Finance & Investing

Fundraising: It’s a Marathon not a Sprint

Five experts provide strategies for navigating the fundraising journey.

July 20, 2022

Welcome to Grit & Growth’s masterclass on a topic that’s on every entrepreneur’s mind: money! Hear from startup and early-stage investors in Africa and South Asia about what investors are really looking for, how to vet potential backers, pitching advice, and more. These experts provide practical guidance and strategies on how to secure funding for your venture.

Money, money, money. Entrepreneurs can’t stop thinking about it, which explains why fundraising is such a critical — and ongoing — aspect of their job description. We turned to five experts for their wisdom on all things related to funding:

  • Andreata Muforo, partner at Nairobi-based venture capital firm TLCom Capital
  • Ido Sum, partner at TLCom Capital
  • Zach George, managing partner at Launch Africa Ventures
  • Sandeep Singhal, managing director of Nexus Venture Partners in India
  • Pranav Pai, founding partner of 3One4 Capital in India

Top Seven Masterclass Takeaways

  1. Fundraising should be active, not passive. Andreata Muforo says, “It’s something an entrepreneur does, not something that happens to them — which means you can get better with practice.”
  2. Cast a wide net when looking for investors. Zach George has a great strategy for getting valuable face time with busy VCs: “Ask for advice and you may get some money, ask for money and you may get some advice.”
  3. Early on, it’s less about the numbers, more about the people. According to Sandeep Singhal, seed and series A funders invest just as much in founders as they do in ideas. “There are many people that want to solve problems, but these are people who are saying, I want to solve a problem at scale. I want to solve a problem with a group of people. I want to have people around me that are equally passionate about building things.”
  4. Don’t get too attached to your ideas. Be willing to listen and adapt. Singhal looks for founders who are passionate and flexible. “If you don’t listen, then you are stubborn. And the risk of being stubborn is you can hit your head on the wall and never be able to get across it.”
  5. Scale can’t be achieved alone. Pranav Pai advocates for the importance of team. “If the human capital side doesn’t keep up, you’re almost always going to fail to meet expectations.”
  6. Due diligence goes both ways. Ido Sum urges entrepreneurs to do their homework on potential investors. “If you know what we’re after, what we’re investing in, how you could be relevant to what we have already invested in or to spaces we have looked at, this is extremely beneficial for us to see that you spent this time.”
  7. Know how you plan to grow. Be specific. Zach George wants the founder to have the details. “If you give me the ‘let me talk to my CFO,’ you’ve lost me. Like immediately, I’ve switched off. Good founders will say, ‘This is how I get to a hundred million dollars.’”

Listen to these funding experts and gain valuable insights, advice, and strategies for how to navigate the fundraising journey and establish successful relationships along the way.

Grit & Growth is a podcast produced by Stanford Seed, an institute at Stanford Graduate School of Business which partners with entrepreneurs in emerging markets to build thriving enterprises that transform lives.

Hear these entrepreneurs’ stories of trial and triumph, and gain insights and guidance from Stanford University faculty and global business experts on how to transform today’s challenges into tomorrow’s opportunities.

Full Transcript

​​Zach George: If your SAM [Serviceable Available Market] is $100 million, not market value, but in serviceable, addressable market — your SAM — I want you to explain to me on the back of an envelope, in less than two minutes, how you get to that. Break it down to me like I was a five-year-old.

Darius Teter: It takes time, skill, and a little bit of luck to convince someone to invest in your business, and you need to do your homework. What will it cost to acquire customers? How much will they pay for my product and what margins can we expect on those sales?

Zach George: The majority of founders could never do that. They fail miserably at it, or they’ll say, “Hey, can I open up my spreadsheet?” Or, “I’ll talk to my CFO.” If you give me the “Let me talk to my CFO,” you’ve lost me. Immediately, I’ve switched off.

Darius Teter: Welcome to the second season of Grit & Growth from Stanford Seed, the show where Africa and South Asia’s Intrepid entrepreneurs share their trials and triumphs, with insights from Stanford faculty on how to tackle challenges and grow your business.

As we developed the first season of Grit & Growth, we spoke to a lot of entrepreneurs who shared a similar concern. Finding investors, particularly at an early stage, can make or break your business. So, it’s no wonder that’s top of mind for so many of our guests. How do you convince the people with cash that you and your idea are a worthwhile investment? Over the course of season one, we posed that question to active investors focused on startups and early-stage businesses in Africa and South Asia. We heard a wide range of advice about how to fund your venture. For this episode, we’ve compiled the best guidance on financing from some of the top experts of our first season. You’ll hear about what investors are looking for in a founder, how founders should vet potential backers, and what holds true across markets.

