FundraisingHackers.com

🙋 Why I started Socap.ai (YC W23) as the top YC founder and what’s next Thanks all for the support during last week’s Socap.ai (YC W23) announcement! A lot of you were curious why I decided to start it after transitioning from CEO to a Board Member at Mighty Buildings (a top Y Combinator company) — here’s why 👇 I’m a rare founder who has been at the other side of the venture table (just to remind you, I started as a VC having founded a number of firms — Ruvento Ventures, EnchantVC, and HaxAsia to name a few — and have famously invested in 2 unicorns out of 17 seed investments while at Ruvento). Being a VC was fun and all, but I wanted a more interesting challenge. When we started Mighty, I couldn’t have imagined how complicated this road would be. As a deep tech company, we needed to raise A LOT of funding and needed to raise it fairly quickly. So far, Mighty has raised over $150M all the way from YC W16 to Series B in 2023. During this journey, I learned from the best of the best — at the YC Series A program and from the unicorn founders who have angel invested in us/advised us. Hundreds of people have helped me along the way with their generous feedback and, most importantly, intros/connections. I don’t think we would have been able to get there if not for my meticulous approach to parallel fundraising and activating/growing my social capital. I started Socap.ai (YC W23) because I grew tired of seeing founders completely misunderstanding what the successful fundraise looks like as well as lacking a quality way of growing their network. Oftentimes it’s a one-time opportunity and if you fuck up the process, that’s it. My mission with this is to change the mindset and make it 10x easier with the help of AI and the right kind of infrastructure (e.g. community). The tech startups scene and fundraising as the use-case is just the beginning for Socap.ai (YC W23) — I, my partner Alexander Nevedovsky, and our team (former VC associates and finance leaders) are so well-connected and well-versed in this beachhead market segment, that it would be stupid to start anywhere else, especially seeing founders pain every single day (I get around 50 connection requests daily from founders seeking help). I’m proud that along with the official Socap.ai announcement we have started hosting regular Socap.ai fundraising bootcamps as the initiative where founders can learn from me and a slew of other top founders (Abakar Saidov, Aaron Holm, Michael Ma, Salman Ahmad, Sly Spencer-Lee, Eric Sanchez to name just a few, there are dozens more whom I'll tag in the coming posts) — for free. We’re pioneering a more streamlined way for these top founders to share their social capital and help companies/founders they like, all powered by the AI platform we’re currently beta testing. Excited to kick off our bootcamp cohort #1 this Thursday — we’ve already started sending out first cohort acceptance letters — check them out if you applied! #fundraising #startups #socap

Socap.ai (YC W23) friends/partners (ULTRA.VC) are hosting a slew of events in Warsaw (🇵🇱) this week. Defo recommend to join 🔥

🙏 Thanks for your support on the announcement of Socap.ai (YC W23) last week — I can finally share pics from the offline fundraising meetup where I secretly unveiled Socap a few weeks back! We’ve gotten Product of the day on Product Hunt, hundreds of DMs/emails, and most importantly, over 300 wait-list applications. Our first Socap.ai-branded bootcamp (it’s free to join but subject to selection) kicks off this Thursday and tomorrow is the application deadline — so if you were waiting for a sign, now is the time. Sign up on our site or follow the link in the first comment. To various investors in my network (VCs/accelerators/syndicates etc) — we’re currently chatting with a bunch of our kind about supercharging the way investors help their portfolio/share connections with the help of our platform. If you want early access to Socap.ai — book a 1-1 call with me on our site.

Please support us as Socap.ai (YC W23) is coming out of stealth! 🤗 As experienced founders and investors (I am an ex-VC with 2 unicorns from a seed portfolio and a top YC founder who has raised $180M over his entrepreneurial career; Alexander Nevedovsky is a repeat AI founder with an exit and has helped dozens of founders to raise early-stage funding), we're constantly bombarded with emails/DMs from fellow founders asking for fundraising help and intros. We get it — fundraising is tough, especially in the current environment. There's so much advice that you don't even know who to listen to. With Socap.ai (YC W23), we make it at least 2 times easier by giving founders a proven YC-style "parallel fundraising" playbook (remember — we ourselves have raised over $200M using it), an accountable community, and exclusive access to the Socap.ai platform where you can easily manage and grow your founder/investor network for your fundraising needs and beyond. Dozens of top founders have already joined Socap.ai as community ambassadors and will be sharing their connections during bootcamp events and social capital sharing days. We're building Socap.ai (YC W23) with a community-first approach, and we need your support. Please upvote us as we're launching on Product Hunt and on socials and apply to our upcoming (free!) fundraising bootcamp kicking off on the 27th of June https://lnkd.in/eT3cFRsq 🎁 In return, we give away: 1 free fundraising coaching session with me and Alex 4 "skipping the wait-list" spots in our upcoming fundraising bootcamp ✋ To participate (and be eligible for the giveaway): Upvote Socap.ai on Product Hunt Leave a comment under this post and/or share this post Onwards!

