I’ve spent the last 5 months working with 7 founders on their fundraise, it reminded me how obsessive you need to be. It brought me back to the days of my raising, and put into the forefront how insanely brainwashed you need to become.
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The founder who refuses to leave even a single stone unturned is the one who elevates the company. They are the one who gets rejected 100 times and keeps trying because they know in their gut they have a special startup.
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Fundraising requires an insane amount of grit. At best, you’re closing 10% of your conversations into capital, but if you’re like the average founder you’re probably closing 0.001% of your conversations. And that’s okay, that’s how it goes.
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I’ve been grinding on a programmatic way to help 1,000 founders fundraise in 2025. It’s involved creating an immense amount of assets within my own company, and battle tested processes I used to close my own $10M in capital. It even required building AI Don (more to come, soon).
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I launched the new founder group only a week ago, and already we are up to 115 founders. I see an opportunity to deconstruct YC (Y Combinator) without needing to take aggressive ownership stakes in startups.
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The game of VC is just that, a game. The rules are quite simple, network with the right people, and build innovative products that generate sustained revenue. If you can do those two things, and prove it with data, then you can advance up the levels and raise $100M. Anyone can do it.
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Come learn the fundraise process I’m helping implement in these 1,000 startups during our official launch on Weds: https://www.skool.com/fundraise-collective-4446/about
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I’ve seen now a handful of great CEOs go from 3 people working on a kitchen table to raising $100M+ with a team of 150. Every single time you can barely see it coming, but then as soon as it happens you realize how obvious it was.
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The difference in mindset usually stems from some aspect of “luck” which changed the external surroundings of the world and pointed massive amounts of attention towards the problem the startup was always solving. But just never had a large enough market to justify venture scale. And now, because the world luckily changed, it does. Cha Ching.
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I’ve also recognized an obvious pattern in the best founders having an ability to hunt for revenue in creative ways. I’ve heard simple strategies like iterating on 200 marketing copies using paid ads, or as complex as building influencer programs with incentive structures to resell their core product.
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There’s nothing better than a founder who figures it out.
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And I’ll say one more thing about top CEOs, they are ALWAYS learning. The curiosity that got them to become a founder doesn’t vanish with success. I’ve seen this trait amongst top VCs and definitely amongst top founders. They’re always looking for just one small tidbit of knowledge to leverage in their daily. They find it amongst talking with other founders, reading, networking with communities, and more.
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I’ve put together some epic presentations over 2024, sixty-four to be exact. But there’s no presentation more important than the one on Tuesday.
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I’ll be delivering the official launch of the fundraise accelerator I showed you all next week on Weds. As well as going over some fundraise stories and tips next Weds.
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🚀 Final Kickoff Meeting - Feb 26th 🚀https://calendly.com/donversationz/fundraise-friday-qa​

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This is the last meeting where anyone can join, after this we turn our Weds calls into only those who are fundraising.

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Looking very much forward to seeing you there, and finding out your reactions.
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Let’s raise,

~Don Stein