I recently had a conversation with a founder who'd just finished a number of unsatisfying conversations with investors. The founder's company was growing well, had crossed $1mm ARR, but still couldn't raise money. According to conventional wisdom, that should have been enough to open some checkbooks. Unfortunately, that's not how fundraising works.
This is strange because of the way we generally talk about startups. In attempting to set up the kinds of experiments on which startups are built, we tend to put precise milestones in place to gauge results. This is great when measuring progress, but it implies a false sense of precision with regard to raising money.I've started borrowing a concept from insurance to frame this problem: Parametric triggers. Parametric triggers are a tool used by insurance companies to govern payouts from policies. These triggers remove subjectivity from the claims process by using independently verifiable, empirical evidence as the decision tree for claims.[1] Applying this concept to fundraising would mean that there is a precise set of things a startup could do to get funding. That's how we'd all like it to work, but there are no specific events that will automatically get money from an investor.
In reality, fundraising happens for companies under a ranged set of conditions. Those ranges and the accompanying outcomes are generally different for different companies, or even for the same company at different times. To make matters even trickier, those ranges are only apparent in hindsight when looking at aggregate information about a large number of deals. What those ranges don't tell you is where the actually successful companies sat in those ranges.
This dynamic is apparent in the aftermath of Demo Day at YC. If you were to isolate on a single characteristic of companies within a batch (say, revenue), you'd find companies with impressive revenue growth failing to raise capital, and ones without much revenue raising significant capital. In a parametric world, this wouldn't happen.
The reason this does happen is that parametric triggers are a great tool for deciding what to do about something that happened in the past. In insurance, parametric triggers determine a specific payout for a specific event - an earthquake of 4.7 magnitude will pay a policy, while one of 4.6 will not. Parametric insurance doesn't account for costs after the event or the payout. The system has all the information it needs to make a decision at the decision point.
Investing in startups isn't about what has happened. Investing in startups is about what will happen. Investors are trying to find small companies that will become multibillion dollar ones. They use past performance as an indication of the quality of the founders and the idea, but no metric is a perfect predictor of the future. The ranged conditions that investors often use as filters - i.e. 15-20% growth per month for SAAS companies [2] - are useful tools to use when sorting for worthwhile conversations given limited time. Those filters are never sufficient for actually making an investment, and every investor has a different framework for making that final decision.
When investors turn down a deal, the good ones will give the founders at least one reason. This may take the form of “we don't understand how you can scale,” “we think there are too many competitors,” or “we don't think you're growing fast enough.” While it is important to think about the reasons given, never assume that the only thing between you and the investment is proving that you can solve for that condition.
What you actually need to do is figure out what pieces of evidence you can use to create a future for your company that investors would be foolish to ignore. This will likely require some mix of your traction, the market you are attacking, and how impressive you and your team are. You also need to recognize that there are contra-indicators of success which investors have been trained to recognize. If they see a small ultimate market with no adjacencies, then incredible early growth has no chance of producing a big company, so they will pass.
Much has been written on how to pitch and fundraise, which is part of the problem. Founders are drowning in examples that seek to turn fundraising into a deterministic process. Accepting that it isn't is a counterintuitive and critical lesson in fundraising successfully.
Here are examples of meaningful achievements that won't automatically get you funded but will get an investor's attention and can be used as part of the story you tell:
- $1mm ARR
- 10% weekly growth
- Repeat founders who were previously funded
- 2 Fortune 500 pilots, 5 in pipeline
- Engagement rates that are higher than Facebook
Fundraising is a frustrating process that resists well-meaning attempts to make it into a predictable science. That's actually quite fitting, though, since while much about startups can be measured, that measurement never guarantees success. Success comes from using the unique advantages you have and combining them into a coherent, self-reinforcing story and product.
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[1] https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Parametric_insurance
[2] http://tomtunguz.com/mrr-growth/
Thanks to Craig Cannon, Dalton Caldwell, Sam Altman, and Andy Weissman for your edits.