Gây quỹ khởi nghiệp: Lên ý tưởng, xây dựng lòng tin và đấu giá quyền sở hữu – E554

“Great founders get to pick, and VCs have to differentiate, right? So great founders will say, ‘I’m looking for a VC that I have good personal chemistry with, sector experience, and someone who’s fast to give me the money.’ Speed matters. VCs, on the other hand, often think founders care most about the VC’s brand—whether it’s a big name like Andreessen Horowitz or Y Combinator. They still rank personal chemistry second, and speed third. So there’s a bit of a mismatch in priorities. For me, I think speed and cash are probably number one. If you're a founder and you raise money from a VC who gives you a $5 million check today, and no one else is bidding yet, and that check expires in one week—I think most founders will take that check.”- Jeremy Au, Host of BRAVE Southeast Asia Tech Podcast

“Selling to customers is really key—because if I have a hundred dollars, I’d rather earn a million dollars from my customers who’ll keep paying me, just by delivering the product, than take a million dollars from Jeremy in exchange for 20 percent of my company. Most founders under-allocate their time to building customer revenue and spend too much time chasing fundraising. The second point is that not all VC investors are the same. There are different tiers—some are really good, some are good but difficult, and some are not good at all. Worse, some will destroy value if you let them onto your cap table. It’s easier to get married and divorced than it is to bring in an investor and try to get them out.”- Jeremy Au, Host of BRAVE Southeast Asia Tech Podcast

“When someone says your idea doesn’t really make sense, that’s actually a good opportunity—it’s useful feedback you can use to improve how you articulate the future you believe in. Take Replica, for example. It’s an AI companion for lonely people. The founder believes that everyone will have their own AI best friend. Whether or not you agree, what stood out was how clearly she explained her logic. That’s what makes a pitch interesting—it’s not about everyone agreeing, it’s about making the future you envision easy to understand.”- Jeremy Au, Host of BRAVE Southeast Asia Tech Podcast

Jeremy Au discussed how pitching, trust, and fundraising work. He explained that pitching is about expressing a future others can believe in, not just raising money. He shared how traction builds trust, why capital must be chosen carefully, and how great founders turn investor interest into leverage. Drawing on examples like Rewind.ai and BenchSci, he laid out what separates good pitches from great businesses.

1. Pitch to clarify thinking: Saying your plan out loud invites feedback and sharpens your logic.

2. Traction builds trust, not slides: Focus on customer milestones first—VCs only glance at decks.

3. Trust is built, not assumed: Show credibility, deliver reliably, be warm, and care beyond yourself.

4. Keep small promises: Reliability grows when you do what you say, even with tiny tasks.

5. Say yes to help: Accepting offers like coffee builds closeness and rapport.

(00:00) Jeremy Au: Why do I need to learn the, “how to pitch?” And I tell people that pitching is very much presenting and articulating — a set of perspectives about the future that is fundamentally a good skill set for all of you.

(12:40)So all of you probably do business communications, many of you are the pitch and I hope that first of all, you understand that pitching gives you one benefit, which is that it's about articulating a future scenario and by articulating it, together, we can improve the business logic of it. Okay? So there's a lot of people who say stuff that is crazy, right?

They say, "My business plan is to build this." Right? And everyone's 'Eh, that doesn't really make sense, right? That doesn't make sense. And then, but when they say it doesn't really make sense, there's a good opportunity, there's good feedback for you to take it, and then improve the way you articulate that future, right?

So if you look at Replica, I'll send an article later. Replica has a very... very interesting pitch. Replica is an AI companion for lonely people. So if you're lonely, don't worry, you can buy Replica. And so she said something about how she believes that everybody who has their own AI (01:00) companion, they'll be their best friend, right?

So quite an interesting but I thought it was a very interesting article because she explained that logic very clearly. Now, do I agree with it? Maybe I'm a bit too old school. Maybe I'm like, 'Ah, I should hang out with humans. But I felt like she did a very good job. So I'll share the article later.

Secondly, is that when she articulated that, that logic of AI companions for everybody and everybody. Everybody's first best friend will be an AI companion and you can attract customers. People are like, "Wow!This is a great product. I want to use it!" Some of you will be like, ''Wow, I really believe in this future. Everybody should also have an AI companion."

