James' World 2

1. Don’t wait for perfection

“Don’t be afraid to invite people in at the ground floor. I think sometimes you can feel like you have to wait until the thing is built and it’s perfect, and it’s out in the world, and it’s successful. But I think the way you build something quick, and the way you make something successful is by inviting the right people in at the ground level.” —Elaine Welteroth, founder of birthFUND, a maternal health investment initiative, raised $1.85 million.

2. Pitch your partners

“The biggest problem with agriculture is that it’s highly consolidated. There’s just a handful of companies that sell to farmers, and they really don’t want to sell anything new. But farmers are actually great at adopting technology, they’re incredibly open-minded. We just needed to figure out how to get our technology into farmers’ hands as fast as possible. We pitched our tech to John Deere and they ended up leading our Series A. It’s an incredible partnership because we’re doing something that fits 100 percent into their strategic initiatives, and they help us increase our brand awareness.” —Shely Aronov, co-founder and CEO of InnerPlant, an agriculture tech company developing biosensing plants, raised $51.65 million.

3. Lead with belief

“Don’t be intimidated by fundraising. If you go in with energy and enthusiasm for something that you’re really passionate about and you truly believe that what you’re doing is needed, the people who are considering giving you money will want to learn more.” —Georgia Gaveras, co-founder and chief medical officer of Talkiatry, a digital mental health provider, raised $242 million.

4. Put clients before capital

“Your best investor is your client. If your clients are happy with your product, you will always have—like in the case of Creatio—a ton of investors who will be knocking [on] your doors and will be excited to invest in you. When you’re laser-focused on clients from day one—finding new clients, serving them, making them your raving fans, making them absolutely excited about the product, developing relationships with your clients—when all your focus and attention goes not into your personal PR, not into speaking engagements, startup competitions, and the fanciest products, but literally into your clients, it all starts working as a flywheel. Because clients, they actually bring life to your company, because it’s the best evidence that what you deliver actually brings value, and that’s the most important thing.” —Katherine Kostereva, founder and CEO of Creatio, a no-code platform for workflow automation and CRM, raised $268 million

5. Prove it with product

“In a venture business, there’s a lot of unconscious and conscious bias for women out there. When I first tried to raise money, I had a VC telling me, ‘I’m a Caucasian guy with gray hair. How can you raise funding for a company without even a single gray hair, and without being a Caucasian man?’ And I was like, ‘Well, you can raise money without a product, but I would rather raise money with a product.’ Eventually, we became one of the most successful companies in our portfolio.” —Siyu Huang, co-founder and CEO of Factorial Energy, a developer of solid-state battery tech, raised $250 million

6. Know what you want

“It’s also really important to understand what’s in fundraising for you. What kind of business do you want, ultimately, what kind of money do you want to make? It’s important that what you personally want is also aligned with what the investors want, and then it’s much easier to succeed. If actually what you want isn’t quite what the investors are looking for, they’ll see that, and it will be very difficult to fundraise.” —Madison Maxey, founder and CEO of Loomia, a materials science company focused on e-textiles, raised $2 million

7. Be the pioneer

“You get very few opportunities to be the first person to do something. It’s a thrill, but sometimes the pathway is so uncharted and the white space is so vast that I think there’s too much opportunity. The most difficult part of building a business on the cutting edge is there’s no playbook to follow. It’s harder to tell if you’re deploying your first-mover advantage in the right way or focusing on the right opportunity within this huge opportunity set.” —Jiani Zeng, co-founder and CPO of Butlr, an anonymous occupancy detection platform for traffic monitoring, raised $68 million