What Cooking Can Teach You About Fundraising

Sep 27

I love to cook. Large parties, small groups or just for myself — I’ll cook any chance I get. It’s one of the things that recharges me.

There are many important lessons from cooking that apply to fundraising — so let’s have some fun! Here are 6 things cooking can teach you about fundraising:

1. Preparation Makes All the Difference

The best chefs spend as much time doing prep work as they do actually cooking. When you’re in the midst of a complex cook, you don’t have time to stop and chop ingredients. Everything needs to be ready to go.

The same is true in fundraising.

If you’re planning to run a high-velocity fundraising process (which is what most Pre-Seed, Seed and Series A rounds should generally be), then you won’t have time to make things up as you go along. Your deck, data room, fundraising CRM and fully-qualified investor funnel must be ready to go before you take a single meeting.

As Benjamin Franklin famously said, “By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.”

2. Presentation Matters

Any VC who tells you that it doesn’t matter what a deck looks like is lying.

That’s not to say that you should go and spend thousands of dollars on a professional designer for your deck (you shouldn’t). But presentation is important. First impressions matter and your deck is often the first impression that an investor has about you and your company.

Whether VCs admit or not, design absolutely has an impact on their reaction when they literally review hundreds of decks each week. In particular, investors are very observant when it comes to your attention to detail (or lack thereof). If a deck has spelling or grammatical mistakes, the slides aren’t aligned correctly or the images are pixelated, it’s distracts from the message you’re trying to convey.

On the other hand, a well-designed deck can add emphasis to key points in your story and make sure that investors come away with a solid understanding of your business. A well-designed deck isn’t going to guarantee you get a meeting, but with the prevalence of free/cheap tools to create good decks and solid imagery, there’s simply no excuse to not come correct.

3. Practice Makes Perfect

Even the simplest techniques and dishes take a long time to perfect. Your fundraising pitch is no different.

I’ve smoked a lot of ribs over the years…

It’s important that you practice your pitch with as many people as you can before you start fundraising. Start with existing investors, advisors and other founders. Make sure you practice with people who don’t already know what you do. Ask them to repeat back to you their takeaways to make sure that you’re getting your key points across.

Then, start your process with at least 5 - 10 investors that you don’t really care about. You’ll get different questions and have a different experience when you’re talking to someone who’s genuinely considering investing (while giving yourself enough meetings to get comfortable, knowing that you’ll probably screw the first few up).

4. Time Things Right

When you’re preparing a meal, different components will take different lengths of time to cook. Some items might take only a few minutes while others take hours. Making sure you get the timing right is the difference between everything coming together nicely and half of the items on the plate being cold.

24-hour brisket, 6-hour ribs, 2 hours for the chicken wings and 45 minutes for stuffed portabello mushrooms. All at 250º.

The best founders manage their fundraising process with the same level of intentionality.

VCs who’ve never met you before might need several meetings to come up to speed, while investors who already know you can make a relatively quick decision. Understanding each firm’s decision process and how far along they are, and then strategically controlling when each and every meeting takes place (relatively to other VCs) is how the best founders drive towards multiple term sheets at the same time. If you lose control of the process or let investors dictate the timing, you can end up with a term sheet from one firm before others are far enough along to make a decision.

5. Quality of Ingredients

The quality of the ingredients has a massive impact on the final result for any recipe. Whether it’s fresh, locally-sourced produce or grass-fed, free range meat, you can taste the difference.

The same is true in fundraising. At the end of the day, VCs are looking to invest in great companies. Focusing on your “ingredients” (revenue, unit economics, customer satisfaction and case studies, etc.) will have far more of an impact on your fundraising result than anything else.

6. Show Your Personality

Investors see hundreds of decks each month. Most are bland and formulaic. Leaning into your startup’s personality — whatever that is — can help you be memorable.

If you’re creative, be creative! If you’re super nerdy, be super nerdy!

Fundraising

Chris Neumann