Remember this iconic battle from Eminem’s 8 Mile? We’re going to recreate it but with #startups and elevator pitches during the offline #fundraising meetup on the 6th of June that I’m hosting together with SMOK Ventures and Ū Hub | Startup Community in Poland. This week is the deadline to apply as a startup — not only is it going to be super useful for founders, but it will also be quite fun. I would maybe join as one of the pitchers if the jury (myself included) chooses me haha. The format is having a tournament of 8/16 just like in sports. Each round you and your opponent get a random topic until the “final” winner is selected: 🧩 Problem/solution 📈 Market/opportunity/why now 🚀 Traction 👥 Team You win not by someone’s vote, but by everyone’s (audience) vote. Here’s the link to apply (if you’re chosen, you’ll get a free ticket — but competition is fierce, we already have more applicants than we can choose): https://lnkd.in/dfeyPTke P.S. Last chance to grab Early Birds tickets to the meetup, the link is in the first comment.

Portco update!

TGIF drop/announcement — I’m hosting a fundraising meetup in Warsaw, 🇵🇱 on the 6th of June. If you’re there and don’t come to the event, you’re going to regret it, I promise. We planned a bunch of things, but most importantly, finally a useful networking area with mingle mechanics and industry areas. 2nd key theme of the event is connecting founders and engineers from PL, UA, BY, EE, LV, LT, and beyond who gathered in Poland to build world-class products. Click “I’m attending this LinkedIn event” and make sure to register following the link in the first comment. PS. We’re gonna be hosting a “startup battle” tournament with 1-minute elevator pitches — only the best startups will be chosen — the deadline to apply is the end of next week. DM me for more info or follow the link in the second comment. Let's do this 🌈 Borys Musielak, Klim Khaletski, Veronika Lindorenko!

Excited for the future plans of another FundraisingHackers.com portco. If you're a football fan, you defo need to check them out. They're also hiring for a bunch of roles, DM me for a recommendation. Mariusz Gąsiewski Alexey Vorobey Eugene Sertukov LFG!

⁉️ Folks have asked me — why FundraisingHackers.com bootcamps? Why have you chosen this format and what motivates you to keep hosting them? Simply said — because they work. Founders actually learn a ton (and most importantly, do a ton) and fundraising becomes much easier (and more effective). A combination of 1-1 coaching and group accountability (plus office hours) is a really powerful booster. But honestly, what Slava Solonitsyn and I realized is that 1-2-3 month bootcamps are a perfect way to observe the founders — how organized they are, how confident they are, and how coachable they are. With bootcamps, we get to be their peers and not investors — which allows us to have much more intimate relationships (from the perspective of sharing struggles and challenges, of course — not the other thing you could have thought about). Since we don’t position the bootcamp as “we only support the top 1% of founders” the whole thing is much more democratized. We want to help underserved founders — and while we have a screening process, we only turn down folks who are not a good fit stage/context/culture-wise. We also treat bootcamps as a funnel for startups we would want to work with longer-term (as angels, advisors, or any other format). And this works too — I’m currently continuing to actively help a bunch of the founders post-bootcamps. On top of that, every FH member can always count on me to help them passively without asking for anything in return. And yeah — we don’t want to do all of the above for free for a very simple reason — lack of accountability from all sides. We’ve made it a point to actively share free content with you, and the community, and have already executed our promise — hosting webinars, sharing playbooks, etc (if you haven’t yet received links from me, comment with “ ” below and I'll do my best to send them to you). But there’s so much more we can share that simply can’t be recorded. Before that, Slava only shared private stuff in a 1-1 context via coaching/advising, but now we’re doing this as part of the bootcamp because we know and trust our community members. And of course, since we’re doing this, we at least want people to value it from the time commitment perspective, thus the price to joining the bootcamp. To put it mildly — we don’t want to have folks who don’t value our experience as cohort members. #fundraising #startups

If you’re actively raising/preparing for the fundraise from VCs, this is your chance to not fuck up and get a quality boost from me and Slava Solonitsyn. We have a few last spots left in the 2nd cohort of our fundraising bootcamp 🫠 You’ll be joining an amazing group of ex-Amazon/Nvidia/Yandex seed-stage founders with projects ranging from SaaSes to deeptech to consumer. Most founders have raised some funding before but not necessarily from VCs. With our bootcamps, accountability from other cohort members is one of the main magical moments founders experience. Maybe this is the nudge you were waiting for — in that case, DM me and we’ll try to schedule a quick 10-min screening chat later today/tomorrow (the kick-off is tomorrow, and the first workshop is on Sunday). The link to the bootcamp site with more info is in the comments. The previous (1st) cohort included 14 startups across Seed, Seed /Series A stages (and US/Europe/Asia) participated, including Y Combinator alums and exited founders. A bunch of them have already successfully raised. Some are in the process right now. Some have postponed their raise saving them a bunch of time/nerves not spent on failed fundraising. Here’s more info about the bootcamp: https://lnkd.in/dtkTrZFJ #fundraising #startups #YC