9 Udemy Courses on How to Raise Pre-seed Startup Funding

The toughest round of funding an entrepreneur seeks to raise is pre-seed investment. It sports the lowest probability of success, the highest amount of ambiguity, is poorly defined, and is causing the greatest amount of confusion and road wreck out there.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Bradley Harrison, Founder and Managing Partner at Scout Ventures (Part 2)

Bradley Harrison: What people don’t realize is that the largest investor in innovation since World War II is not Silicon Valley; it’s the United States government. There are billions of dollars in each of these programs. The Army’s program for grants last year was $3.3 billion. That’s just the Army.

The government is passing the Endless Frontier Act which is about $110 billion to support innovation all through grants. We take our money, non-dilutive capital, and a bunch of smart people and build companies that we say are making the world a better and safer place.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Bradley Harrison, Founder and Managing Partner at Scout Ventures (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. 

Bradley Harrison, Founder, Managing Partner at Scout Ventures, discusses how military professionals are engaging in entrepreneurship with an ecosystem supporting them. Quite fascinating!

Sramana Mitra: Let’s introduce you to our audience. Tell us a bit about your background as well as what you’re doing at Scout. 

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Geoff Ralston, President of Y Combinator (Part 1)

Geoff Ralston is President of Y Combinator. We had a terrific discussion on what we each are seeing in the startup ecosystem.

Sramana Mitra: Geoff has been involved with Y Combinator right from the beginning. Why don’t we take a look back on the evolution of Silicon Valley and Y Combinator.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Warren Weiss, Managing Partner at WestWave Capital (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: That was surprising to me when we started working on Fullcast. That tells me that there are many industry segments. Fullcast.io is selling to cutting-edge SaaS companies and finding white spaces. If you look at manufacturing and logistics and other industry segments that are not as advanced, there are a ton of workflow white spaces. Eventually, you introduce AI. There is just bread-and-butter workflow automation still wide open. 

Warren Weiss: It’s amazing. The more transparent the data on who’s doing what in your company and how customers buy, there’re more opportunities to understand both business processes to make things more efficient. 

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Warren Weiss, Managing Partner at WestWave Capital (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: All these areas that we are talking about are talent war scenarios. They are highly-specialized areas. There’s not an abundance of people who have great expertise. That’s another driver for these acquisition scenarios. The larger companies are also trying to hire talent. One of the ways they hire talent is by acquiring smaller companies. That also creates a conducive environment for these smaller exits. 

Warren Weiss: The whole workforce has been massively disrupted by the pandemic. It’s brought to light new issues about how people want to work and where they can work from. The distributed nature in which you engage, hire, onboard, and train has become much more strategic. We have made a couple of investments in the HR-related space.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Warren Weiss, Managing Partner at WestWave Capital (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: We have very aggressively developed a whole track within our program. We have a big education effort. We are scaling that with some very interesting partnerships including with Udemy. The theme that we have developed around this topic is Bootstrapping to Exit.

By bootstrapping, I don’t only mean companies that are working without outside capital. They are also companies that are working in a capital-efficient way. It’s the same philosophy that you do things very capital-efficiently and get to certain milestones without making the exit price too high. You’ve answered one of the questions that I had in my original talking points around chasing unicorns. 

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Warren Weiss, Managing Partner at WestWave Capital (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You started off by saying that you’ve already had seven exits within three years. Talk to me a little bit more about the exit. What are the circumstances of these? That’s unusual for a small micro-VC to have seven exits within a three-year period.

Warren Weiss: One of the areas that we’re in is security. Larger enterprise security companies are hungry for growth. They’re looking for acquisitions that could be tuck-ins. That represents 30% IRR. We really focus on funding great engineering teams – people who know how to build world-class products.