Fun Raising

Grant brings a rare perspective to the fundraising conversation because he came up through the industrial world, not finance. He started in oil field operations, worked pipeline infrastructure across Texas, Louisiana, Pennsylvania, and beyond, then helped build out a corporate venture arm from scratch before joining 8090. That hands-on background means he's evaluating founders less on polished dec...

Brett's approach to pre-seed investing is built entirely around the founder, not the idea. At a stage where most companies have little to no traction, he goes straight to the team slide and digs for founder-market fit, how the team met, and why this specific group of people will push through when things get hard. His take on pitch meetings is equally refreshing: he doesn't want a presentation, he...

Josh brings a unique lens to deal sourcing that most founders simply don't understand. Rather than chasing hot sectors or famous brands, he actively looks for what others are missing, reasoning that the majority of early-stage venture capital lives in the Bay Area, and whatever that community can't or won't think about is exactly where the overlooked opportunities hide. His investment themes, rang...

Philip Carson brings a refreshingly contrarian perspective to fundraising from the jump: most startups shouldn't be raising venture capital in the first place. Rather than treating VC as the default path, he pushes founders to honestly assess whether they actually need outside capital or whether they're chasing the idea of being a venture-backed founder. This framing sets the tone for an episode f...

Arthur's most distinctive contribution in this episode is his "campaign plan" framework, borrowed directly from his Marine Corps background. Rather than just pitching a product vision, he wants founders to show a sequenced, interdependent plan where each milestone unlocks the next. He shares a real example of a three-month-old defense startup that already had a mapped path to their first program o...

Brandes brings a refreshingly candid perspective on what early-stage investors actually care about, and it might surprise you. When she opens a pitch deck, she scrolls straight to the team slide and almost nothing else. Not the market size, not the financials, not the roadmap. Just the team. For a fund like Also Capital that writes concentrated inception-stage checks, they are making a bet on a pe...

Ethan brings a rare dual lens to this conversation: he spent years as a founder who couldn't get a meeting, then became a managing director at Techstars, where he reviewed thousands of pitches. That combination gives him a clear-eyed view of what actually moves the needle versus what founders obsess over that doesn't matter. His most counterintuitive point: the pitch deck is mostly a red herring....

Eric brings a refreshingly practical framing to fundraising: it is a process, not a pitch. He emphasizes that founders should treat every phase, from outreach to diligence to closing, as a structured workflow. That means building a list of 50 to 100 firms, drilling down to the right individual at each fund (not just the fund itself), and staying on top of communications with a simple tracking syst...

Adam's biggest throughline is that how a VC behaves during the fundraising process is exactly how they will behave as a partner for the next decade. He is unusually direct about this, encouraging founders to treat the diligence phase as a mutual interview and to do back-channel reference checks on investors just as VCs do on founders. He gives a sharp breakdown of the VC landscape too, suggesting...

Jakob brings a refreshingly practical, no-nonsense perspective to early-stage investing, shaped by building his own community-based fund in El Segundo, the hardware and defense-tech hub that grew out of SpaceX's roots in LA. Unlike most VCs, Discipulus runs a physical two-week residency that front-loads the relationship-building, network access, and demo day prep that most founders spend 6-12 mont...

Turner Novak is one of the most unique voices you'll hear in early-stage VC. As a solo GP at Banana Capital writing $100K-$250K checks, he operates more like a founder than a traditional fund partner, and that perspective shapes everything he says. He's built an audience of nearly 200,000 followers across social platforms, and he actively uses that distribution to help portfolio founders get in fr...

Emily Lindberg brings a genuinely rare perspective to the VC world -- a PhD in biomechanics from UC Berkeley who transitioned into venture through Nucleate, a student-run VC focused on bio companies. That scientific background shapes everything about how Undeterred evaluates deals, and Emily is refreshingly candid about what that means in practice. She emphasizes that even when a fund loves your t...

Leo brings a rare combination to the table: technical depth as a mechanical engineer with a PhD from MIT, operator experience as a former founder, and the analytical rigor of a McKinsey diligence background. That blend makes his fundraising advice unusually grounded. Where many investors speak in generalities, Leo is specific. He walks founders through how to build their investor CRM, explaining w...

Leo brings a rare dual perspective to fundraising advice: he thinks like an engineer and communicates like an investor. One of the most useful threads throughout the episode is his emphasis on respecting a VC's time and attention. With 50 to 100 cold emails landing in his inbox every week, Leo makes it clear that founders who stand out do so not by explaining everything upfront, but by treating th...

Mike Steadman is not your typical VC. A former Marine infantry officer, three-time national boxing champion, and self-described "underdog and misfit," Mike came up through bootstrapping businesses before landing at Context VC as a venture partner -- a path that gives him a sharp eye for what separates founders who get funded from those who don't. His advice throughout this episode is grounded, tac...

Jesse brings a rare dual perspective to this episode. Having built and sold his own company before becoming a VC, he speaks to founders as someone who has genuinely sat on both sides of the table. One of the most refreshing threads throughout the conversation is his honesty about what VCs actually go off of at the pre-seed stage: almost nothing. With data rooms described as "ghost towns," Jesse ex...