Billion $ Story

Founder

SPRYNT

Sold workshops led by professionals from Amazon, IBM and Google to corporate clients and startups.

Co-Founder

June Fund

$100M VC firm headed by Google's Chief Business Officer Philipp Schindler

Principal

Heilemann Ventures

Investment Team

iZettle

Operations & Business Development

Deloitte

Made pretty slide decks and spreadsheets very few people ever looked at.

Consulting

I help startup founders raise $1-10 million from VCs with a Billion $ Story | ex-VC at $100M firm by Google board member

Fundraising can be brutal.

After talking to 4,000+ founders over the last 10 years,

I’ve discovered three core problems most of them face (and how to solve them):

1/ You can’t book enough investor meetings
2/ Investors don’t see the potential of your business
3/ They pass on you with bullsh*t feedback or ghost you

Each of them alone could end your run.

If these sound familiar it’s likely because you’ve taken fundraising advice from the wrong people.

And that has resulted in an absolute grind of a fundraise.

Something you don’t care to repeat.

I get it because I’ve been there.

And it’s not your fault.

The internet is a noisy place, and those with no experience often speak the loudest.

Why should you listen to me then?

Because I’ve experienced fundraising from all angles:

→ I was a VC
→ I’ve raised money myself
→ I’ve helped 100+ founders raise $1-10 million rounds

And I can tell you why it’s been a grind for you…

Because venture capital isn’t like most markets.

It’s top-heavy.

It’s feast or famine.

I was a VC for a $100M firm led by one of the most powerful men in tech

…and I’ve seen the reality:

A few outliers get more money than they could ever spend. The rest fight for table scraps.

Because VCs only look for one thing:

Future billion $ companies.

Outliers.

They want founders who can bend reality to their will.

Ordinary pitch advice, generic deck templates, and cookie-cutter narratives won’t cut it.

If you follow the ordinary path, will that make you look extraordinary?

Never.

You’ll drown in a sea of sameness with 90% of pitches.

To create something unique you need an intense approach.

That’s why my help is tailor-made for founders:

1/ I’ll show you how to get 80-100 warm investor connections and book meetings

2/ Together we’ll craft your unique Billion $ Story that will make investors chase you

3/ You’ll learn how to apply my tactics and investor psychology to create conviction and FOMO and close your round

Does it work?

Here’s what my client Frank Gu - currently building his second billion $ business - says:

"Uli is an amazing storyteller, period.

If you're anything like me and tend to overthink things with that extra critical and logical voice in your head, do yourself a favor and book a session with Uli immediately.

He will make your story shine, you won't regret it!"

Interested?

Just DM me “billion$story” and let’s have a chat

Uli Kuenzel

I’m an entrepreneurial growth leader that has sold more than $25M of software, services, and physical products. Over the last decade, I’ve raised money, started and sold a company, built and led teams, and led revenue growth for companies in several industries.

Jon Caldwell

If you're raising capital to pay for development, you might not need as much as you think.

I'm using Claude Code to build tools for my own use right now. No dev team. Just me talking to Claude like I'd talk to a developer.

It's finding things I wasn't even spotting. And it's just a hundred bucks a month.

For most platforms, you can do 95% of the build with AI. Download your repo. Talk to Claude. Ship code.

This doesn't mean you don't need capital. But if most of your raise is going toward tech, ask yourself: Could I do this with AI and a fractional CTO instead?

The answer might free up your runway, or change whether you need to raise at all.

Do you really need that quarter million for development?

Founder @ 3Victor | 1x Exit | Fractional growth operator for tech & services founders | $25M+ in sales of software, hardware, and services

We put $3,000 into cold email as a test. We got $12,000 out.

Client was selling packages to large brands. Big contracts, long sales cycle. We spun up a smaller offer to another segment, SMBs, as a test. Started closing deals at $3,000.

Then we tested channels. Paid ads. Cold calling. Cold email.

Cold email worked. We got reliable customers at a predictable cost. So we scaled it.

$3,000 into cold email infrastructure and AI. $12,000 back in revenue. Now we're spending lots over the next year just scaling that one channel.

That's it. We're not diversifying. We're not adding paid ads. We're just doing the one thing that works until it stops working.

When you find a channel that converts, what are you doing to scale it?

"We're not growing like we want to." Okay, what are you doing for sales and marketing?

How many cold calls? How many emails? How many LinkedIn connections? How much content? Paid ads?

"Well, nothing. I sent five emails last month."

You should send more emails.

