Fundraising Mastery: The Tao of Kimmer – John Kim (EP.503)
Episode publishedPodcast: Capital Allocators – Inside th...Capital Allocators – Inside the Institutional Investment Industry
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The structure of the meeting is very important, but the persona can be even more potent. First, let me talk about the structure. Every meeting must start with four things. You must establish rapport. You must establish credibility. You have to gain their attention. You have to generate interest, and you better do it fast. It's a conceit that when somebody walks into a meeting, they say, oh, well, you are meeting with me, and so I have all of your attention. No. You're doing something right before you met me, and you're gonna be doing something right after you meet me because by definition, if
I'm Ted Seides, and this is Capital Allocators. My guest on today's show is John Kim or Kimmer, who's raised more than $70,000,000,000 across his career for leading venture capital and private equity firms. Kemmer recently distilled three decades of lessons into The Dow of Fundraising, the best book I've ever read on fundraising for investment managers. Since then, Kimmer joined a general catalyst portfolio company, ILA Sciences, as chairman and president of corporate development. Our conversation covers Kimmer's philosophy about raising capital, the sales process, art of persuasion, best prac
I'm excited to be here too. Thanks so much for inviting me, Ted.
Why don't you take me back to your background that led you into this path of fundraising?
I started my career as a cash register salesperson at IBM. If you wanna learn how to sell, there's an area where you actually figure out how to sell because the cash register that IBM were selling back in the late eighties were way more expensive than the NCR or the Casio cash registers. You had to go door to door and try to figure out who's going to buy them and why. Fortunately, IBM had an exquisite training program. They trained us and trained us and trained us. Eventually, I got pretty good at selling cash registers. I did well enough to make it to business school. And then when I got to b
You do this throughout your career. There's this great aphorism if you can't do teach, so you end up writing a book.
That's probably met with the other after that. If you want to know how little you know about something, start writing about it. That's what happened to me. One of the things I should get out in the open is I wrote the book as my farewell gift to the industry. I now run an artificial intelligence company called Lila Sciences, which has fundraising as a component to it. But I was finishing a big fundraiser, my last firm General Catalyst, and I was feeling the urge to try something different, the last chapter of my life. The essence of the book, the way it would start was, is that I was going to
That frame of the Tao, how do you think about applying that to the process of raising capital?
My interpretation of the Dow, so anybody who's listening to this, you're look, that's not Taoism, and I'm gonna guess it probably isn't. The whole idea of the Dow was it was all about opposites, balance, about dualities. There's so much about fundraising and persuasion that is about dualities, Things that are completely not true yet people believe them. The things that people hate yet they're addicted to. The things that people don't want to do yet they are compelled to do it all the time. What's the most amazing thing that you would see in so many professions and you have to watch out for in
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