. That's not a great recipe for success either. You have to, in my opinion, pick some reasonable number, whatever that is, you know 810 15 Something like that. Qualified investors who match with who stayed sector style matches with what you're looking to do, and then send them targeted outreach. Ideally, through a common connect, one can come connect or cold email works, as long as it's very targeted, at least from us it works. But it has to be very targeted, just spamming 1000 People just doesn't do anyone a lot of favors so, so really picking the folks to talk with and then having a very structured pitch, which is a VC pitch, not a product sales pitch, that's really key.

Ryan Miller  
brilliant man. So don't sell the product. He didn't say that, but sell the business almost. And what he's talking about here, folks, is we're saying, look, there's a difference between the view on the inside and the view from the outside. And so VCs have the view from the outside. So you know how all the dots connect, you know, your product, you built this thing, it's a labor of love. But on the outside VCs are looking for other things to say, how am I going to get a return? Who are your other investors? What are you all about, if you're early stage, you probably the earlier that you are in your company, the higher up on your pitch deck, your team slide should go and all of those things, which are the elements, which Anupam just literally outlined for all of us. So as the when it comes to fundraising, choose your weapon, you can either have a machine gun or a sniper rifle. And so often, I think what atom bomb is, is saying I'm using different words, don't stand on the edge of the forest and just spray and pray this machine gun hoping you hit something, actually be smart about it. Do your research, find the investors that actually invest in what you're doing. Because trust me, I get hit up all the time, too. They will say, Oh, you're a venture capitalist, I got this startup, can I send you my deck? And he said, we don't just invest in everything, like, have you even looked at our website, right? Like there's so easy stuff. Trust me, folks, VCs are easy. Just do your research a little bit, understand what they invest in understanding what the partners are. And really just position your offering in a way that that VCs would want to participate in that not necessarily in your product, because they can believe you have a great product, but not a great business. That is not what you want. And so as Entercom is suggesting is don't just give me a product pitch, give me a corporate pitch. Tell me the vision, the team, all the drivers of the business value, not just the product? Yes, we want to know what your product is. But that's not the main driver of why they invest. But you said that's a fair statement. Absolutely. Love it. So we talked about fundraising, and we danced around pitching I'm wondering just from your side, you hear 1000 pitches a year? What what leave behind? What kind of things have you noticed as far as helpful advice when it comes to pitching?

Anupam Rastogi  
Yeah, I think good practice pitch is tailored to what you know investors are looking for. That's important. So covering, you know, the really talking about the founders background, the motivations why they're doing this, I like to hear that, for instance. And I think that's helpful to most founders, because that's what most investors because that's what they're thinking about. And talking about the market, you know, why is this opportunity going to be big? And one mistake or one thing I see founders often do is look for the you know, Gartner numbers or something like that in the space, it's a $15 trillion tam VCs, you know, just gloss over it, just put yourself in the other shoes is my suggestion, you know, what's much more useful is really quantifying it bottom up and figuring out that, hey, there are 10,000 different companies in the world that could be the users of this product, and I'm gonna charge them, you know, 100,000 each, or whatever it is. So give me that that's much more useful. So think a little bit granularly, about that market size, talk about business model, talk about what's the state of the art, what are the competitors? What are the alternates? What are the customers doing today, to solve this problem that they have. So that's one thing that I look for in pitches, that's really important to understand, because that really gives signals into, you know, what may be the adoption rates of this product? Is the pain point burning enough? Are they already using some competitors. So now do we have to get, you know, people to switch customers switch, rather than just adopt this? Do they have a budget for this product in the enterprise space, it's all of those are important to get across in a short initial pitch, at least at some high level. And I say some of the best pitches that we see, what I like is, you know, founders that have gone and done very structured market discovery, they've often gone talk to, again, I'm focused on the b2b and enterprise space. So these are b2b customers, it's often they've gone and talk to 25, 30, 50, sometimes 100 people in their customer persona. And you'd be amazed, you know, on LinkedIn these days, you know, if you write a well written message there are you can reach, you know, anyone that you want, and good founders know how to do it. And they've done that and they've in a structured manner, drawn out some insights from it. So that can really add to put your pitch, you know, make your pitch really shine at the seed stage precede seed stage, if you don't have already, if you don't already have a lot of customers, that really helps as an alternate in that pitch. And then as I was alluding to having different versions of that pitch, have a practice three minute version, have a 15 minute version that you do in a 30 minute call so that there's time left and then have a longer version, which goes into that one hour type meeting. It could be a partner meeting with multiple folks. So it's still a first meeting for some of the partners that are joining the partner meeting. What could be a deeper dive call with your with the person that you are engaging with? That's it. Those are some areas that I would suggest for founders, you know, the debate

