Sessions · Speaker session
How to Get Good at Fundraising
Thursday, April 10, 2025 · 4–7 PM PDT
This session has ended.
About this session
In April 2022 I didn't know anything about starting a company; when and how to raise, who to raise from, and how much to ask for. Fifteen months later I had raised $100M over three rounds of funding. I made a lot of mistakes along the way, but also ended up in a pretty good spot for the company. This talk will share what I learned along the way from talking to other founders about their experience, doing hundreds of calls with VCs, and sheer necessity and dumb luck.
Agenda
9–9:30 AM PDT
Arrive and Check In
Connect with fellow attendees before the event kicks off—arrive on time to make valuable connections and start building relationships that could accelerate your founder journey. Speaker session starts promptly at 4:30
9:30–10 AM PDT
Jordan Tigani: How to Get Good at Fundraising
Learn how Jordan navigated being a new CEO and what he learned on his way to raising over $100MM in just 15 months
10–10:40 AM PDT
Preparing your Pitch Deck
What’s the ultimate goal of a pitch deck? What is the most compelling deck structure you’ve used? Any content changes for Angels vs VCs? What mistakes did you make along the way? How much information do you include in each slide, and the deck as a whole? What’s in the appendix?
10:40–11:20 AM PDT
Finding the Right Investors
How did you determine the proper size and valuation target for your financing? How did you determine the proper capitalization strategy (debt, equity, angel, VC) Given the size, stage and type of raise, how did you find the right investors to pitch to? How did you hone your pitch over time?
11:20 AM–12 PM PDT
BYOT: Bring Your Own Topic
What's keeping you up at night? What could you use additional insight on? Tap the experience of your peers for guidance.
Hosting this session
Jordan Tigani
CoFounder at MotherDuck
Jordan is co-founder and chief duck-herder at MotherDuck, a startup providing a serverless data warehouse based on the open source DuckDB. He helped create Google BigQuery and spent a decade working on it as engineer, book author, engineering leader, and product leader. More recently, as SingleStore’s Chief Product Officer, Jordan helped them build a cloud-native SaaS business from zero to 10s of millions on ARR in under two years. Jordan has also worked at Microsoft Research, the Windows Kernel team, and at a handful of star-crossed startups. His biggest claim to fame is predicting world cup matches using machine learning with a better record than Paul the Octopus.
Next step
Have a question behind the session?
Share what you’re working through. If your company qualifies, we’ll reply personally within 24 hours.
For companies that have raised at least $1M from venture firms.