So you can attract teammates, It'll help you attract supporters. Obviously, whenever you pitch something you also attract detractors. So Jeremy is like, 'Eh, I prefer organic, humanely-raised , organic humans. Last thing, of course, is that when you pitch, you're also partnering with capital allocators, right?

So people can give you money and resources for you to achieve the pitch that you want to have, whether it's a tuition center, a fashion brand, a bakery, whatever you want to do, people can give you money (02:00) to make it happen. In fact, just last night somebody was like, "Hey, my friend, has, understands coffee really well and I'm looking for money, blah, blah, blah, right?

So everybody's pitching all the time. So when you are a founder and you're building, obviously we're talking about pitching, but of course what I'm trying to say here is that you should always focus on traction first. Building real life business value creation from the customers. Real life proof points, real life milestones.

So you need to have that traction. Really focus. Because a lot of people think… seem to think, "Oh, it's about a pitch deck, and they make the best pitch deck." But the problem is that a pitch deck, on average, a VC looks at your pitch deck for only 3 minutes and 44 seconds. So... so there's an online pitch deck that measures this.

The average VC looks at your deck for 3 seconds. It's a very low amount of time line, so if you think about it, the pitch deck is a way to encapsulate that logic. But really, what you want to focus on is really focusing on great traction. Then you need to build trust where people believe in you, they know you, they believe that can happen, and (03:00) then they build the pitch deck, right?

The pitch deck is the thing that converts them and brings them over the finish line, okay? Traction. So I think traction is pretty obvious for everybody what it is. I want to talk about trust. This is a bit of a side note, but some of you don't know what trust is. So trust is a simple equation called the trust equation.

You can imagine all the consultants always have to make this, but there's a good way to think about it. Trustworthiness is a function of four things. First, is credibility, reliability, intimacy, and self-orientation. So credibility is, let's just say, "Okay, I'm going for surgery", right? "I'm going to get my kidney removed", right?

So credibility is the doctor comes in, right? And then the ... the doctor says, I'm a professional. I'm a professional, I've done this a million times before. Okay, not a million. I've done it ten thousand times before. Then there's a lot of credibility because this person has the stature to do it, right? That's number one.

Number two is, by… imagine if your doctor comes in late, right? So you're supposed to have that appointment at (04:00) 11am, but this person kept only came in at 12:30 pm. Then, that doesn't feel reliable, right? Then you say, 'Oh, the doctor's oh, it's a one off, etc. You go for your second appointment, and then this person comes in late by an hour again, right?

So this person is not reliable, right? So this person promises something and they don't deliver that promise, right? So when you have a meeting, turning up on time is a promise that you turn up on time. Then the next thing of course is, intimacy. Do I feel buddy, right? So You know what I mean by that is, if you have a very good rapport, you have a fun time, you go for drinks with the doctor all the time, et cetera, you have very, you're very close, you're very warm with each other, that also helps build trust.

And last, of course, is self-orientation. If the doctor comes in and says, “Jeremy, the only thing I care about is my own bank account." Then you'll be like, "Oh no!" You don't, you don't want to work with a doctor. But if the doctor says, "Oh, I'm really here for you, I care about saving lives", right?

Then, that self-orientation or selfishness or (05:00) selflessness is a key component to it. So when you think about building trust with people, you need to think a lot. You will be thinking, 'Okay, I need to build a personal brand.' Someone recently was just like, 'I want to set up a podcast with my friends.' So I want to become credible to show that I understand this domain of expertise, whatever it is, so that's credibility, right?

But I think a lot of people also really understand reliability, which is delivering what you promise. You should also promise more in life to deliver. You should always promise the trick for you to do well in work. It is not to promise a big thing and deliver a big thing, it is always to promise a small thing and do the small thing.

Okay? What I mean by that is, if you ever have a boss, and you're like, 'Oh, I need to promise this big deliverable'. Don't try to do that, just say, "Hey boss, in two hours time, I'll give you this small thing". Deliver that small thing in one hour or 50 minutes. Does it make sense? Because reliability is a function of you delivering on your promise.

But you can't deliver on what you promise if there are no promises. Does it make sense?

So a lot of people in Asian culture is under (06:00) promise. It doesn't make sense. You don't do enough promises. You need to do all these small things, all right? So you need to promise more. And so sometimes the other version of that is people like to do stuff and not have made a promise. So I say, I give you. I do. I did a nice thing for you, which is nice, but you don't promise.