Ryan Miller  
is, you know, everyone has their own style and you look up online, what's the best way to build a pitch deck that VCs are gonna fall in love with and you see all these different templates and courses is a whole industry just trying to keep us happy. Yeah, I mean, yeah, I appreciate that. But there's a debate. Number one we've settled one is where does the team slide go? And the answer is, it depends. Early stage goes up in the beginning, later stage financing goes down towards the end. But what about the big idea? Right? So this one is like, the big idea, here's what we're here to do this? Is this the thing we're going to solve or create, or, or whatever it is, in your opinion, to the rest of the world trying to make you happy? What do you like to see were in the pitch deck, if at all? Do you like to see the slide? The big idea?

Anupam Rastogi  
I think it has to be really early in the deck. So you know, Doc, what team? And I think you're just jumping to the problem and the solution. And there's different ways to do so there's no right answer in my mind, but I think you have to hit on what you're doing pretty quickly, in the first few minutes to keep the attention to what is the problem? And why is it big? I think those are an issue the who is doing it because the founders, those two are the next biggest questions. What is the problem? And why is it an interesting problem to solve, which goes into the market size, and all of those things. So I'd say hit it up, as soon as you can, in the in the flow.

Ryan Miller  
I love it. Man, I totally agree so that I put you on the spot there, I appreciate that. You nailed it. So at apartment, I both agree that early on, get the big idea in the mind of the investor that you're pitching, regardless of whatever it is, whatever you're solving, whatever your thesis is, whatever it is, make sure they understand the big idea of like, here's what we're trying to do. This is why it matters. Here's why you should care. Here's what it means to you. Let me tell you about my team, and then you move forward. And then you go on. I absolutely love that. Now, I did ask for three things. What would be a third thing that you would really wish that founders or aspiring venture capitalist anything at all? What would be the third thing that you would love to leave behind? 

Anupam Rastogi  
Yeah, you know, one area I work pretty closely with founders on once we partner with a company is on building out their early go to market, again, being focused on b2b SaaS, and a lot of companies are tech driven. So we have a lot of founders who have technology product backgrounds, before they started this company, often then the question comes, okay, now we have a product we built, we have some level of interest from customers, how do we now scale and get more customers, and one natural reaction often is, hey, let's get someone to head sales and scale out the sales team, which only seen the first you know, the zero to one journey, it really has to be driven by the founder, because sales and product are not disjoint. At that point, you know, sales and product are very closely tied. And it's really the founder of the funding team that can play that role of really taking that feedback back and forth very quickly. The second reason for that is that, you know, the early stage sales is really much more of an art. And there's not that many people you can hire, who would be able to do that for you, you know, they don't, first of all, not wanting to exist. And if they do, then with a startup budget, they're probably not someone you would be able to hire at that early stage. So my recommendation to founders always is that be ready to be prepared to drive the first year one journey, it could be, you know, a million Arr, 2 million arr. Somewhere in that territory, the founder has to really Spearhead from the front lines, that whole process, of course, you could hire people to help you at some point, once you have some traction, some early traction, you can hire people to help you with the sales process. But you really have to run it yourself, or one of the founders has to do that. So that's one input that I often find myself sharing and working with founders on the second related one, as you know, question always comes, who do we hire on sales and marketing? How do we get our head of sales? Let's say you've crossed that early, then you have a few customers? Now again, do we get a head of sales? And that head of sales will hire lots of salespeople over time? Or vice versa? Do you get someone who can actually do sales and sales, and then you have a few of those people, and then you get someone who can manage them and lead them? My experience has been that the second one actually works better. And it actually goes a little bit hand in hand with what I was saying earlier with founders actually leading one of the founders leading the sales org, and then hiring salespeople directly working with them that generally my experience has ended up working well, or better than the other approach? Of course, there's no right answers, I think different circumstances. That's where we have a lot of those discussions with the founders we work with on you know, who to hire, when to hire them, what kind of profile should they have another mistake or another area? I see in the early days on the go to market and sales side is founders often, you know, when they're looking to hire, let's say the first couple of sales reps, they're trying to go for the big names and saying, Hey, in my industry, here are the two big names, I'm going to hire the number one or you know, one of the top sales reps from company XYZ, which is the number one company in my space and sometimes able to do that, they will pay the top dollar and they will get this you know, a top rated salesperson from that org. Now, the problem with that is sales, you know, early stage startup where there is barely some level of very early product market fit, let alone a playbook is very different from mature are larger companies. Larger companies have all these playbooks, they have a brand. They have a lot of existing customers, they have the sales motions, they have territories that which are well defined. So these people are working in a very tightly defined spectrum. They know the customers are going after these customers are coming in very warm already, the product is well defined as a lot of collateral, the pitch is very well defined. And so you're attracting people who can work very well in that environment. Now, some of them may translate into the startup environment. But my experience has been that correlation is pretty low success in that very well established environment does not map necessarily into the startup environment. So I'd say really picking well, and that goes for a lot of other market oriented functions, including marketing, customer success. So that's my input to founders often is that when you're evaluating, let's say, the resume, just hide the logos and look at what they've done. Ideally, they have done that zero to one journey before in that role. So if you're hiring a salesperson, they have been a salesperson at a zero to one type startup, ideally, if you're looking for an experienced person, or it is and and they are great learner. So it could be someone who maybe doesn't have that much experience, but the great learners, and often it's also people that have multiple skill sets, they're good at multiple functions, because again, in the early days, they will end up playing a lot of roles. They aren't yet those very well defined guardrails and narrowly defined roles yet a salesperson may also get involved in you know, some product conversations, certainly some customer success, retention, upselling conversations, sometimes marketing and collateral, they may have to design themselves. So you're looking for more of a all rounder than someone that's very specialized in a certain kind of swim lane. That's another area that we often find ourselves, you know, working with founders on, and that's my input to founders is make sure you're hiring the right kind of person for the stage you are at.

