Darius and I were in the same batch at YC and he was one of those guys you just thought would outshine everyone else.
My takeaway from this excellent post was that once you start fundraising, you need to be on the hunt 100% of the time. I see too many co-founders sharing fundraising duties and product development duties at the same time. The idea is that you should have already spent enough time building a product that is at least partially compelling and showing some traction. Once you set out to raise funding, you can't effectively skip between building product and talking to investors.
I've been lucky enough to follow Darius' career for a number of years. And I can't say that I've seen a more masterful use of AngelList to round out a who's who of investors. This post shares some great insights on how he managed to make that happen.
Thanks for the helpful post. We're considering raising funds but aren't from Silicon Valley. How would you suggest getting our initial list of investors to contact and people to intro for us?
Where are you located? I think when you're fundraising you have to go where the money is. Plan to spend a few weeks in the Valley driving up and down the 280 (avoid the 101 it sucks).
You can use technology and services like Angel.co to make the connections and schedule the meetings... then you have to go out.
I raised this last round from my home in Hawaii. I spent the first few weeks doing phone meetings and then was in SF & NYC for another couple weeks doing partner meetings and wrapping things up.
My takeaway from this excellent post was that once you start fundraising, you need to be on the hunt 100% of the time. I see too many co-founders sharing fundraising duties and product development duties at the same time. The idea is that you should have already spent enough time building a product that is at least partially compelling and showing some traction. Once you set out to raise funding, you can't effectively skip between building product and talking to investors.