So what I'm trying to say is don't try to stop doing nice things. Say you're gonna do a nice thing and then do the nice thing. Does that make sense? So that'll be my tip for you for your professional success over time. Next thing is intimacy, so making sure that it's warm, etc. So one of the biggest hacks that I had is whenever I'm in a meeting or office, or I'm with an interviewer, the interviewer will say something like, "Do you want some water?"

"Can I get you a cup of coffee?" A lot of you will say no. The biggest difference I did was I started saying "yes". Okay? So, if the boss says, "Hey Jeremy, I want to pay for a meal." I'd say, "Thank you so much. Please let me get it for next time", right? If your interviewer wants to get you a coffee, say yes. Because they're doing a nice thing for you, and when they give you and feel they do a nice thing for you, they (07:00) feel nicer.

Does it make sense? To you, they're more intimate with you, right? Does it make sense? So they trust you more because they feel they're closer to you because they did a nice thing. A very weird psychological trick, but that's why, it works. Okay, try it next time, alright? And of course, self-orientation, you don't want to come across as someone selfish.

You want to come across as somebody who is doing it for the mission, for the company, for the cause, whatever it is, right? So that is, trust is a system. And so founders had to do that over and over again, so that they're able to do that. Now, fundraising often has to think about it in terms of their frameworks.

So what I tell people is that you as a fundraiser should first of all be thinking through your Capital Stack. What it means is that VC money is the least preferable or most expensive form of capital. So if you take a million dollars from Jeremy as a VC, then I am taking 20 percent of your company.

I'm taking 20 percent of your profits in perpetuity. Does it make sense? So that's the most expensive form of capital. A bank is cheap. A bank is only gonna ask (08:00) you for 13 percent of interest every year. That's not too bad. So I give you a million dollars. You have to pay back 13%. So you get to pay back 130, 000, right?

Not too bad in the grand scheme of things, right? Versus 20 percent of your profit year on every year for the next 100 years, right? Now obviously we talk about working cash, then we talk about your customer profit. So selling to customers is really key because when you have a hundred dollars, I'd rather have a million dollars from my customers who will continue giving me money rather than take, and all I have to do is deliver the product I give them, versus taking a million dollars from Jeremy to get 20 percent off your company.

Most of us tend to under allocate their time towards building customers. They spend too much time chasing fundraising and so on and so forth. The second thing is that, not all VC investors are the same. VC investors have different tiers. Some of them are really good. Some of them are really good, but assholes.

Some of them are assholes and not very good, and some of them will destroy value in your company if you let them in onto your (09:00) cap. And once you bring on an investor, you can't get them off because they buy a percentage of your company. It is easier to get married and divorced than it is to allow an investor to come in and try to get them out.

You can't get, you can't force an investor out, okay? The amount of effort that you spent upon making sure that you marry the right person, you want to make sure that you end up marrying the right investor as well. So what's important is that you need to create a target list of like school system, right?

You're applying for schools and universities. You want to say, these are the safe investors. I think they're good. If I get them, I'm happy, I'm okay. Then there's a group that I think good and I'll be happy and I think it's a little bit of a stretch, right? Does it make sense? And then there's a group that is 'Wow, if I have this investor, it's out of the moon', right?

To have Sam Altman as an investor, to have Tim Ferriss as my investor, like this is my dream investor, right? And so you need to create that tiering of these three types. But what I'm trying to say is that as a founder, you should be looking and say, this person, look, I hire (10:00) interns to do my marketing. I hire a finance accountant.

I want to hire the best accountant to do my accounting. And now I'm asking this person to join my board of directors. I better look for the best board director for my board of directors, right? So you want to hire the best possible person. So one of the big heuristics I tell people when you're a founder is I want you to look at investors and say, "Would I hire Jeremy to be my boss?"

And not really boss, but be on my Board of Directors. Does it make sense? And then, yeah, there's a lot of scenarios where I'm a good person. But if I was, for example, you're doing quantum computing, deep tech, and you look at Jeremy, and you say, Jeremy knows nothing about quantum computing. Is he really the best possible person to be on my board?