I have this conversation constantly. Founders think they have a strategy problem or a positioning problem or a channel problem. Sometimes they do.

But most of the time, they have an activity problem. They haven't done enough of anything to know what works.

Five emails in a month isn't a campaign. It's not even a test. It's nothing.

Before you hire a consultant to fix your go-to-market, ask yourself: Have I actually tried anything consistently for more than a few weeks?

Where's the real problem?

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Consulting on and implementation of growth programs with founders of technology and service companies. Helping executive teams improve strategy, positioning, messaging, pricing, and sales/marketing channels to achieve growth.

• B2B2C BeautyTech platform: Improved pricing and sales process, increasing ACV to 2.6x, signed $272k in new deals in 8 weeks, and implemented company-wide KPI tracking. Advised founders on strategy and negotiation.
• B2B FinTech startup: Generated 74 opportunities through cold calling and email in 4 months. Advised executive team on sales management, processes, pricing, positioning, messaging, and marketing strategy.
• B2B Event Management SaaS: Generated 120+ investor and strategic partner leads in 8 weeks by reaching out to almost 3000 investors and competitors.
• B2B SaaS for CPG: Generated $493k in pipeline from SMB brands and $269k from agencies, validated cold calling and email channels, and attracted acquisition interest from multiple agencies.
• B2B SaaS for trend prediction: Created opportunities with major companies like General Mills and Nestle, launched a new campaign generating 39 leads and 5 qualified opportunities, and discovered highly effective outbound angles.

Head of Growth

SaaS development company. Successfully led revenue turnaround, achieving 80% growth in 3 years, 510% faster than the industry standard. This reversed a 12% decline in the previous three years.

• Signed tens of millions in revenue, managing over $50M in total pipeline value.
• Increased YoY signed revenue by 73.1% between 2022-2023, reaching eight figures in Jan '23 TTM
• Signed seven-figure deals with Series A-funded startups in Silicon Valley and large SaaS companies
• Diversified lead sources by reducing referral dependence from 100% to 59%, and increasing outbound (9%) and inbound (32%) channels.
• Led development of inbound channel that grew web traffic 1230% and generated hundreds of thousands in sales, dozens of opportunities and millions of dollars in pipeline.
• Built and led sales & marketing team: 2 marketers, 1 rep, and 1 account manager.
• Implemented qualification processes (BANT and later MEDDPICC) in HubSpot, improving deal focus and revenue forecasting accuracy.
• Recovered a lost client generating an additional $1.9M in revenue, and won a deal against a competitor priced 3.1x lower by leveraging credibility and trust.
• Developed sales and marketing strategy: revenue analysis, segmentation, personas, qualification criteria, and process.
• Reported results and strategy to CEO and Board.

Channels used: content/SEO, organic social, paid social, paid search, community, outbound, partners, and referrals.

Growth Consultant

Director of Sales & Marketing

Funded services marketplace startup within the HoldCo. Led growth strategies, acquisition channels, and streamlined operations to maximize user acquisition.

• Lowered new user cost per acquisition by 74%
• Lowered posted listing CPA by 58%
• Increased listing conversion rate by 17%
• Increased match rate by 20%
• Designed and implemented marketing channel tests
• Installed pixels and conversion tracking for Google and Facebook ads
• Implemented competitive analysis, growth strategy, and user experience improvement reports

Head of Business Development & Innovation

Built a premium health‑products company from concept to multi‑national distribution and a private‑equity acquisition in four years.

• Identified an underserved sub‑category, designed a differentiated formulation, and built a full supply chain—from R&D through contract manufacturing and quality control.
• Raised equity and debt from private investors & BDC; scaled with marketplace, influencer, DTC, and distributor channels.
• Expanded retail footprint from zero to 450+ locations across North America & Asia.
• Drove 40 % CAGR (≈ 8× industry average) while maintaining a 76 NPS and 95 % 4‑/5‑star reviews.
• Grew owned audience to 30k+ social followers.

Exit: Acquired by a private‑equity group in 2019, delivering a 36% IRR to early investors.

Founder (Acquired)

Document automation SaaS platform. Achieved 120% of quota; closed deals with banks, insurance companies, and professional associations; led sales training sessions on compelling storytelling and prospecting; executed 30 to 80 cold calls per day.

National Account Executive

IoT sensor startup. Achieved 100% of quota; streamlined outbound sales process with a data-driven approach, split testing email templates to produce a 50% increase in evaluation kit sales velocity; successfully opened accounts with two major technology companies in the US.

