Jenny Fielding, Managing Director of the Techstars New York City Accelerator, knows fundraising. As a startup entrepreneur herself, she cofounded Switch-Mobile in 2006 and subsequently worked for the company that acquired it in 2009. Jenny joined Techstars in 2014  and has run the IoT and hardware accelerator, healthcare accelerator, and fintech accelerator, and has mentored (and invested in) more than 130 startups. In November 2019, Jenny spoke at the LaunchPad Propel event in New York City on the topic of fundraising.

As Jenny observes, we’re currently in a “buy” stage of the economic cycle - there is a lot of capital, a lot of funding opportunities, and even some new platforms beyond the traditional equity and debt options. However, she also notes, more capital is going to fewer seed-stage startups which means getting the fundamentals down right is more critical than ever.

Primary and secondary research are key: What is the right kind of capital? And what are the different paths and options a startup has? Once an entrepreneur knows that information, it is about finding connections. Who do you know? Who are the right investors for a startup? And how can you tap into the networks with the kind of people you need to meet? (PitchBook, Crunchbase, Bloomberg Beta, and even just Google are critically important tools for this research.)

Another piece of fundraising research from Jenny is to “start developing relationships early” and “treat investors as people, not just a checkbook”. This is particularly important for the angel, preseed-, and seed-stage fund investors.

LaunchPad student questions that Jenny addressed about fundraising include:

• How do you initiate a conversation once you’ve found the right potential investor?
• How do you pivot a relationship with a mentor, who has expressed interest in investing, without fracturing and damaging the connection?
• What should student entrepreneurs do to prepare for their first potential investor conversation?

For Jenny’s answers to these questions and many more, check out our recording of her fundraising discussion from Propel 2019: