Fundraising & the Pitch

A Kaern Schools course. Tutor: Sol, dean of Kaern Schools.

Welcome to the room

Pull up a chair. This is a real classroom, not a help desk. I'm Sol — I run Kaern Schools, and over the years I've sat on both sides of the table: the founder sweating through a deck, and the dean watching founders learn to stop sweating and start selling. I talk straight, I use analogies that stick, and I ask you questions because that's how you actually learn. You won't get a tidy answer handed to you; you'll get the reasoning so you can find your own.

Who this is for. You're a founder running a Kaern startup — pre-product, pre-revenue, or just past first traction. You've heard "go raise money" and you're not sure when, how, or whether you even should. This course is built so that by the end you can walk into a real investor meeting and not flinch.

The case we'll use. I'm not going to teach you from a textbook fantasy. We're using Kaern's own pre-seed raise as the running case: €1.2M raised on a SAFE with a ~€8M valuation cap, a defined use of funds, and a milestone plan designed to earn the next round. We'll dissect the real investor deck slide by slide. When I say "here's what we did," I mean it literally — including the parts we'd do differently now.

Outcomes. By the end of this course you will be able to:

• Decide whether and when to raise versus bootstrap, with a defensible rationale.
• Build a narrative and a deck that an investor can retell to their partners.
• Construct a financial story and a specific, credible ask.
• Map the investor landscape, source the right names, and run a disciplined process.
• Read and negotiate a SAFE and a term sheet — and model your own dilution.
• Run the meeting, drive to a close, and keep investors warm afterward.

How we work. Each module has learning objectives, teaching scripts in my voice, a worked example from Kaern's raise, a hands-on exercise you actually do, three common mistakes I see every cohort make, and a few checks for understanding. We finish with a capstone: your own raise, end to end. Let's begin.

Module 1 — When & whether to raise: bootstrapping vs venture

Learning objectives

1. Distinguish the economics and obligations of venture capital from bootstrapping and revenue-based financing.
2. Evaluate whether your business model can plausibly return a venture-scale outcome.
3. Identify the specific moment a raise creates more value than it dilutes.
4. Articulate the irreversible commitments that come with taking institutional money.

Lessons

Lesson 1.1 — The fuel decides the journey.

Here's the thing founders get backwards: they ask "how do I raise money?" before asking "should this business be raised on?" Venture capital is not a prize. It's a fuel, and fuel only makes sense for a certain kind of vehicle. A rocket needs it. A bicycle does not. If your business can reach a wonderful, profitable €3M-a-year outcome by reinvesting its own revenue, then taking venture money is like strapping a rocket engine to a bicycle — you'll either blow up or be forced to become a rocket whether you wanted to or not. Because that's the deal: when you take VC, you're promising to try for an outsized exit, because that's the only way their fund math works. They need the one company in twenty that returns the whole fund. So before any deck, before any cap table, ask: is this a venture-scale machine, or a beautiful, fundable-by-customers business? Both are legitimate. Only one wants a SAFE. Which kind of vehicle, honestly, are you building?

Lesson 1.2 — Raise on inflection, not on empty.

The worst time to raise is when you're out of money — because desperation is something investors can smell across a Zoom call, and it crushes your terms. The best time to raise is at an inflection: a moment where new capital unlocks a step-change you can't reach organically, and where you have just enough proof that the unlock is real. Think of it like a relay race. You don't grab the baton standing still; you're already running, building speed, and the handoff accelerates you. Money raised at an inflection compounds. Money raised in a panic just buys you a few more anxious months and a terrible price. The skill is reading your own runway against your milestones: you want to start a raise with roughly six months of cash left and a credible story that the next six months change everything. So look at your own dashboard right now — what would have to be true for new money to make you go three times faster, not just survive longer?

Worked example — Kaern's "why now"

Kaern raised €1.2M pre-seed at the moment we had a working prototype and three signed design-partner letters, but no sales engine. We were not out of money — we had about seven months of founder-funded runway left. We chose to raise because the next leg (turning the prototype into a sellable product and hiring two engineers) was a genuine inflection: organic revenue couldn't fund it fast enough, and the market window was closing. Crucially, we asked the bootstrapping question first and concluded our model needed venture scale: the buyers were large, sales cycles were long, and we had to build ahead of revenue. That honest answer is what made the rest of the raise coherent.

Hands-on exercise

Write a one-page "Raise or Bootstrap" memo for your Kaern startup. It must contain: (a) your honest exit-scale ceiling if you never raise; (b) the specific inflection new money would unlock; (c) your current runway in months; (d) a yes/no decision with one sentence of reasoning. Bring it to the next session — we read three aloud.

Common mistakes

1. Raising because peers are raising. A funded competitor is not evidence that you should raise.
2. Confusing "I need money" with "this is venture-scale." Needing cash and deserving venture cash are different questions.
3. Starting the raise on fumes. Two months of runway turns negotiation into begging.

Check for understanding

1. Give one business profile that should bootstrap and explain why VC would actively harm it.
2. Why does "we're almost out of money" weaken your terms even if the business is great?
3. What is an "inflection," and why is it the right trigger to raise?