Great to see innovation in the fundraising process. As a founder, the things that bother me the most about fundraising are:
1. The experience imbalance. VCs do pitch meetings every day for years on end. Founders, not so much. No wonder the expectations mismatch.
2. Wildly unpredictable outcomes. Early stage fundraising is more like working a fuzzy strategic partnership than applying for a loan. The same inputs probably don't produce the same outputs.
Yea, for founders going down a traditional VC path, there is some what weird but actually sensible logic to the idea that "being good at pitching VCs" is actually a useful skill to filter for. If I'm a Seed VC, assessing how well the founder will do at raising from Series A-F investors is actually part of the game.
We do "funding for bootstrappers" so most founders that work with us don't really plan on needing to raise more capital (it's not prohibited or anything, just not Plan A). So we and they don't really care about how "good" they are at playing the game of pitching.
Assuming that's true, it would be interesting to know what the alternative funding sources are, and whether they're appropriate or accessible to non-wealthy first timers building product companies.
VC is ostensibly generally accessible. Even accelerators like YC are VC-track.
the untold secret of bootstrapping to date is that is has often been done from positions of privilege: family money, savings from a very high paying career, spouse's salary, inheritance. Very hard to make broad generalizations since the companies are often privately held and under the radar (so no statistically significant data) but my experience is that the case far more often than you would think.
On the other side, I see many many founders essentially twist their business plan into something VCs want to see because accelerators/VCs are the only source of capital for early stage tech companies.
1. The experience imbalance. VCs do pitch meetings every day for years on end. Founders, not so much. No wonder the expectations mismatch.
2. Wildly unpredictable outcomes. Early stage fundraising is more like working a fuzzy strategic partnership than applying for a loan. The same inputs probably don't produce the same outputs.