There are a lot of opinions on the best way to raise capital, but while people may differ on strategy, most everyone agrees that fund-raising is a critical aspect of every entrepreneur’s job.

Andreata Muforo: Many founders think that fund-raising is kind of something they do on the side, but you need to embrace the fact that it is part of your job description and to have that mindset. So it’s not that investors are wasting your time. You need investors to grow your business.

Darius Teter: That’s Andreata Muforo, partner at Nairobi-based venture capital firm TLcom Capital, and she, among many other investors, sees fund-raising as active, not passive. It’s something an entrepreneur does, not something that happens to them, which means you can get better with practice. And that’s great news for entrepreneurs, because you’ll be fund-raising throughout the life cycle of your business. To review the main stages of that journey, let’s turn to Zach George, who is managing partner of Launch Africa Ventures, another African VC. Can you just walk us through what the startup funding stages are called and who are the main investment players? What are those early stages called and who’s providing those funds?

Zach George: So you’ve got pre-seed funding, which is essentially your funding companies or founders that are just post-idea, and they’re busy building an MVP [minimum viable product], a prototype. That funding is almost entirely driven by founder capital themselves, friends and family, and maybe the odd early-stage angel investor. Those pools of money could range anywhere from $10,000 to maybe half a million dollars at a stretch, depending on what industry you’re in. That’s pre-seed funding. Then you’ve got seed funding, and seed funding also has a big friends-and-family component to it, but that’s when you start seeing angel groups and angel networks coming in. So local angel networks from an Africa context, you’d have the South African angel network, the Nigerian angel network, and sort of going down to city. So Lagos angel network, the Cape Town angel network, etc. So angel networks, friends and family, and, importantly, this is where accelerators and incubators come in.

So most accelerators, I mean, obviously the ones that we are familiar with, like the YCs and the startup boot camps and the tech stores of the world — but regional accelerators play a role in providing anywhere from $20,000 to $100,000 worth of funding. This stage is still predominantly pre-revenue, but post-MVP. But you do have quite a few companies that are just post-revenue. And revenue at that stage could be prototypes, pilots, POCs (proof of concepts), which … you do find some companies that have recurring subscription revenue as well. But at this stage it’s still too early for institutional capital.

The one exception to that is hyper-local, regional-focused VC [venture capital] funds. So there are a few seed VC funds, local to just a city or just a country, that may write small checks. The average size of rounds at the seed stage is between half a million dollars to, at a stretch, $2 million. And that’s, again, from maybe an emerging market/Africa context. Then you’ve got the series A stage, which is where your first institutional check comes in. That is usually led by a lead VC fund. Series A round sizes range from a low of $2 million, that’s very low, to as high as $25 to $30 million rounds. You usually have a lead VC that commits half of the round at least, so 50 percent of the round size. You then have super angels, or large angel groups, that sort of finish out the rest of the round and, at the most, two to three other VCs.

There are cases where series A rounds can have up to six to seven VCs, but the norm is one lead VC fund, a couple of other VC funds, and angels and super angels filling out the rest of the round. That’s series A. Series B and series C is what people often refer to as growth capital, growth and late-stage capital. And those range from anything north of $10 million round sizes, all the way up to — I mean, Flutterwave last week announced a $170 million series C round. So like I said, $10 million all the way up to $150 to $200 million rounds. That would be series B, series C.

Darius Teter: As you can tell, fund-raising is a journey, which is why Zach advocates casting a wide net when looking for investors. In fact, he has a kind of sneaky strategy for getting valuable face time with those busy VCs.

Zach George: At the pre-seed stage, you’ve got to start early. You’ve got to start talking to investors while you’re building your product. A good analogy that I give, which is often used in the industry, is, “Ask for advice and you may get some money; ask for money and you may get some advice.” When you’re talking to angels, and this happens to me a lot, a lot of founders that are mature enough in the market will come to say, “Listen, Zach, I know you’ve done a ton of angel investments. This is what I’m doing. Can you give me some advice on who I should be talking to? What should I be pivoting it into?” And, honestly, I’ll spend a few weeks when I am just giving them advice, and I will open doors for them. And maybe a month later, I’ll write them a check, but I wrote them a check because they involved me in their business planning.

