The trick is you need to do some research on the person your emailing and figure out, are they interested in this space at all? I get blind emails where I'm clearly just C seed or BCC with a hundred other people saying, dear Mr. Harris, you might be surprised to learn about our incredible opportunity to make lots of money. And by the way, the progress for me isn't necessarily about traction. The thing that no one wants to see is I've been working on this for four years, and I just finished the alpha of what I'm working on.
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