As Mike from CompStak admitted, “it took a year to learn how to play the game and raise money for CompStak.”

“How do you play the fundraising game?”

First thing’s first: only serial entrepreneurs with a track record get money for ideas.

How much do you want each other? How much do you want the investor in regards to how much they want you? Find a way to equalize that situation. Consider your value proposition, do you have great traction or great growth to make yourself more appealing?

Raise money when you don’t need it. Have at least 6 months of runway money, this guarantees better terms . You want the money to catalyze your growth, not to keep you afloat — “We’re doing great, with the money, we can do better”.

With that in mind, don’t raise money during holidays. Time kills all deals. When the deals are dragged on over time because the partners of the funds are in all different places and occupied, the initial excitement of the deal is gone and so is your valuation.

Play to your strengths and fix your weaknesses. “We have great growth, we are lacking people” becomes “We have great growth, we want to bring on smarter people.”

Use the fear of missing out: Contrary to popular belief, investors are human too. If someone thinks it’s worth the investment, they’ll be thinking, “what do they know that I don’t?”

Investors want to know how scarce you are, one of the most common questions to come up, “so what stage are you at?” Use the fear of missing out to your advantage. This brings up to possibly the most important part of executing a deal:

“forcing function” by Mike Mandel.

Mike, CEO of Compstak, leveraged his company any opportunity he could to get investors. When CompStak got into 500 startups, which would inevitably raise the company’s profile, he offered investors a chance to invest before the new valuation. Moral of the story: create scarcity and urgency.

Keep the venture capitalists on the same level of playing field, let them create competition between each other — don’t pick favorites until the end. That way you can end the negotiations with, “I want you but I got better terms from them, let’s work this out.”

Most importantly, there is no such thing as committed money. The moment a deal is made, send your details over, add them to your investor/angel list and wait for the money to come. Stay paranoid.