When Alma and Evelyn’s son, Kalyan, was born they noticed irregularities with his skin and he was scratching to the point of injuring himself. After numerous trips to the pediatrician and being told everything was alright, Evelyn remembered Alma had been diagnosed a few months before with a milk allergy. She was inspired to take Kalyan to an allergist to be tested. Sure enough, it turned out that he was allergic to nearly twenty food items, and this marked the beginning of a period in his parents’ lives fraught with uncertainty, fear, and frustration.
How to Get Seed Funding for Your Tech Startup by Thinking Like an Investor
Fundraising seed capital for your startup is a pain, right?
You don’t really know what investors are looking for or what chances you have to raise the money you need.
In this article, I’m going to walk you through how investors think about your investment.
Now, every investor is different, and despite what people tell you, seed investing can be very subjective. But this guide is meant to give you a general sense of what they are looking at and for, so you can be one step ahead of them (most of them).
Ready to dive in?
Let’s do it, but first, two sentences to put things in context:
Seed funding was meant to enable innovators to build and prove out their ideas in the marketplace, but with the increasing size of seed rounds (often $1.5M or more), investor’s expectations have also swelled.
What was an exceedingly difficult task in the past has only gotten more challenging, and startup founders need to work harder to distinguish their business from a multitude of other promising companies.
The most important thing you can do as a founder of an early-stage startup
I had the pleasure to attend a great panel discussion put on by Strawberry Creek Ventures and Castor Ventures, firms that invest in Berkeley and MIT alumni respectively. The two panelists were both fantastic entrepreneurs working on genuinely world-changing solutions, and over the course of the evening, they recounted their entrepreneurial journey. After the moderator finished asking her questions, the discussion was opened up to audience questions.
I asked the two entrepreneurs how they got their ideas off the ground at the earliest stages of their enterprise. This is a topic that I’m obsessed with given that it’s my job to help entrepreneurs launch and grow their startups. Both answers were great, but one truly resonated with me.
Getting VC funding without a huge network or diploma from Stanford
The other day I met a very charismatic, intelligent, and driven young man at a venture capital summit in Silicon Valley. He had a compelling vision for an app that both solved a pressing social problem and had great commercial promise. He floated around the room striking up conversations with one person after another, and out of the hundreds of people that were there, he out-hustled all of them, by a long-shot. I had a chance to catch up with him briefly at the end of the summit asking him how meeting investors was going. He looked up at me, exhausted and simply replied, “It’s been better.”
$20K to Accelerate Your Tech Startup this Summer
Beta Boom works with very early-stage tech and life sciences enterprises to develop their solution, get traction, and solidify their business in order to win significant follow-on funding. Program highlights include: Intensive 10-week program (June 11 through August 18) near beautiful Salt Lake City in Utah $20K in funding Personalized program to fit your specific … more