The Two Futures of Getting Funded
You have to nail two futures when you want people to give you money for the company that you're building. What do I mean by that?
I mean that they're actually two different time domains that you have to live in as an entrepreneur when you're trying to get people to give you money for something you haven't done yet.
Entrepreneurs only focus on one future. It's either the immediate future or the long-term future, and this is why it's a mistake. It doesn't check the boxes in an investor's head that need to be done to see both immediate return and big picture return. You have to be able to tell two different future vision stories.
You want to get this right because it plays into the immediate gratification that instant gratification need that humans have.
Right? I want it now.
I want it now.
I want it now.
And the second one, this is where we're actually going more for gluttony. Humans are greedy. People are greedy.
They want more money.
They want huge amounts of money.
They have a desire and you, the entrepreneur can help them achieve that.
So let's talk now about what these two futures are. I call them very simply, the micro future and the macro future.
Micro is what is in the near term. Let's say that you are a technology founder and you have already raised your seed round and you're going out to raise your series A. When you are presenting to an investor, you want to show them the micro future of how you're going to get to your series B.
So you have to be able to identify what are the milestones that you're going to hit, what does this funding unlock? How do you accelerate that growth to that next series B, where the next group of investors is going to say, "I'll give you more money."
When you create that micro future in a way that stands out, it is going to give investors the confidence that their money isn't going to get burned. And this is why I talk about it as instant gratification.
They want to make sure that when they put money in you in a year, 18 months, 24 months, their investment is going to get marked up.
So they can go to their LPs and raise more money because they can say "look, we invest in this company at a hundred million dollar valuation. And now that we're at $250 million, look at how good we are at managing your money."
Micro future checks the instant gratification, but investors are looking for a second future, and that is the macro future.
The macro future is the big picture. This is the thing that gets them out of bed that makes them say, "I want to be a part of this journey."
You are - in the words of Elon Musk - painting this picture of being a multi-planetary species, right? That's the big macro future that Elon is talking about is we're going to be able to take people to live on Mars.
But if you think about Elon's micro future might be we're going to be able to launch the rocket like they just did t hat has the capacity to take humans there, and we're going to prove that it can get off the ground and get to a certain height so that we can then get to the macro future.
So you have to be able to blend the micro future and the macro future because the macro future is where investors are going to see the ability to get.
A 50x return, a 100x return. This is where they're seeing those big dollar signs in their eyes of "I might be a billionaire. I might get to cash out and see a billion dollars come in because your big vision is going to be worth tens of billions of dollars."
This is why we have to blend the micro and macro, because the micro future is how we're going accelerate to $250 million. And the macro vision is we're going to be worth tens of billions of dollars.
You see why you can't do only one of those? If you only focus on the macro, the near future feels too uncertain. But if you only focus on the near future, the big picture is completely lost, and it's not exciting enough.
You want toblend the micro future and the macro future in there, and if you do this, you can raise as much money as you want.
I know this because this is exactly what the founders that I work with and the entrepreneurs that I work with do. They've raised over $575 million at this point. So if you want to be like that, you've got to paint the picture of the micro macro future and deliver that to investors in a way that makes them say, "take my money and go make it real."
This post right here is going to help you go even further on what we talked about today, so you can start putting it to action and really seeing the results. Because at the end of the day, that's what we care about most. So check out this post and go out and execute.
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A former trial lawyer and prosecutor in Dallas, TX, Robbie trains founders to become world-class storytellers and venture capital fundraisers.
In barely two years, he's helped founders raise $575,000,000 of venture capital