Ryan Miller  
Yeah, I love that. So go to market strategy. So that is a huge part. And if y'all who are listening, if you don't know what that is, I would encourage you to really understand what a go to market strategy is, if you at some point expect in your startup to raise money, just have a sense of what it is, no one expects you to be perfect. But the more stuff that you can have even notionally figured out, the better that will land with venture capitalists. So now that we're rounding third base, we're bringing it home. Is there any last minute remarks? Anything you would like our fans around the world to know anything at all?

Anupam Rastogi  
Yeah, no, I'd say it's a great time to be founders right now a lot of activity with generative AI, our belief is every workflow in the enterprise, and how work is done across every business function could be sales, marketing, customer service, operations, HR, and every vertical industry that you can think of everything is going to change over the next year, several years and next couple of decades. So good, it's a fantastic time to be out there, if you're a founder will incorporate a lot of those newer technologies that are coming in as quickly as you can into your thought process, at least if not the product. But yeah, great to be here and share our thoughts. You know, it's easy to find us@emergent.vc. And, you know, I'm on LinkedIn as well. Easy to look me out there. And yeah, no pleasure to be pleasure to be here

Ryan Miller  
Awesome, man. Well, thank you so much. So just to synthesize everything that Anupam talked about fundraising, master that process, understand that that is the process and then learn what that is, and follow that very regimented, but effective one, namely, the big one is don't stand on the edge of the forest, spraying a machine gun, think and calling yourself a hunter, you're not you're just trying to get lucky. So actually be someone hunt down those VCs understand what they love, understand the partners really understand that, get your list. And that is a big part of your process. The second thing that I have talked about is pitching pitch. What investors are buying, not what you are selling, there's a big difference that to get that check is not necessarily just because you got a cool product that helps but that's not it, it's not enough. And so understanding how are they going to make their money, right? Let's just say it out loud. He didn't say that. So maybe he maybe you're a little different than me. But I doubt it is to say help us understand what this return profile looks like in your business. What are your revenue? What are your assumptions? What's your growth rate? Understand what VCs are buying is not always what you what you're trying to sell. And then finally, go to market strategy. Know what that is. And ultimately big part of that is don't outsource your sales leadership too soon. If you're a founder or a leader or an emerging fund manager, it is your job as the founder to drive that revenue. Do that you do these things, and you too will be well on your way in your pursuit of making billions.

Wow, what a show. I hope you enjoyed this episode as much as I did. Now, if you haven't done so already, be sure to leave a comment and review on new ideas and guests you want me to bring on for future episodes. Plus, why don't you head over to YouTube and see extra takes awhile, you get to know our guests even better. And make sure to come back for our next episode where we dive even deeper into the people the process and the perspectives of both investors and founders. Until then, my friends stay hungry. Focus on your goals and keep grinding towards your dream of making billions