Fundraising

When I meet first-time entrepreneurs, almost every initial conversation eventually turns to “How and where do I look for angel investors”? It’s the elephant in the room. The Everest all founders looking for funding must climb, whether or not they know how to rock climb and whether or not they have experience with extreme temperatures and altitude.

An accelerator is a school that helps entrepreneurs get their venture to the next stage. Most importantly, accelerators prepare founders for the Demo day where they can raise their next round of financing. These schools are most useful for founders with little startup experience or for foreign startups looking to enter new markets. When you have to sift through the many accelerator programs offered, it is easy to get confused. Luckily, in this article and the corresponding video, we put together eight criteria you can consider when deciding which accelerator is the best fit for you.

Determining how much equity to give co-founders or contributors is not easy. On one hand, you want to fairly reward people for taking the risk, believing in you and helping you build your company from scratch. On another, you want to create the right incentives and only offer equity to those who are committed to your company’s success long-term.

To determine the size of your financing round, not only do you have to consider the length of time for which you are raising capital, but to also figure out which costs you should and should not include. In this article, and the corresponding video, we discuss how to properly calculate your funding needs and we specifically focus on those costs that startup founders often forget, which results in them running out of cash and scrambling for funds much earlier than they are ready to raise the next round.

Many founders often ask me how much money they should raise – especially when it comes to their first funding round. Should they aim to cover three, six, twelve, or eighteen months of operations? Unfortunately, there is no silver bullet. The rule of thumb is that you should raise enough capital to get you to the next milestone and those milestones, and the amount of money required to reach them, vary from company to company.

In this article and the corresponding video, we discuss the top five mistakes entrepreneurs make in their pitch decks.

Many startup founders don’t fully understand why it is important to have a company valuation, especially at an early stage. We demonstrate how a company valuation affects the amount of control you, as a founder, are going to have and how much money you end up making in case of an exit with a help of a fictional example.

In a market hungry for immediate results, there is always pressure to grow quickly. But is that always the right thing for the company’s overall strategy and long-term prospects? Here are four situations where rapid growth can backfire.

Human creativity knows no bounds. However, not all great ideas can and should be turned into successful businesses. How exactly can you tell if you have a winner? In this blog and the corresponding video, we present a five-step framework you can use to determine if your idea is viable enough to pursue it further.

The Startup Station is committed to helping you put together credible financials for your early-stage venture. And yet, most early-stage investors say that they don’t consider pro-forma projections for pre-revenue companies as part of their investment decision. So am I just wasting your time when I teach you how to properly formulate assumptions, how to translate your business plan into a financial plan, or how to evaluate the financial feasibility of your business model?