How to Raise VC Money

My journey really started when I was around 12 years old. My mum asked me, "What do you want to do in the world, Gian?" And with the naivety every child has, I said I wanted to make the biggest impact in the world. Whilst I haven't necessarily done that yet, it's always stuck with me — pretty much every decision I've ever made has come back to: can I make an impact in the world with what I'm trying to do?

So by 18 I'd built five companies before the age of 21 — an amalgamation of everything from tech, to different hiring services, to a pro bono consulting company, to an app for students. I tried all the things you could do under the sun. Then I moved to Canada and started two biotechnology companies there, Trait Biosciences and Pebble Labs. That was amazing — we raised $60 million, got to Series A, hired about 15 scientists — and it let me take a real part in the health and biotech industries and make as much of an impact as I could.

At Series A, I realised I really wanted to start my own company, and I knew I wanted to go back to the UK, where I'm from. So I moved back, but I didn't really know what I wanted to focus on. The next best thing was VC — building the network, understanding the other side of the table. My thinking was: two or three years down the line, leave the venture firm and go build another venture-backed company, but as the CEO. That was always the goal.

I joined Octopus Ventures, one of Europe's largest venture capital firms, and helped build out their health team — from a standing-still team of three to, I think now, a team of seven, one of the most active health investors in Europe. I did around $200 million of investments whilst there, all within health. It was an amazing experience.

But the thing that completely changed what I'm doing now — which is funny, because I'm still in the VC industry — is that whilst I was a VC I saw the best founders you could imagine, the ones who've gone on to build hundred-million and billion-dollar companies. I saw the ten-year journeys it took them, the stresses, what it really costs. And I also saw the founders who weren't the best. It was hard for me, because I'd spent a decade getting to the point where I thought I was going to be a health venture-backed founder. And around December 2019 I realised: this whole ten-year journey to the point where I thought I'd start a company — it's not me. I'm not that founder, and I'm never going to be. I'm much better in a more advisory, teaching role, playing a more indirect part in this industry.

That was really hard, but it was also a weight lifted off my shoulders. Then 2020 happened — COVID — and in August 2020 I quit my job. By February 2021, I realised I really loved just speaking to founders and helping them with fundraising. So for the last year and a half I've been helping founders fundraise — over $80 million raised in the last year, and going forward from there.

I'm battling with it right now, honestly. It's always going to be the lack of stability. And it's actually harder for me now, because I'm a solo founder and I've never dealt with that — I always had people around me, co-founders, or at least a team, and now I'm by myself. But yes, it's the lack of stability, or control of the future. You don't know what's going to happen, and even on the same day it can be going amazingly and then horribly. You have to take a step back and look at the last six months to a year and ask, "Have I grown?" That's hard to do — it's just human nature — and I definitely find it hard.

Yeah, 100%. It was one of the reasons I left VC, actually — it was a normal nine-to-five, and there was less autonomy as you got more senior. If you ask me my political leaning, I'm not really political, but I'm libertarian if you want to call me that. It's deep in my body that I hate authority and being told what to do — I've been like that since about the age of 12. So it's just my personality type; I prefer to do my own thing in my own way. For example, I hated KPIs. I know KPIs are so important — I'd look for founders who have them — but for me personally, that was another reason I didn't want to be a VC-backed founder. I'd hate it. I'd be depressed and burnt out so fast.

Oh, that's hard. I still think it's one of the best jobs in the world as a nine-to-five. The best part is meeting the founders — that was always my favourite thing, and I'm glad I still do it. Being able to meet founders who are fundamentally changing the world — and, as a health investor, seeing actual evidence that patients are doing better — that was always my favourite part.

The worst part is kind of the same thing — it's the double-edged sword of VC. You're investing in founders trying to change the future of the world, which feels amazing. But frankly, 60–70% of it is luck. You can never really know if you're making the right bets, and you won't know for seven-plus years. Yes, there's a success when you get the investment done and they're in the portfolio — but that's really just the start of the journey. You don't know if you're succeeding at that point. There's no real moment of "wow, I've done well, I'm going to make the fund and myself loads of money and change the world for the better," because in two years' time that company could be dead.

The second one, which is related: for the really good founders, multiple firms are chasing them. I lost, I think, three different companies to Atomico — we were battling, and I took two from them too. You can spend two or three months with a founder, really get into it, think "I love this founder, I love what he or she is trying to do, I believe in the vision" — and then they go with someone else. That's really hard, because you've spent so much time on it and got nothing from it.

At Octopus we were very data-driven. We had a CRM, we had data points, we'd look at the whole funnel for the fund — how many decks we saw, how many turned into first meetings, first to second meetings, and so on. In the health team we did the same. Deal flow is everything in VC. If you can see every single company raising seed to Series A that year, then it's just about how good your choices are. But if you're only seeing 50% of the companies and they're all the worst ones, you're in a bad pickle. So there was a lot of "have we seen all these companies? Why did we switch off the ones that turned out successful? What was our unconscious bias in that decision?"