And the right founders will come to you and say, “Thank you very much for helping me think differently. Here’s a small half a percent stake in my company in advisory shares. I’d like you to also be an angel in my company.” So getting a prominent angel investor or a prominent mentor on your advisory board early on, that also drops you a $5,000 or a $10,000 check, is worth so much more than the money they give you. But ask them for advice and then they will open doors for you. I mean, it’s crazy advice, but it works.

Darius Teter: I want to repeat Zach’s punchline: “Ask for money, you might get advice. Ask for advice, you might get funding.” Your earliest investor contacts may usefully challenge your own assumptions about your business and your business model. How you receive their advice matters, because the other unique resource your startup has is you, the entrepreneur. Early-on funders invest as much in founders as they do in ideas. And that’s certainly true of Sandeep Singhal, managing director of Nexus Venture Partners in India. But what exactly are investors like Sandeep looking for in an entrepreneur? So I want to get a little bit into this whole question of: How do you get to know an entrepreneur? What characteristics are you looking for when somebody walks in the door? What do you need to know about them?

Sandeep Singhal: Number one is energy level. You can tell from a person, in the way that they interact with you, what their energy levels are and how will they sustain their energy as they build out the business.

Darius Teter: Define energy.

Sandeep Singhal: It comes from passion. It comes from internal drive, but it’s also about how you are seeing the desire to build a business. And good entrepreneurs just want to build something big. They’re not coming in and saying, “I just want to solve a problem.” There are many people that want to solve problems, but these are people who are saying, “I want to solve a problem at scale. I want to solve a problem with a good group of people. I want to have people around me that are equally passionate about building things.” That energy, that passion, sort of, is a starting point.

Darius Teter: So they’re not just a lone wolf and they don’t just have a compelling problem they want to solve. They have a growth vision and they at least have some people who are with them.

Sandeep Singhal: That’s correct.

Darius Teter: And so you’re not looking at the numbers at all at first. Or have you already done a bunch of due diligence before they even get in the front door?

Sandeep Singhal: From a seed and series A perspective, it is less about numbers and it’s more about people. Numbers really start coming into account in series B and series C, but at a seed and series A, very few companies will have numbers that you can depend on for making a decision on a long-term basis. That individual, when they’re presenting to me, should get me as excited about the problem as they are, because that’s what they’re going to do day in, day out. Once they have the company and they’re out in the market, they’re going to be trying to convince customers. They’re going to try to convince the best talent and employees. They’re going to be trying to convince the best partners to work with them. So they have to get me convinced. It’s not sales, but it’s motivation. It’s getting that trust built in the other person that, hey, I can make this happen.

Darius Teter: On the other hand, Sandeep doesn’t want people to be too attached to their ideas.

Sandeep Singhal: The final thing is the ability to listen and adapt. So what you need to be able to — and this is what we test in the conversation is — we throw them a curveball. We’ll ask a question which would get you upset, or which will sort of say, hey, this just can’t work. And we see how the person reacts. Do they get upset or are they sort of thinking, “Why is this guy telling me this? What do I need to do differently?” And you can tell that this person’s wheels are turning in their head and they’re thinking about the problem. They’re thinking. So that ability to listen … because the market is always telling you something, the competitors are telling you something.

Darius Teter: So you want them to have the passion and persuasive power of an evangelist, but one who also listens.

Sandeep Singhal: Yes, because if you don’t listen, then you are stubborn. And the risk with being stubborn is you can hit your head on the wall and never be able to get across it.

Darius Teter: So another way I would think about this is, you want someone who’s in love with the problem they’re trying to solve, not with their specific solution. In addition to a compelling entrepreneur, a strong understanding of the market is paramount to an investor like Zach.

Zach George: Ultimately, a tech startup has to be obsessed with two things: product market fit and problem solution fit. If you can get these two things right, the market and economics will determine everything else. But you’ve got to get these two things right. Know your customers really well, know your target market, and know what the unit economics are. Once you understand these three things, the market will figure out the rest. So one of the common mistakes is, founders assume that just because they’ve started a particular company, that they know the market better than anyone else. That is, I wouldn’t say categorically true, but in most cases, not the case.

So a pitfall that a lot of founders have is they just do not do enough research on the market and their competitors as they should be. I’ve been in way too many discussions with founders where I’ve embarrassed the crap out of them because they have no idea who the second, third, fourth, fifth, or even 10th competitors are in their industry. And it goes above and beyond just their industry. They may have a business idea with some customers, but they just don’t know enough about what folks in the industry are doing. I mean, the amount of market research that founders do is way too little at the early stage.

