Thank you to Pablo Fernandez of Flexpoint Tech for creating these notes. To contribute to the TWiST PodNotes archive email us.

Top Insights

• Fundraising is a full time job.
• Be careful when raising from friends and family.
• Understand how SAFE and convertible notes work.
• Keep the accounting of your company clean:
  • No personal expenses in the business.
  • No money from a third party that is not documented (loan? investment?)
  • Clean P&L.
  • Amortize your expenses correctly.
  • Salaries should be correctly categorized.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1GU1pbroi8

Table of Contents

Guests

• Jason Demant: went through Launch Accelerator, and he's now the managing director.
• Ashley Whitehurst: managing director of Syndicates at Launch

Should founders bootstrap or fund raise?

Fund raising is a path for very few startups, most business are bootstrapped.

Business fall in one of two categories:

• Lifestyles: they might be good for founders, reaching valuation of $30m, but VCs need higher valuations.
• VC-scale: more than $100m in revenue with great margins, more than 30%, ideally more than 50%.

VCs want to see an exit in 7 to 10 years and it should hit $100m in revenue before then.

Should I start with friends and family?

You have to be careful that the loss of the money won't destroy the relationships.