#7 — $500M Lesson Nobody Talks About
Over the last decade, I've helped raise more than $500M. The biggest lesson had nothing to do with money.
Different deals, different structures, different continents. I built the governance frameworks, structured the entities, sat in the rooms where capital decisions were made.
You want to know the thing that almost killed the biggest deals?
Misaligned expectations between founders and investors about control.
Not valuation. Not terms. Control.
Who picks the board? Who approves the next raise? What happens if the founder and the lead investor disagree on strategy?
I watched smart people burn months because they negotiated the number on the term sheet but never designed the decision-making architecture underneath it.
The money is never the hard part. The structure around the money is.
Every cap raise should start with a governance conversation, not a valuation conversation. Who decides what? Under what conditions? With what override mechanisms?
If you're raising right now and nobody has asked you these questions yet, your advisors are doing it wrong.
The money will come. The architecture determines whether you survive once it does.
#Governance #StartupFundraising #VentureArchitecture #Mexzungu