Darius Teter: So they don’t know the competitive landscape. They don’t know the total addressable market. They can’t answer this classic value proposition statement, that, “This is the problem. This is my solution. This is why my solution is better.” They don’t have that.

Product market fit is important to Andreata as well, but it’s not the be-all, end-all. She also focuses on the business model and the team surrounding the entrepreneur.

Andreata Muforo: Three main questions that we want to answer. So the question: Is this an attractive market? Because we are looking for large, underserved, growing markets. Is this a good company? And then next: Is the business model that the company is pursuing one that can capture the market? And then: Is this a team that can execute on that business model? And then the third bucket of questions we’re asking ourselves is around: Is this a good investment? The team is very important throughout the life, whether it’s early or it’s growing. So we look at the vision of the founders, the strength of the seed level in terms of the experience, the execution, what is it that they’ve achieved. And then we also form a view and an opinion around the strength of the team, realizing that these are great teams for this stage, but probably not for the next stage.

Darius Teter: Pranav Pai of 3One4 Capital also highlights the importance of your team, because the kind of growth that investors are looking for can’t be achieved alone.

Pranav Pai: I think the number one determinant factor today, besides domain expertise, for us is the capacity of the founders to hire a fantastic team. We’ve learned that there’s a certain characteristic set in founders, and sometimes no one person has it. So it has to be a team of founders, maybe two, maybe three or more, sometimes. But that combination of founders needs to be able to attract great people every year because the rate at which these companies need to grow, if the human capital side doesn’t keep up, you’re almost always going to fail to meet expectations.

Darius Teter: Investors will conduct tons of due diligence on prospective investments. For Ido Sum, Andreata’s partner at TLcom, the best entrepreneurs do the same research on potential funders.

Ido Sum: Founders tend to forget their role in this process, which is to do the same due diligence on the prospective investors. This is a very long-term relationship in which, during five or six or eight years, you would write a couple of checks. But the rest of the time you work together. And I would urge all of these entrepreneurs — more so in emerging markets, where this is maybe less common — to reach out, to speak to other founders in the portfolios of their potential investors, companies, and really make their homework, because this is much more about the person and the relationship than just the check, in our view. But sometimes we get those pitches on stuff that we have nothing to do with.

Darius Teter: You want to know that they did their homework about you.

Ido Sum: Yes. Yes. I think that goes a very long way. If you know what we are after — what we are investing in — how could you be relevant to what we have already invested in or to spaces we have looked at? This is extremely beneficial for us to see that you spent this time. If you’re just saying, “Hi, I’m doing a real estate project in …

Darius Teter: So please invest in my chicken farm.

Ido Sum: … I won’t bother replying. And we get a bunch of these.

Zach George: The other thing that founders make a lot of mistakes, if you want to call it mistakes, is not doing enough diligence on their investors. So to me, a good founder conversation with an investor goes like this. I walk into an investor’s office. I already know the last 10 investments that fund has made, in what sectors, in what sub-industries. I know how much they invested. I know where these companies are going right now. So I go and talk to the investor I’m talking to, and I say, “Listen, I noticed that these four companies that you invested in are doing so well, or whatever, this is how I can add value to you as a fund. And this is how I can create synergies between ourselves and your portfolio companies.” So knowing exactly what the mandate and strategy of your potential investor is, how their portfolio companies have performed and creating value for them, is something that very few founders do. They just see investors as ATMs, and that doesn’t work. It’s such an easy, drop-dead giveaway.

Darius Teter: All this research can give you a big leg up with VCs, but perhaps the most important information Zach and Sandeep look for are the specific details of how you plan to grow. That is, after all, why they’re investing in the first place.

Zach George: If your SAM is $100 million, not market value, but in serviceable, addressable market (your SAM), I want you to explain to me on the back of an envelope, in less than two minutes, how you get to that. Break it down to me like I was a five-year-old. The majority of founders could never do that. They fail miserably at it, or they’ll say, “Hey, can I open up my spreadsheet?” Or, “I’ll talk to my CFO.” If you give me the “Let me talk to my CFO,” you’ve lost me. Immediately, I’ve switched off. Good founders will say, “This is how I get to $100 million in SAM.” And they’ll start something like this, “Currently we work in Gaborone, population is X. We’ve got 2 percent of the market. On average, they spend $10 buying this, so $10 times this is that. We are growing at 10 percent month-to-month, so that gets us to this. If we were to open up in a new city, we get to this.” And they can explain to me, in a logical way, how they get $200 million.