Maybe not, but he could be a, he's a nice guy, and he's not gonna screw things up. So he's a safe investor, right? But he's not the dream investor. To some founders, I'm a dream investor. To other founders, I'm just an average investor, right? Does it make sense? You always have to be thinking about it from both sides of it.

Lastly is, as a founder, you want to always be (11:00) structuring a simultaneous ownership auction. When you are fundraising, you are selling a percentage of your company, right? You are trying to get multiple people to bid for a slice of your company, okay? Because once you sell that 20 percent of your company, it will never be sold again, right?

And what you want to do is that you want to have multiple term sheets, multiple VCs competing to put money into it, so they'll beat each other, and so that they'll give you the best possible deal, right? Which is why it goes back to it, is that if you think about it, obviously, a lot of people think that VCs are very powerful people.

But a good founder is able to go through the process. They build a great business, they're solving a real problem, they build. Then they go out, they fundraise capital, they learn the feedback, then they incorporate that back into the business, they continue building, and then they keep repeating the cycle over and over again.

But the reason why is that for the best founders, as a result, they are able to generate a lot of feeding frenzy, a huge competition where people are fighting to get into the deck. So you all will say, 'Wow, (12:00) these VCs are so amazing.' Everybody's fighting to get their piece of their time. And yeah, you're right.

A lot of the VCs feel overloaded. They're meeting 10, 20, 30 startups, whatever. But it's funny that when you become a great founder and you do everything right, they'll do it for you. They'll beg for your time, they'll beg for a meeting with you, they'll beg for a chance to be on your cap table when you do it correctly.

So for example, there's a company called BenchSci, they did an 8 million Series A in 2018. And so they set it up properly and they got five term sheets in three weeks. And one of the prospective bidders was including Gradient, which is Google's AI fund. So Bench Science is basically AI for science lab stuff.

And then fast forward to 2023 last year, they raised a 17 million Series D round, right? Rewind AI just happened last year. They did a Series A in 2023. They received 170 term sheets. So the guy was like, he was like so hot, he was so overloaded. So he created a Google Docs. And then he said, hey guys, in this Google Docs, write down what you want.

What number are you going to bid for this (13:00) company? How much money are you going to put in and what the valuation is? And then I'll let you all bid. So imagine all these powerful VCs all are now forced into this Doc and you're like, shit, now I have to do a bid, a literal bid, right? And NEA won the bid, yeah, and they paid, the valuation there was, they put in 12 billion dollar.

for a 250 million dollar valuation. Rewind AI's thesis is that nobody's going to use ChatGPT, etc. 

Does that make sense? Not OpenAI that's trying to integrate with Google, but Google doesn't want to integrate with them because Google is a competitor of OpenAI, blah, blah. No, we're going to create a model where everybody has a full stack of information, so all your data rights belong to this one model, but that model is yours.

Interesting thesis, because then that person will look like you, sound like you, talk like you know everything about you, see your photos, have access to your web browsing history, but this AI would know everything about you. Whereas right now, Google's AI only knows what you share with Google, and OpenAI only shares, knows the stuff that you type into OpenChat GPT, right?

The thesis is something called Rewind. ai. As a result, they have a 350 million (14:00) valuation from last year. But what I'm trying to say here is that the tables can flip quite fast. And so it's quite important that you as a founder, even though you're looking at these demigod VCs who look like they're very powerful, if you do the right business and you're the right timing and right process, you can actually generate a lot of buzz.

And so as a result, great founders get to pick and VCs have to differentiate, right? So great founders will say 'Okay, I'm looking for a VC that I have good personal chemistry with, sector experience, and very fast to give me the money,' right? So speed. Versus VCs would probably, they think that what's important for founders is the brand of the VC, is a famous VC like Andreessen Horowitz or Y Combinator.

Number two, is it the personal chemistry? That's number two, so it's still high. And also lastly, they also agree that it's speed as well. So anyway, a little bit of a debate here. For me, I think that speed and cash is probably number one. From my perspective is if, you as a founder raised money from a VC and you got five million dollar check today And there's no (15:00) other VC that's out there coming in yet to count the bid and this five million dollar check is only expires in one week.

I think most founders will take the five million dollar check, even if theoretically two weeks later somebody's walking with ten million dollars, right? With a better and then has more chemistry blah blah blah like even if you have all these things if you're too late it won't happen.