#270: The Art of Startup Fundraising and Selling Your Company with Alejandro Cremades

You can learn a lot from a world driven by growing enterprise value from day one. Let the expert who wrote two books on the subject walk you through the world of startups — from fundraising to exit — to show what focusing on the end goal can do for you and your company, starting today.

Alejandro Cremades is a serial entrepreneur, M&A advisor, and author of the books The Art of Startup Fundraising and Selling Your Startup. He’s even been recognized by Barbara Corcoran of “Shark Tank” and is well-known for “The Deal Makers Podcast,” so to say he knows a thing or two about entrepreneurship is an understatement. Be ready to get pumped up about growth in this episode designed to help small- and mid-sized businesses navigate the funding landscape and achieve their long-term goals.

What You Will Learn

Why Alejandro thinks exiting is 10x harder than raising capital
What types of investors are out there any why they invest
The differences between a strategic acquisition vs a financial acquisition and when each exit makes sense
Why Alejandro says the biggest mistake is when founders think “they are the company”
The different rounds in fundraising - and what the requirements and expectations are for each round
The art of the deal when negotiating the valuation of your company with an investor (let them talk first so you can talk them up)
How to balance your priorities with an investor’s priorities while scaling the company
Why it’s important to have an M&A advisor in an exit and how to avoid bad decisions under stress
The one question you need to ask when seriously considering an investor
Why VC competition has expanded globally vs what it was like 15 years ago
Which businesses are going to suffer when a market corrects itself
What Private equity and venture capital truly invests in (numbers vs founders)

Bio:

Alejandro Cremades is a serial entrepreneur and the author of The Art of Startup Fundraising (foreword by ‘Shark Tank‘ star Barbara Corcoran) and recently released Selling Your Startup. Most recently, he started Panthera Advisors, a premier investment banking and financial consulting firm after his own exit.

Alejandro built and exited CoFoundersLab which is one of the largest communities of founders online with over 500,000 members. Prior to CoFoundersLab, he worked as a lawyer at King & Spalding where he was involved in one of the biggest investment arbitration cases in history ($113 billion at stake).

Alejandro is an active speaker and has given guest lectures at the Wharton School of Business, Columbia Business School, and at NYU Stern School of Business. He have been involved with the JOBS Act since inception and was invited to the White House and the US House of Representatives to provide his stands on the new regulatory changes concerning fundraising online.

Quotes:

11:56 - “When people raise money, they don’t realize that when you’re raising money, there is money in with expectations of money out.” - Alejandro Cremades

12:35 - “The way you raise money today is going to impact the way that you raise money tomorrow but then also, they way that you can exit your business.” - Alejandro Cremades

15:14 - “You should never think about fundraising as money. You need to think about fundraising as networks. It’s all about turning around the money and really thinking–more than anything–about who is giving you the money and how you can leverage their network in order to get to where you want to be, because companies, every eighteen to twenty-four months, they transform.” - Alejandro Cremades

29:55 - “You think you are the company, and that is a mistake because eventually, that company is going to die. It’s going to merge. It’s going to go bankrupt. Or whatever, but that company is not going to be in business forever.” - Alejandro Cremades

37:59 - “That’s why I find that, when you’re going through an exit, you need to have a team that is able to take the reins and really, to avoid as much as possible, the impact that is going to be caused by you being distracted from the execution.” - Alejandro Cremades

47:11 - “I think there’s going to be a correction on the market. We’ve been on this bull run for such a long time.” - Alejandro Cremades

56:23 - “One of the things that I always come across (in terms of, like, what are those similarities) is that those [successful] entrepreneurs really care about listening.” - Alejandro Cremades