John Kim - How to Raise a Few Billion Dollars - [Invest Like the Best, EP.482]
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Today, my guest is John Kim. John is one of the world's top and most prolific fundraisers. Over his career at General Catalyst, he helped raise billions of dollars and turn GC into one of the largest venture firms in the world. Today's chairman and president of corporate development at Lila Sciences, a company building scientific superintelligence, which has raised over $500,000,000 John is also the author of The Dow of Fundraising. This conversation is really a guide on how to raise money from someone who has done it at the highest level. We talk about why persuasion equals desire minus fear,
As I wrote the book, The Dow Fundraising, I had this idea that I wanted to put something philosophical out in the world because fundraising isn't just a idea of persuasion. It's actually a way of life that the actual interacting with people through the lens of them as the center of your conversation is a way of life. And that way of life requires a certain level of responsibility. When you start to get good at understanding how people work and how people react and how they will react to me or to you or to other personas, you can actually use that for your own selfish needs or you can use it fo
I wanna go to the situation where I'm a person, I have an idea, something I wanna do. It requires capital or resources of some kind. What people should understand about that starting state that you've learned and where people then tend to fall down. Like, I think one of the interesting messages that you and I have talked about before is, of course, a good idea is important, good product, the thing you're trying to build or sell or what have you, but that people maybe underestimate the role that capital can play in making that thing happen. And therefore this skill that you've learned a lot abo
First, you have to look and say, okay, who are the people who trust you? This is why they call it friends and family. What is friends and family? High trust. High trust. I don't think it's totally true that friends and family are people who will give you money and they're not afraid to lose it. Their tolerance for loss actually may be much, much worse than an institution. That's I think kind of a urban myth that, oh, go to friends and family because they'll give you the money as charity. I think the most expensive money is borrowing money from your friends because you don't give the money back
Before we do that, I'd love you to dig deeper into this very simple idea of persuasion equals desire minus fear. Like it's an incredibly simplifying, elegant way of thinking about this.
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