Atherton: Founders cannot blame missing term sheets on gender or race
Amber Atherton · Amber Atherton of Zyper and Iba Masood of TARA on Raising a Series A as a Female Founder · Y Combinator · Dec 18, 2019 · at 34:27
Amber Atherton, founder of Zyper, discusses fundraising dynamics for female founders and whether identity impacts VC term sheets.
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“Like, if you have a great product and great traction, then you have a hot deal, and like, any other kind of justification as to why you're not getting term sheet is, you can't really say that. Like, you either have product market fit and a hot deal, and that's it.”
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More from Amber Atherton
Atherton: Female founders pitch market sizes less aggressively than male peers
“I feel like the appetite for risk for a lot of female founders to really answer that question, you know, how big can this be is it's more realistic perhaps of like, okay, well, we have product market fit, the product's going to change a bit. So, Realistically,…”
Atherton: Founders should never fake competing term sheets to create urgency
“You can be tempted to say, oh, well, we have this other time sheet. We have this other offer, blah, blah, blah. Just don't ever do that because it's so small as a community and just be honest.”
Atherton: Zyper wrote its own investment memos to send to VCs
“What we did was kind of do the VC's jobs for them and Write, you know, a memo as to why you should invest in us. And that sort of went out, you know, with the deck after the first meeting.”
Atherton: Startups should negotiate legal fee caps during fundraising
“Negotiate a cap with your law firm to do the regals because it will go over and it will end up being 30 days or maybe even 60 days.”