This is Andrew Gunderman’s weekly newsletter, a place to find his upcoming events, news, and to read about technology, business / startups, economics, and investing.

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👀 Who is Andrew Gunderman?

I am a young entrepreneur who raised venture capital for the first time at 21 and dropped out of college that same year. I sold my first company at 23.

I also host both private and public events for celebrities, professional athletes, influencers, elected government officials, business magnates, and more. Many thousands of people have attended my events all over the country, and I've raised hundreds of thousands of dollars in sponsorship.

I was named on the Inno 25 Under 25 list for 2023. You can find me in Entrepreneur, Forbes, Inno Magazine, and more.

🎉 My Upcoming Events

• The Quarterly Penthouse Series is the premier private event in Chicago aiming to be THE event for the most accomplished people in the city. Featuring professional athletes, celebrities, influencers, business magnates, high ranking and elected government officials, and more. These events feature guests worth billions of dollars and who have millions of social media followers.

  • Early March - For extremely accomplished individuals in any field

• Renowned Chicago is the premier private community for established influencers & content creators in Chicago. Our community represents a membership with a cumulative 80 million followers on socials.

  • Mid April - For established influencers or content creators making any type of content (30k minimum followers or some major accomplishments)

That’s it for now! If you’re interested in attending an event just respond to this email and let me know. However, all of my events are curated for specific groups of people, so if you’re not in an event’s target group don’t expect an invite.

😀 The End-to-end guide on how to run a fundraising process

I see a bunch of content on the internet that talks about fundraising, but I rarely see an actual end to end guide of actionable tips on how to run a legit process. I have tried to put that together in this guide, to the best of my ability, using knowledge I’ve gained from friends who have raised billions and from my own experience raising for multiple things. This advice is tailored towards startups, but I have used it to raise money for non-profits, events, and other ventures.

The Pre-Raise Process

Ideally, you should start thinking about the raise process far before you need it. Building up the relationships makes your life far easier when it comes time to raise. There is a common trope in the startup world that “if you want funding, ask for advice. And if you want advice, ask for funding.” The key here is to begin building relationships.

Many people will tell you that building relationships with VCs is a waste of time, but I strongly disagree. You don’t build companies in a vacuum. You build it with the help of many other people who support you and believe in you. Building the relationships with VCs makes your eventual raise easier, but it also gives you those relationships for any future company you start. It is a currency that lasts your entire lifetime.

The best way to run the pre-raise process is to begin a few months before you actually want to raise. Start taking a few meetings a week with investors and ask them for advice or to poke holes in your business model. This will help you begin developing the relationship and you will start to understand how to pitch effectively. You’ll also learn what VCs are looking for in conversations. Ask them for total transparency.

You can get in touch with VCs by going to startup events, although this takes up a lot of time. My specialty has been outrageous amounts of cold outreach through linkedin or email. You can do this rather quickly and send out a large volume. Linkedin makes it easy to source people and you can buy lists or find free lists online of investors. My advice is to always make your outreach feel as personalized as possible and to send out 10x more than you think you need to. To successfully raise VC you might need to talk to 100 different firms. To talk to 100 different firms you might need to outreach to 1000 firms. Don’t be afraid to message VCs that aren’t in your city as well. Warm introductions, of course, are the best when possible.

During the Raise

Raising is and should be a full time job. Whoever is the CEO at your company should be spending a ton of time raising within a short period of time. Try to pick 3-8 weeks to focus entirely on a fundraising process.

The reason you should do this within a short amount of time is three-fold. Firstly, it is not a good look to be running a raise for 2 years. People will think you have no momentum and are struggling to raise. Don’t overlook the psychological component. Secondly, if you are able to close a raise in that short amount of time then you can go back to doing what is important - building your company. You want to minimize the amount of time it takes to raise as much as possible. Lastly, the momentum you appear to have during the raise is extremely important. It will help you negotiate better terms and to close deals more often. If your deal seems like it is in high demand and has no problem closing it’ll be easier to get funding.

You’ll usually have a lead investor who will set the terms of the deal. Once you get a lead investor you can often find the rest of the money much easier. Within your 3-8 week raise process you should be setting the schedule and the pace of the deal. You don’t want to be begging investors to take meetings. It should be “I’m going to be done raising on this date so get in or get out.” Running a tight process like this will help give you the leverage you need to close out a round quickly.

Anyone can raise around a million. Once you start raising much more than that you might need more traction, but I know many people, who didn’t have good advantages, who raised pre-product. Obviously, there are a ton of factors here like interest rates & the macro economic environment, but most of raising in the early days is persistence, grit, and determination. If you reach out to 2,000 investors and keep improving your pitch I’d be impressed to see you fail your pre-seed or seed raise.

Post-Raise Process

Please communicate with your investors. Please. For one of my first companies I didn’t communicate with investors very well. That was something I greatly regretted. In a lot of ways, our investors could’ve been very helpful and could’ve helped us progress much faster. However, we didn’t ask.

Send out investor updates once a month to both current and prospective investors. Even investors you might never take money from. You never know when people might know other investors that they’d be willing to introduce to you. You’ll also need to raise again, likely in the next 12-18 months.

🫠 What I Need Right Now

• Nothing!

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