Darius Teter: And while India may be a completely different market from southern Africa, the same logic still applies.

Sandeep Singhal: What we do look for is size of market. So for us, it’s very important that you’re planning to target a large market. And the reason why I say planning, versus saying you’re targeting a large market, is because there’s a third part to this, which is focus. So you’re passionate about solving a problem. You know that you’re going after a large market, but you are doing it in a very focused way. So sometimes what ends up happening is the focus can make it appear that the market is small because you have defined a niche. You’re going after the top 100,000 customers that really need audio books.

And it may appear like a small market, but you can walk me through and say, “Okay, if I get these 100,000, then I can get the next million, and then the next five million.” And many entrepreneurs struggle with that, that ability to walk me through why what you’re doing right now will allow you the right to get to the next set of customers. How will you be able to take the learnings from your 3 million in revenue and scale it to 10, 20, 50? This is my growth horizon to get to this point. And then I’m going to go onto the next growth horizon and the next one.

And an entrepreneur that’s thinking that way is also very well aligned from an investor perspective, because that’s how investments work. You start by saying, okay, my first thing is I need to get to a product market fit. The next thing is I need to get to a GTM (go-to-market) fit. I need to be able to have a go-to-market model, which is repeatable, which is scalable. The next thing is, I’m now going to be able to protect my MO, whatever I’ve created as a MO. So at each stage you are thinking through, What is the nature of problem you’re solving in your business? And a good entrepreneur is able to sort of outline that.

Darius Teter: When you start fund-raising, it can be tempting to team up with the first person who just says “yes.” But that investor will play a key role in your journey, so it’s worth the extra effort to make sure it’s a good fit. Sandeep has a few suggestions for how to do this.

Sandeep Singhal: The starting point is, is this investor passionate about this problem? Maybe not as much as I am, but at least has enough passion and is thinking about this, not just from a standpoint of, “Okay, I’ll bet behind Sandeep and he’ll make me money.” So this is a person who has thought about this problem, has a point of view on it, and is therefore able to ask me intelligent questions.

Darius Teter: Wait, I got to stop you right there. So they shouldn’t be looking for someone who just says, “You convinced me here, but let’s do it.” You actually ought to go past that, because I think a lot of entrepreneurs would be so excited if that was the initial response. They would feel like they just hit a home run and onward.

Sandeep Singhal: I would at least ask the person: “What about what I said, convinced you?” In a nice way. “Is there anything that I should be doing differently? What is it that you think I should do more of?” Or some way to bring that, at least check that this person is just not a sort of lazy check writer, but is actually going to be a partner with you through the journey.

Darius Teter: Because you want more than the check.

Sandeep Singhal: Yes, because — this is true for both the entrepreneur and the investor — because any startup is not a straight line. You are going to run into problems which you hadn’t anticipated at the time of the fund-raise. And if there is an understanding as to why that investment was made, you can always go back to that and say, “This is what we were looking to do. What was wrong with our assumption?” And that ability to do that requires that there has to be some common set of assumptions between the entrepreneur and the investor. So if you haven’t had that conversation at the start and the investors just wrote you a check, then how do you have this conversation later?

Darius Teter: This partnership aspect is especially important because investors like Zach can offer much more than just money.

Zach George: If all you bring to the table is financial capital, you shouldn’t be investing early. Angel investing requires time, resources, effort, and networks, and smart founders have learned to say “no” to investors that don’t add any of the value outside of that. So as an early-stage investor at the pre-seed stage of a business, as an investor, you have to add significantly more than just capital. So what does that entail? A, you’ve got to understand the power of networks exceptionally well. So if you’re not opening doors to other investors in that current round — of future investors — that’s a big red flag. Number two, if you’re not opening doors to corporates, but specifically insurers, banks, telcos [telecommunications companies], retailers, manufacturing firms, or whatever corporates are relevant to solving distribution for that particular technology startup, again, that’s not a big value add if you can’t do it.

Number three, if you aren’t able to understand the applicability of that particular piece of technology to the industry and be an evangelist for that product in the broader ecosystem, your money ain’t going anywhere. So you’ve got to be adding at least two of these three attributes outside of just your money. Otherwise, there’s no point investing early. On the flip side, good investors are investors that go above and beyond what I just said and help your founders with things like recruiting, with talent sourcing. I mean, people often ignore HR and human resources when it comes to helping founders. A lot of founders are constantly shuffling their time between A, raising capital, B, striking partnerships with large corporates from a commercialization standpoint, acquiring customers that are B to C, and hiring.

