The next thing that's important with investors is, you know, when you're blind emailing them, don't immediately ask for a half an hour of time with no clear ask. You need to know ahead of time what their investment process is or what they like to invest in. Just be direct because people are busy and I think they appreciate directness. And so there might be a bunch of people who have realized this thing you're talking about, but if I don't know it, that's kind of cool. If I can't think of it in thinking about a problem for a few minutes, then I start to get interested and I want to have a conversation.
Aaron Harris is a Partner at YC and before that he cofounded Tutorspree.
He’s on Twitter @harris.
The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.
Y Combinator invests a small amount of money ($150k) in a large number of startups (recently 200), twice a year.
Learn more about YC and apply for funding here: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/
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Topics
00:00 - Intro
00:42 - Seed fundraising process
3:32 - Emailing investors
9:32 - Parallelized fundraising process
12:17 - Meeting with investors
14:17 - Overcapitalization
17:07 - Communicating your plan to investors
19:02 - Evaluating investors
22:57 - Fundraising process for a Series A company
27:02 - Meeting Series A investors
28:57 - Post-Demo Day psychology