Firebase fundraising lessons learned | Hacker News Reader

Firebase fundraising lessons learned

blog.firebase.com

54 pointsmayop10011 comments

Someone please say something intelligent but not begrudging about the fact that only having to spend 27 days raising $1.1 million is such an abnormally short time frame that while interesting the "lessons learned" will probably not be transferrable to the vast majority of entrepreneurs.

Why do you think that? If you're focusing 100% on raising money and taking meetings every day, 4-5 weeks spent fundraising is about average, at least in Silicon Valley.

If I'm reading his post correctly, it took Gabriel Weinberg 4 months to raise his round, and he still called it quick and painless: http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2011/10/what-i-learned-f...

Angel and VC are completely different fundraising processes.

An angel might commit to invest $50K after one 45 minute meeting. A VC could give you $5M, but it will always take multiple meetings, thorough due diligence, the approval of all the partners, etc.

In your opinion, what is the best way to contact an angel?

The best intros to investors came to us from our customers.

Have you ever raised large amounts of funding? (I see you have a $45k seed on your current company) A month has been pretty standard in my experience, even raising larger (A) rounds.

Fundraising is a big drain on founding team bandwidth, so there's obviously incentive to get it done as soon as possible.

I succeeded at failing to raise money for our company, but spent a long time doing it.

If it takes much longer, it's probably because it's a company that should be raising, or that the company failed to properly prime interest prior to fundraising. Once you begin fundraising, it's extremely, extremely bad for the process to draw out. From the first time you ask for term sheets, you should be able to fill the round fast.

I guess it does matter if we are counting the "prime interest" part of the equation or not.

1 month is a reasonable amount of time when you have the head start of YC demo day, or something equivalent, which conveniently corrals 100+ investors to sit down and listen to your pitch with an expectation that your odds of success are higher-than-average.

If you don't have that, though, you need to spend time lining up enough interested investors in a short enough time window to build up that artificial sense of scarcity, and that can take a lot more than 1 month.

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