sunnyray.com archive, by topic

What founders say about fundraising

Fundraising comes up on almost every episode of The Sunny Ray Show, because almost every guest has either just closed a round or is trying to. These are the passages where founders and investors talk through how a round actually gets found, priced, and closed, quoted straight from the transcripts, not summarized or reworded.

15 passages from 14 conversations, drawn from 509 conversations and 7,432,473 words in the full archive

• “Which then kind of created a cap table that was a little bit um you know, not ideal, right? And um And it was a cap table that couldn't be supported, you know, moving forward based on where people's like um efforts are. Now, move, you know, if I ever did this again, I have whole different frameworks I advise a whole bunch of people how to like avoid this mistake, but I did nevertheless I still made this mistake. And um the cap table wasn't sustainable.”

  Dave Anderson·Six Near-Death Moments, One AI Startup·at 25:21

• “I think namesake is valuable, but it's not a determining factor. Um, it's more of a progressive signal. And so what I mean by that is like if I'm in making a an investment and I see that SEOA is on the cap table, obviously that's a little bit of a a different circumstance, but Sequoia is on the cap table.”

  Marco·From Investing at 12 to Managing Multimillion-Dollar Venture Funds·at 18:43

• “I love how you've run this company. I've loved your communication over the years." And all she kept coming back to me with was, "I can't tell you how much I appreciate you being on the cap table, how helpful you've been, all the introductions you've made all the years, the support you gave me through COVID when the business should have shut down three times."”

  Steve Walsh·How This Angel Investor Burned Out & Built Billions Helping Founders·at 27:50

• “Cuz I think what I found especially today is a lot of investors especially with the advent of AI have an expectation that you can build a revenue generating business far more efficiently. And I think that's really what I've learned from that is that uh you know, you can raise capital and raise capital Raising capital gets a lot of press, but at the end of the day, build a business. that scales, that generates revenue, and generates profits. And typically, the rest takes care of itself.”

  Scott Kelly·What 100 VC Fast Pitch Events Taught Scott Kelly·at 5:08

• “It's also very difficult because to raise more money, you have to reset the cap table and do all the things and nobody's willing to like like pay that money because again, how big can it be? DevHub, I think it can still be again, that idea of we are the standard for what a web is is people can think of DevHub as websites and it's like, "Oh, your brand is on DevHub, we know you're good." Like, right today, if a company's using Cloudflare, one's like, "Oh, cool."”

  Mark A Michael·Mark A Michael on DevHub's Bet That Websites Are Now Written for Machines·at 29:29

• “Number two, like I said, companies, their valuations are much higher now. You have seed companies valued at 120 20 million, right? Uh you have other seed companies, depending on who the founder is, the cachet of the founder, um they're raising at a billion dollars or 950 million pre-money, then they get that that event that is post-money 1 billion, all right?”

  Israel Suero·Why Your First GTM Hire Beats Your First Engineer·at 27:21

• “They kept a good eye on their cap table and and their costs and it's a great business that doesn't need to be 500 billion dollars to be successful. So, I think we're going to see more dynamic entrepreneurial technology companies where, you know, Sunny, maybe you run three different vertical AIs as as the CEO. You have a small team behind them.”

  Shane Wilson·How A Football Star Conquered Frontier Tech — The Unexpected Leap·at 42:26

• “What we can tell you is that there's there's not that much competition in trying to be the tier 2 supplier to that drone company." And that usually um you know raises some ears. Um and uh we're also really lucky that there are a lot of family offices out there that particularly resonate with our mission and with the long-term orientation because a lot of the family offices the principal made their money in a very similar fashion.”

  Tanveer Kathawalla·Future of Robotics Depends on Boomer Businesses·at 14:26

• “That's really like seed to series A and also sometimes series B. Um and what I do there is I hop on their live deals. I help them discovery through close, um, while also building all of the stuff underneath.”

  Hannah Schloesser·She Hit 400 Percent of Quota, Then Quit·at 1:42

• “At the valuations, valuations, like you see companies right now raising at 120 million valuation, at 40 million valuation, right? Um, and and they're becoming unicorns sooner. If they do it right, they're becoming unicorns much sooner.”

  Israel Suero·Why Your First GTM Hire Beats Your First Engineer·at 26:16

• “It's a relationship building marketing strategy. It's not the event is just the container. But the whole purpose is actually a very, very precise journey of a customer, customer acquisition, or fundraising fundraising So, yeah.”

  Rime Salmi·The Real Deals Happen in the Side Room · Rime Salmi, fractl·at 34:24

• “That is how you get your valuation up, and when people see your car, they either become your investor or your uh clients. So, I'm I'm not just limited to my cars. I mean, I I can produce many other products as well, and so uh I think raising capital it's going to be harder for a lot of people.”

  Will Fan·Building the World's First Bitcoin Car·at 44:27

• “The only reason why you want to bring on venture capital. Now, angels are a different story. But with venture capital, the only reason you want to take take a dollar from us is if those dollars help you do in two years what would traditionally take you a dozen years to do.”

  Wolf Starr·Four Careers, Three Funds, One Bus Tour · Wolf Starr, The Venture Atlas·at 9:40

• “We're going to get the series A here, the series B here. They should have that same line in their head for IP. Here's what we're going to develop and get a patent on in which countries. here's what's going to be a trade secret and how all that lines up is important to me.”

  Daniel Gold·Why AI Apps Fail — Deep Tech Needs Wide IP Moats·at 28:16

• “I think the market's big enough that it's never going to be one player in fundraising at least to get started with. Um but, the distribution is super important. So, for me, like I always knew I was going to go through partnerships at least and and do a lot of that. So, startup communities and VCs and you name it, any ecosystem partners, um fractional providers, or even fundraising coaches, or anything like that.”

  Elizabeth Bikoff·Burnout, Bias & AI: How 155 Skydives Forged a Startup Founder·at 32:53