TBC: What I Learned Coaching HBS Founders on Fundraising

Jason Yeh: Hey there. Welcome to another episode of the Back Channel. In today's episode, I want to talk about. An experience that I had visiting Harvard Business School as I was invited to attend the launching Tech ventures class, taught by Jeff Bussgang, my old professor, and participate, give feedback, and help teach one of the final sessions of the semester.

It was really an amazing experience. I got a chance to hold office hours with a bunch of startups. I got a chance to coach a few of them before a bunch of pitch practices. It's really amazing. The first thing I'll say is that in the, I don't wanna date myself, but over 10 years since I've been, uh, a student at HBS, the entrepreneurial vibe and energy has increased by like a hundred fold.

It's so incredible to see how many of the students at HBS really want to start their own companies. Some venture backed, some just profitable bootstrap businesses, some [00:01:00] PE backed. There's a lot of energy to be an entrepreneur coming out of HBS, which is a great place to tap into talent. I'm biased, but I definitely believe that's true.

And in the conversations and in the classes that I attended, I saw a lot of amazing businesses, met a lot of amazing founders. Everything from rocket companies to consumer FinTech, to travel companies, to healthcare tech, boston's a big hub for that. And so when I got a chance to see how at a granular level

these students were thinking about fundraising. It was great to pull out some things and good for everyone to know that even HBS students will make some of these mistakes. I wanted to pick out a very specific thing that I saw, maybe I'll do a couple other episodes on the other things that I've seen, but the one that I wanted to focus on in this episode is all about how you set the stage for the problem space.

And there are these two [00:02:00] comparison points that I'll describe and what I saw and, and how I coach these founders to get, get a little bit better. So I'll talk about it like big picture versus specific and academic versus anecdotal.

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Jason Yeh: [00:03:00] I had seen a few of the founders as they were leading into the problem space, describe what they're working on as the market size is $3.5 billion

or there are [00:04:00] 67 million Gen Zs in the United States states, or 87% of Gen Z had one instance of this in the last month. Now, it might seem to them that The people that are teaching them and coaching them are encouraging them to, to go figure out and validate the market, go do research, that they should pack their pitches with these large numbers, these research based numbers.

And what I'll tell you is what I told the founders that were pitching and kind of compared it to a very specific point, very anecdotal point, versus some of these larger, more academic numbers and why one might be better than another in a lot of these scenarios. The very specific example that I want to talk about is a founder who is targeting the Gen Z space and how some of her lead in slides were about 87% of Gen Z does this one thing.

In general, what I'll say [00:05:00] is that these statistical representations of a market can oftentimes get a, an investor to just kind of shrug their shoulders. I believe a lot of investors will say in the back of their heads, uh, okay, like, where are these numbers coming from?

How big was the sample size? And then not only that leading with generic or more academic numbers can. Give you the feeling that the founder across the table is more of a, a research scientist than a doer. Can you instead show me that you went out there and talked to someone, talked to customers, and got real examples of the problem that you're describing.

On the other hand, after coaching, one founder instead changed her pitch, or at least supplemented her pitch by saying. In fact, my sister, who is a 17-year-old Gen Z, just last week, experienced the exact same situation we're describing. She did A, B, and C and fell into the traps of X, Y, and [00:06:00] Z.

That additional, more specific, more anecdotal point, does more for the storytelling of a pitch than a aggregated big number. If it's logical where things are going, an investor can take a more specific anecdote and go, oh, okay, so that is real. Now if that thing is real, then let's multiply it by how big I think this market is, or how big the, the founder told me the market is, and now this feels like a real problem and not just a research project.

Okay, so what I would encourage you guys to do is really think about how you make the story that you're telling around the problem space. A little bit more tangible, a little bit more realistic. Not just numbers. Not just numbers in a spreadsheet, not just research papers, uh, but actual things that have existed, that have occurred and that you, the founder, understand because you were engaged with [00:07:00] it.

All right, so that is one of my tidbits of coaching that came out of my visit to Harvard Business School a couple weeks ago. I have a few other things jotted down that I wanna record episodes about, but I'm gonna wrap this one up and I will see you on the next episode with the back channel.

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