@daisym I’ve done three raises so far and my latest one was also the fastest, roughly 3 months start to finish as a priced round. That’s fast and I got lucky - typically it’s 6 months from first pitch to money in bank.
First off, the speed also depends on if you’re doing a priced round or a SAFE note round; the later being much faster because everyone can avoid lawyers which is where it gets slow after all the Yesses. For pre-seed and below $3M I’d say it almost guaranteed to be a round using the YC SAFE contract. Google it or get a summary on how it works via GPT.
The fastest and most sure-fire way to raise a round with the best terms is via “the process”:
What you do is you start a big spreadsheet of all the angels and VCs you want to pitch and figure out the intro paths to the key decision makers (the partners) at each. Don’t pitch anyone before you are absolutely ready and your pitch deck, story, data room etc is also sparkling.
Next, you get introductions to all of them at the same time and mash every VC / angel call into a two week period. Do all your calls via Zoom or Meet if possible. I’m going to skip actual zoom pitch strategy here for brevity. You should try to get 20-30 pitches lined up into a 2 week period. My record is 8 pitches on single day.
Remember, VCs all pretend to be wolves but are actually sheep and scared to commit with conviction (they all say they do but it’s a lie). They generally All know each other, seriously, they pass deals between themselves and compare notes.
When on a sudden this scrappy startup shows up on their radar and pitches everyone at the same time you create essentially your own market, and FOMO starts kicking in. Assuming you play it right you will get into diligence with a handful while you continue pitching others. Ideally then, one of them gives you a term sheet to lead the round (typically takes 50% of round size or more), and then two things happen immediately after: 1) you get term sheets from others trying to beat your first term sheet, and 2) several of the VCs in a no-decision holding pattern may join in to fill the remaining of the round. Once you get that first term sheet it’s typically easy breezy to finish the round. You will oversubscribe if you execute well.
Feel free to DM me happy to discuss more detail.
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