Two things we really focused on. First, the Dunning-Kruger effect — I'll butcher the definition, but it's basically when someone thinks they know a lot about a topic when they actually don't; they think they're an expert and they're a novice, and they make all the wrong decisions from it. That is rife in VC, because we're incredibly high-level and yet we're told we're the best people in the world because we have all the money — so the ego runs really high. We were trying to get away from Dunning-Kruger and build much better decision-making.

The second is unconscious bias in decision-making generally. Whether a partner says yes or no, and then me, slightly more junior, feeling I should say yes because the partner did — so we used things like blind voting to counteract that. You have to build those systems as the foundation. But at the very top it still has to be: do I believe in this founder, and can I build a relationship?

On relationships, there was actually a recent study on what VCs think founders want from them versus what founders actually want — and it's quite different. One of the biggest things founders want, which VCs miss, is being more personal about the founder's vision. Not just talking about the investment — instead saying, "Let's just have an hour-long meeting about the vision and how we're going to get there." Being personal about what they're trying to do, how hard it's going to be, and showing you'll be there to help throughout the journey — that really helps with founders.

The first thing to realise is that pre-Series A — really pre-seed through Series A — everything about the future of your company is uncontrollable. At seed, the numbers show about 70% of companies pivot before Series A, so even if you invest at seed, the company is probably going to change. Everything is up to chance: either there's a lack of evidence because it's so early — they're pre-launch or a year in — or they're pointing at market data on something they're actually trying to change, so it makes no sense. Market sizings are pretty much bullshit the whole time. And if it's not those, it's directly affected by the founder themselves.

So every single investor, when they invest, 60–70% of the reason is the founder. The biggest thing that goes into a pitch — what made me and my team excited out of the thousands of companies we saw — always comes back to pitching yourself as a founder rather than your company. It's not about what your company does, especially in the first few meetings. It's who you are as a founder, why you're doing what you're doing, and how you're going to do it. That's what makes someone excited. Change your pitch to a story around that, rather than the boring "here are the ten things a VC wants, I'll knock them out and show what my company does" — as if investors are illogical beings who can't understand what's good or bad.

When I speak to my clients, I say a founder needs four tenets in their personality. The first is authenticity: the ability to show your deep, personal reason for building your company. That's the foundation — it gets someone on board thinking, "I really like this person, I know they'll walk through walls." At Octopus we literally called it "walking through walls." It's built from the founder's origin story, showing deeply why you're doing this — not really your résumé or your company.

The second is logic: showing the uncontroversial steps for how you'll do it — how you're building the company, what culture you're setting.

The third is empathy — being empathetic to the person in front of you. I've seen so many founders pitch as if the investor is a customer, as if they're in the industry, have dealt with the problem, and understand everything down to the T. That's not true — investors are very high-level. So there are two parts to empathy: showing, not telling — showing why they should be excited about the future; and making the investor play into that future. If I'm the investor and you're the founder, you want me to feel that if I invest in you, the future is going to be better — not just the company's future, but my future. "I'm meant to be the health investor, and this is going to be the health company in Europe, so I have to invest, because it's best for me."

The last one is the hardest, but it sets everything up — I'd call it the X factor: relevancy. Showing that you are the exact person, at the exact right time, with the exact expertise, to be doing this. Combined with the first three — especially authenticity, that deep "why" — that's something else, out of all the founders I've ever seen.

But it comes back to authenticity. He said it directly — "this is going to be a massive company, I'm going to make you lots of money" — and he wasn't hiding it. That was authentic, and it showed authenticity. So sure, if that's your reason, be authentic about it. But you need to deeply understand why you're building your company, and if you're not willing to do that, you're not going to win. Building a company — especially a venture-backed one, but any company — is very, very hard. Even if you succeed and sell for a billion-plus, you'll have multiple years, or at least months, where it drops off and you feel like it's going to fail. The only thing that really keeps you going is your deep why — do I believe in the future and the vision I'm trying to build, and can I carry on through the hardships?

You only really find out if a founder is good during the hard times. That's what we found at Octopus. During the good times it's easy — you're growing three times a year, you're on the trajectory, that's great. But when COVID happens, or another black swan, or your revenue drops by half and you need layoffs — like what's happening now with the recession — that's when you find out whether someone can push forward and still succeed in the vision.

The worst pitches are always the blocky ones. They've Googled "the ten things a VC wants," made a pitch deck around it, and it doesn't tell a story — "this is the first thing I'll say, this is the second, this is the third." It doesn't flow, it bores people. I always say the worst pitches are pitches. In any investor meeting, you shouldn't really be pitching — you should be pitching in the sense of getting a conversation going. If you want to succeed at fundraising, you want to invite people to think to themselves, "Wow, that future — I really want that." Then it's not about the ten-item checklist; it's "how can we get to that point, how can we work together?" Or, "I've had this thought about it — have you thought about this?" If you get to that conversation, you're not talking about the risks, you're not talking about the checklist that doesn't mean anything — you're talking about the opportunity and how you work together to get there. That's all you really need to do.

