Sales, Hiring & Fundraising Have More in Common Than You Think
Inference, Influence, and Evangelism
I love spending time getting to know entrepreneurs, it’s my favorite part of being a venture investor. I interchangeably use the words entrepreneur and founder, but prefer founder, it has more reverence for the truly audacious act of creation. Some weeks I meet as many as 30 new founders. Unfortunately, because of this, in these initial conversations I often don’t have as much time as I would like to drill down on what I consider three components that are indicators of potential success: sales, hiring, and fundraising. But what I have found is that I am still able to get a good read on how strong a founder (most often the CEO) is in those areas. That is because fundamentally all three involve the core ability to evangelize the business and share their vision; painting a picture of a better future — for their customers, their employees and their investors.
I participated in thousands of interviews over five years working at StartX, the renowned Stanford University entrepreneur community, and that effectively became my “training” set of data. One question we often asked was for founders to pitch a judge panelist on joining their company — a simple, off-the-cuff 30 second pitch. What that 30 seconds showed us was how effective an evangelist a CEO was for their company, and how quickly he or she could crack the psychology of that other person and directly speak to what influences someone. What questions did they ask? What assumptions did they make? Did they position the opportunity as conveying they had the other person’s best interest at heart? Sales isn’t about selling (at least skillful sales is not); it is about sharing your vision and inspiring them to see how they can achieve something important.
From time to time, I will meet a founder who is great with customers, but hasn’t yet cracked the investor pitch framing just yet. I’ll hear him say something like “I am not good at fundraising”. They may mean “I don’t like fundraising.” Well, fair enough! Reframed though, fundraising is the same as hiring and sales; you are telling a story that engages your audience and frames it in terms of what is best for them. You are bringing on a partner who can further your business, the same way a key employee or major contract can. Because I believe so strongly these are transferable skills, if I see a CEO hiring an A-list team, or getting early LOIs with big name customers, I know that he or she can excel at fundraising as well. It is just a matter of reps and a change in psychology because the underlying skill is already there.
These days, my first conversations with entrepreneurs at Prime Movers Lab are fortunately longer and more wide ranging than an accelerator quick pitch, but I still look for the same things. Evangelism is all about influence and storytelling. Sales, hiring, fundraising — key indicators of a startup’s potential success, all require you to figure out how to influence someone. As a fund investing in breakthrough science, the companies we invest in need to be able to inspire and evangelize. After all, as Guy Kawasaki, the OG of evangelism, said “Evangelism is selling a dream”.
Prime Movers Lab invests in breakthrough scientific startups founded by Prime Movers, the inventors who transform billions of lives. We invest in companies reinventing energy, transportation, infrastructure, manufacturing, human augmentation, and agriculture.
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