Darius Teter: While funders can bring a lot to the table beyond finances, it’s also worth understanding what they don’t do. And that’s a conversation investor Pranav Pai has with every founder before they reach a deal.

Pranav Pai: So we are very clear, our involvement is on the strategy side. Our involvement is solving problems for you. We are very clear what we won’t do. So we are very clear we’re not going to win your deals. We’re not going to hire for you. We’re not going to build your product for you, although we could. We enjoy doing that sometimes. But, really, I think there needs to be a frank conversation between the founders and all their investors with how that dynamic should be between each set of partners. And for us, it’s what we’ve figured out works best is a very honest conversation as we’re closing the round, saying, “Here’s everything we can do. We have five teams inside the firm. We will help you with recruitment, with technology, with, of course, capital development, fund-raising, market access. And we’ll help you, of course, make a plan, but we’re not going to execute that for you because that’s interference.”

Darius Teter: And when issues do arise, the relationship and communication you’ve built with investors will be crucial, as Ido has discovered.

Ido Sum: We are trying to get better at being good investors and good board members and good contributors. And there are times where you don’t see eye to eye or you’re not empathetic enough. Or at times you try and work with parts of the team without getting the permission of the CEO, even if unintentional. So I cannot say that there have never been instances in which we had issues to solve, but this is part of the journey. This is part of the game. And I think it’s much more about how you solve it rather than promising you’ll never have such issues.

Darius Teter: All of this research and pitching and relationship building takes time. It’s important for entrepreneurs to have that expectation going in because investment just doesn’t happen overnight.

Andreata Muforo: It takes a bit of time. So you need to have many conversations with many investors before they invest. And investors have their process in terms of the due diligence that they do, the conversations that they need to have. So it’s also, I think, a level of patience.

Darius Teter: What does it look like to embrace your role as a fund-raiser and a founder?

Andreata Muforo: There’s a mental fitness that you need because you get rejected. So you need to be able to pick yourself up from that mental place where you’re discouraged and keep going and keep having those conversations with the same level of energy and enthusiasm to keep going. I think also, for entrepreneurs, they love to build, which is great, and that’s why we back them. That’s why also fund-raising can seem like it’s in the way. So I think also to prepare, when you prepare for fund-raising, it’s also to get other people within your C level to delegate some of the things that you used to do so that you can focus on fund-raising, because it does require time to be able to do quite well.

Darius Teter: It’s a competitive world out there, especially when you’re vying for capital, but in compiling these excerpts from our first season, I was reminded that financing is a symbiotic relationship. VCs are vying just as hard to find promising companies to invest in. Just ask Pranav.

Pranav Pai: I think if you have to build value on the private side, you have to work with the founder. That’s a privilege you have, that’s an advantage you have. And that’s something that if investors use, if they use this correctly, I think you can make magic.

Darius Teter: Investor success depends on passionate entrepreneurs like you. So do your research. Understand how you’ll fit into the market and their portfolio of investments. Inquire about what they can offer beyond capital, and, above all, share your specific plans for growth. These steps are fund-raising best practices.

As you continue along the path, embrace fund-raising as an ongoing journey, a key part of your job that may never be fully finished. Whether you’re approaching friends and family or launching a series B round, think of each stage as a learning opportunity and you’ll keep improving until fund-raising becomes second nature. Thank you to all the experts we heard in today’s episode, Andreata Muforo, Zach George, Sandeep Singhal, Pranav Pai, and Ido Sum. If you want to hear more from any of these guests, check out our first season where we have whole episodes on the mechanics of early-stage financing, as well as the African and Indian fund-raising ecosystems.

This has been Grit & Growth with the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and I’m your host, Darius Teter. If you liked this episode, leave us a review on your podcast app. It really helps us to share the stories of these incredible entrepreneurs with as many people as possible. To learn how Stanford Graduate School of Business is partnering with entrepreneurs in Africa and Asia, head over to the Stanford Seed website at seed.stanford.edu/podcast. Grit & Growth is a podcast by Stanford Seed. Laurie Fuller and Erika Amoako-Agyei researched and developed content for this episode. Kendra Gladych is our production coordinator and our executive producer is Tiffany Steeves, with writing and production from Andrew Ganem and sound design and mixing by Alex Bennett at Lower Street Media. Thanks for joining us. We’ll see you next time.

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