John Kim

“If the product is not worth raising money for, no matter how good you are, you can't raise money. In other words, if you have no differentiation, your track record's bad, it's a really complicated story, you're out of business. The general partners in that sit…”

“Here's where almost everybody gets it wrong. Everybody focuses on the logos, the logic. That is almost never where you want to start. You have to be logical. But you want to address the person's emotional desires for what they want, and then their ethical or i…”

“If you're talking to sovereigns, you better have something strategic. You better have some reason why it benefits the country. Better look through and say, hey, this is why your nation benefits.”

“I have found that pension plan investors, people who don't have a lot of upside, if I make 10 times money for you don't get paid anymore. Your job is hard because you work in an environment that can be bureaucratic, political, disrespectful. Can be. Not all pe…”

“Every meeting must start with four things. You must establish rapport. You must establish credibility. You have to gain their attention. You have to generate interest, and you better do it fast.”

“If I want somebody to help me get into an account, that individual's relationship with the person they need to contact, I don't need an intimacy between them. They don't have to be close friends. It does help, obviously. That person just has to be respected. I…”

“I now run a artificial intelligence company called Lila Sciences, which has fundraising as a component to it. But I was finishing a big fundraiser, my last from General Catalyst, and I was feeling the urge to try something different the last chapter of my life…”

“This is the essence of the equation I call the law of differentiation. Your track record plus your differentiation divided by the complexity of your story is generally how much money you can raise.”

“Repeat back what they said. You want to make sure they say an objection. I think your fees are too high. Ok, that's an objection. Then you literally just have to repeat back. Ok, so hey, you just said our fees are too high. Can you give me some more color on t…”

“At some level, I think I've underperformed my true potential. I got so attached to the sales persona and being this super fundraiser. I raised a lot of money in my career. I'm proud of it, but I got really attached to that persona, that identity. When there ar…”

“Whenever I walk into a meeting, a hundred percent of the time, I have two things that I will do. And this is probably since birth. I will know what my first thing I'm going to say is. Then I know what my closing objective is.”

“I believe that persuasion is desire minus fear. So what people want minus how scared they are. So many books on persuasion talk about how to stoke desire, how to get people interested. I think that that's very credible, very real. But I find that most of succe…”

“The fundamental truth is that's usually not where the sale falls down. Most people will believe that people are good investors. Most people will believe that the opportunity makes sense. They just don't trust the person. There's a big difference between belief…”

“If you're talking to a fund of funds, The asset manager, you better say something really differentiated. Because they're selling differentiation.”

“Then the law of trade-offs. It's one of the easiest and best laws to understand that you're always trading off size and terms and speed. It's size times terms times speed.”

“You need to know what you're auditioning for. Because it's not a sales pitch. It's not an interview. It's an audition. The idea that you're walking in, they know what they think they're looking for.”

“For 30 plus years, almost every conversation I have fits that structure. It's a habit. Anybody I ever meet, that is how I will structure a conversation.”