135. Fundraising Friends feat. Neha Govindraj, CEO @ Bonside

One of the things that I did prior to fundraising that I found to be extremely helpful through the fundraising process is I identified someone in my network that I trusted and respected the opinion of as it related to fundraising, either because they were a venture investor or another founder. Actually I had one for both so I had someone that was a venture capitalist and one that was a founder. And I decided that they were going to be my friends in this process, and I wasn't going to ask them for any introductions from the founder side, and I wasn't gonna ask them for any capital for the venture capitalist. And what that enabled me to do is I could truly talk to them unfiltered. Because when you're fundraising, you're always selling. It would be too much pressure if I, said, Hey, I'm gonna talk to my venture capitalist friend, and, you know, you start off the process and you're being totally unfiltered, then you ask them for an intro. And then if something doesn't go well, you feel uncomfortable, kind of going back to them and telling them about things that didn't work and then asking them for another intro. With the founder friend, I didn't need to explicitly say it like I wasn't like, Hey, I'm never gonna ask you for an intro. But I just didn't do it and that was never the expectation. With my venture capitalist friend, I told them. I said, I'm never gonna pitch your firm. I just don't want that dynamic. I wanna know that I can go to my venture capitalist friend for any advice, the good or the bad, and they will give me their candid reply cuz they don't feel like they need to introduce me to anyone or anything like that. And then, same with my founder friend. And I found that I was able to extract way more value from my founder friend and my venture capitalist friend by structuring it that way. Because they were just like, okay, pressure's off, I can just like blindly help Neha without having to think about what does this actually mean for the introductions that I'm gonna be making. For me, it was important to have someone that was in the industry that I could go to with that stuff because I wanted reactions and thoughts, and I wanted to like trust it, versus just a friend that was totally separate from it all that I could vent to. And I'm so glad I did it that way. There's just so many VC funds out there and it was really nice to have someone on the inside that I could go to, and really get unfiltered advice from without having to think about, wait, would you invest in me? Do you agree with this person? I could just blindly trust their opinion too.