Thread by @patio11

Good nuts-and-bolts discussion of fundraising generally, and specifically a snapshot in time during the coronavirus epidemic.

freshpaint.io/blog/anatomy-o…

(I particularly like the bit about how a $5k angel punched waaaaay above their weight due to introductions.)

Would like to underscore, as someone who did fundraising for the first time this year and has done high-volume prospecting before in e.g. hiring and sales: you will absolutely die if you do not have A System and in fundraising that probably means a spreadsheet.

You might think you have a good working memory. I have a good working memory. I am not capable of remembering which of 76 people lit up particularly when given the A anecdote or whether there are outstanding document requests from Prospect 37.

(Given that fundraising is by its nature an occasional activity I think it's structurally always going to be less well served than e.g. CRMs for sales teams, but I think one really compelling value ad as an angel investor might be "Clear 4 hours for me and we will Airtable this")

(I also love @kevinakwok's idea of, effectively, having a startup CEO use Front or similar to share access to their inbox during fundraising cycles with an extremely trusted person who would do nothing but fundraising inbox management.)

(@kevinakwok so he gets the notification.)

A weird thing, structurally, about fundraising is the best CEOs *in the world* will get only about 10-40 reps on it over their entire careers, whereas the other side of the conversation does almost literally nothing else.

But for a variety of reasons the CEO is almost always the person who has fundraising responsibility at startups, and often the person who has rounds-to-sole responsibility, which seems like about as good idea as giving them rounds-to-sole responsibility for mobile apps *forever.*