Fundraising is tough. On everyone. The founders burnout is so real, but I beleive it builds you a thick skin
Last week we announced that Dynamiq have raised a pre-seed round. Obviously, amazing news. So I've been talk to a few friends who are fundraising right now and they asked me how was it. Some people say "Oh, you're in #AI space, that might be so easy to raise capital these days". Short answer - it's not. That's why I wanted to share a bit of motivation to those who are raising now, mainly those early stage & first time founders. No matter if you're in AI or not, early stage or late stage. Fundraising is tough. Now or before it is and was always like that. If you think someone is raising capital in an instant - they're not. You just don't see the full picture. Fundraising is a constant rejection. And you need to prepare for that. It's also a numbers game. We've done over 110 calls before getting to couple of YESes. The hardest thing here is not to take all these rejections too personally and stay focused on what you're building. It's a very fine line between being almost delusional about your idea, but also having critical thinking kicking in once in a while to evaluate if you're actually on the right track. It's almost like in Stochastic Gradient Descent algorithm in Machine Learning - while processing the feedback it is very important to select a proper batch size and learning rate that moves you closer to the objective in the optimal timeframe. Remember that every person that ever gives you feedback on your startup (including VCs) is biased in one way or another. All of us have to certain extent distorted perception of reality. It's just psychology 101. VCs reject you not just because they don't like you - some of them are just out of money themselves but still taking calls, some just didn't fully understand your vision (maybe you need to practice your storytelling), some maybe are generalist and don't really understand your sector, some might have too much experience in this space and have seen failures and can't figure out how you're different. In my opinion people who succeeded are the ones who despite all the obstacles, negativity and objections keep pushing. Keep pushing.