It depends. There are amazing tools now to build beautiful decks — Beautiful.ai, Canva, Pitch — so you don't necessarily need a proper pitch-deck designer. But most founders I've seen using PowerPoint, frankly, the decks look horrible, and that's really bad, because the deck is an extension of yourself and the first thing an investor sees. If an investor sees a PowerPoint you haven't even converted to PDF — too much information, straight from the '90s — I'd instantly switch off. I'd think, this founder doesn't know what they're doing. So from a design point, make it look nice, but you don't need to spend money if you don't have it.

The more important part — the part you can really improve, and one of the things I help founders with — is the content of the deck: telling the story. About 90% of founders failing with a deck fail because it's a checklist. A first meeting with a VC exists to get them to say, "This is an interesting company, I want to chat to him or her, let's go from there." That's the biggest thing founders miss. How do you build a story around your deck, make it simple and concise for someone who doesn't know your world? If you've got that in a deck, that's all it's really there for — and from then on it's about improving yourself as a founder, not your deck, that gets you the investment.

Take checkout software, or logistics — lorries going across the world. There are companies with hundreds of millions of investment in freight; on paper it's not that sexy. But what's sexy is the potential of the company. That's what founders miss when they don't tell their story. First there's the founder origin story — the deep personal reason you started. Then the company story — why this company is going to be big. It may not be sexy, but you show the trends and the data points to prove it's going to be a massive company.

The best storytellers meld both. Most founders tell analogies or customer stories but don't show them, and don't weave in the data. You need both — the story to resonate with the emotional brain, and the data points to satisfy the logical brain that this makes sense. The best storytellers I've seen tell stories and analogies, show customers, build stories around everything they do — but they build all of it around real data points they've actually collected.

I spent a lot of years focusing on improving my weaknesses — authority, KPIs, deadlines, all that stuff. I focused too much on it, and it took away from my strengths, which are more the personal side. The biggest thing I've learned from life and work is that you should work on your weaknesses and get them to a certain point, but the diminishing returns hit quite fast. You waste a lot of time trying to level yourself out, and you spend less time on your strengths. So improve your weaknesses to the point where they're not detrimental — then go gung-ho on your strengths. For me, that meant changing completely the kind of company I'm trying to build, around my strengths, rather than shoehorning myself into something I'm never going to succeed in.

I completely agree, and I think it is a problem. Having a founder brand — or investor brand, whatever it is — definitely helps deal flow. Two things. First, culture. In the US, Twitter has always been a big driver — VCs have used it to get jobs — whereas it just wasn't the same in the UK. Part of that is the type of investors: I was an ex-founder when I became a VC, and I was a rarity. There were far more bankers and ex-consultants in the European VC industry, which is ridiculous when you think about it — it should be the other way round. Founders make better investors, in my view, although the data doesn't necessarily suggest that.

The second reason is the maturity of the industry. European VC has only really skyrocketed in the last five years — probably closer to three. Before that it was small, and if you were a big fund you got pretty much all the deal flow, because there weren't many funds around. Everyone went to the same funds. But now there are a lot of funds — people like Harry Stebbings who have the founder brand on lock — coming in. The US always had competition, so you had to build something. Europe didn't, but now you're seeing more of it, and that's driving the shift.

It depends what you mean. If you're talking about internal systems, how you work, the unconscious-bias checks — sure, that was objective. But when you actually invest in a company, probably 60% is feelings.

There's definitely that. But if you go down that road, you get smaller and smaller, down to a single founder — and founders are very different, especially across industries. A deep-tech founder is going to be completely different from a B2C founder, and that's fine; it'd be ridiculous if they weren't. So I'd caveat it. It's that relevancy — the X factor — that really moves mountains for a founder, and you'll miss out on a lot of founders if you try to over-systematise it. A great example is underrepresented founders and the unconscious bias there. Internally, what your brain does when you only invest in white founders is: "I know this one thing works, so I'll invest in this." But you're missing an amazing section of founders who can build amazing companies and aren't getting the funding they need. I can't speak for every VC fund — we didn't do that at Octopus — but I'd be wary of trying to objectify something that's still emotion-based.

Atomic Habits by James Clear is one of my favourite books ever — amazing for trying to improve my habits, which can be bad sometimes. And I'm not going to talk about the most common ones — Zero to One and so on, that every founder has read to their teeth — but the book that really resonated with me, as an ex-founder, now building my own company, and thinking back on the founders who were successful, is What You Do Is Who You Are by Ben Horowitz, the founder of a16z.

It's all about culture building and how you set up your culture for success. For me, in the same way the founder is the only controllable part for an investor deciding whether to invest, it's the same for a founder: culture and hiring are the most important things when you're scaling. If you fail at hiring in the early stage, it can literally make or break your company. If you fail at culture, it can make your company fail — even two or three years down the line. It's a really slept-on book, and it's the most important thing you can do when scaling your company.