Raise close to you.
It’s easier to raise “close” to you.
That’s one of my number one pieces of advice when first time entrepreneurs ask me for tips on fundraising.
Our series A for Sketchfab was led by FirstMark, a US firm, but with Matt Turck, a French partner at the firm.
When you are French, and pitch a US VC, you can’t make side jokes about American football, you lose a bunch of social connectors. You may have been to Polytechnique or HEC, they won’t know what that is. You are also not so great at selling yourself, even though you might have built something extraordinary. Another French would be aware of that, an American will assume have no vision or no confidence in your business.
You also have a thick accent. Americans wouldn’t even understand when I was trying to say 3D, they heard “free D” 🙈 And they couldn’t say my name.
I’m not saying that if you are French you can only raise with French folks, of course.
Close to you can mean a number of things:
- Same city, so you can semi randomly come across each other, among other things. Also why the “3 weeks SF road show” as a European rarely works — except if you are building the next Slack or HuggingFace — you have to move there first.
- Same country
- You went through the same school
- You practice the same sport
- You are in the same industry
- etc
That’s particularly true for pre-seed and seed rounds, when you don’t have much to show yet. If you are building a mobile app, pitch entrepreneurs who exited in that space. If you are building a Food & Beverages company, it will resonate much more with someone who succeeded in that space than someone who is in SaaS.
The first angel who said yes to our fundraising, Oleg, founded Fotolia, and could project that business to a platform for 3D files.
One caveat: if you are building something truly innovative, people from the same industry might not get it. When starting Sketchfab, we met a number of people from the 3D space, and they couldn’t understand why anyone would want to see a 3D file and not be able to do anything else with it.