Sales Development Representative

- Kabul, Afghanistan Op Attention 2011-2012, Transport Platoon; convoys with heavy vehicles, supporting close protection teams and joint operations with US military; advance promoted to Corporal and recommended for leadership course progression
- Calgary, Alberta 2013 flooding disaster relief operations
- Qualified for CFSAC national shooting competition in 2012
- Counter-Terrorist driving certification, training in small-unit tactics, CQB and unarmed combatives
- Top Candidate & Top Shot in Basic Military Qualification 2009

Infantry Soldier (3PPCLI)

English

French

Helping veterans transition into entrepreneurship

Helping entrepreneurs from high school, college, and post-education backgrounds plan or grow their new businesses.

I got a sales job to save my company.

We'd filmed Dragon's Den and I was riding high. All five dragons made offers. 

I told our distributors to stock up. I bought four times more inventory than usual.

The producer said the episode would "probably" air in October.

October came. Nothing. November. Nothing. December. Still waiting.

Meanwhile, vendor payments were due. Net 30, net 60, net 90. I'd negotiated terms based on a timeline that didn't exist.

By month three, I had a choice: stop paying myself and pray, or get a job and keep the company alive.

I made a list of 120 VPs of Sales at tech companies. Cold emailed all of them. Got about 20 calls, three offers. Started a new job 45 days later.

For the next 18 months, I worked that sales job full-time. Hit 120% of quota. Ran the startup on the side. Had my first kid in the middle of it.

The episode finally aired in February. Sales tripled. The company survived.
But only because I did the thing that felt like failure.

Nobody tells you that sometimes keeping your company alive means swallowing your pride and getting a paycheck.

It takes 20+ good customer experiences to balance out a single bad one.

Alex Hormozi shared this stat and it stuck with me.

Think about what that means. You can do great work for months. Build trust with a client over dozens of interactions. Deliver on every promise.

Then one dropped ball. One missed deadline. One careless comment.

And you're not back to zero. You're at negative 20.

Reputation takes years to build and a minute to destroy. We all know the saying. But the math makes it visceral.

Every interaction either deposits into or withdraws from your trust account. And the exchange rate is brutal.

Are you treating your reputation like a savings account or a checking account?

I've mentored dozens of people. The ones I remember all did the same thing.

They executed fast and closed the loop.

I volunteered for a couple years mentoring veterans transitioning into entrepreneurship. Most people would take advice, say thanks, and I'd never hear from them again.

But a handful stuck with me. One guy I told about a pricing survey methodology. He ran it with his customer base, updated his prices, and came back a month later: "We're doing 30% more revenue now."

That was gratifying. And I remember him to this day.

If you're looking for mentors, here's what actually works:

Show why them specifically. Not a generic "I want to learn from you." Reference something they said or wrote that stuck with you.

Execute within 2-4 weeks. Nothing signals seriousness like speed. Nothing signals waste of time like sitting on advice for months.

Close the loop. Tell them what you did, what happened, and what you learned.

You don't need skills to bring value to a mentor. You need enthusiasm, execution, and follow-through. That's rarer than you'd think.

Next time you get advice from someone you respect, try executing within two weeks and sending them the results.

An SDR was spending 15 to 20 hours a week on research. Now he spends zero.

Before: he'd manually look up company websites, find tech stack info, get owner names and phone numbers, fill it all into a spreadsheet. Fifteen to twenty hours a week.

After: We set up Clay to enrich all those data points automatically. Fraction of a penny per company. Takes minutes instead of hours.

That freed up 15-20 hours for actual calls. Based on his historical conversion rates, that meant somewhere between 5 and 20 more meetings per week.

When we pitched it to leadership, we didn't talk about AI. We said: "For $200 a month, you get this many more meetings."

It was a no-brainer.

The pitch isn't "we should use AI." The pitch is "here's what we'll get back."

Where is your team spending hours on work that could happen in minutes?

Here's a cold outreach workflow I built that doesn't feel like cold outreach.

Target: Funded startup founders who post on LinkedIn sometimes, but not consistently.

Step 1: Pull their LinkedIn posts. Calculate the gap between posts. Filter for people who post sporadically.

Step 2: Find a YouTube video or podcast where they did an interview. About 60% of founders have at least one.

Step 3: Pull the transcript. Use it to create a custom asset for them, a strategy or asset based on their own insights in their own voice.

Step 4: Send it with a simple message: "I saw your interview with [host]. We made this for you. Let us know if you'd like to talk."

No pitch. No ask. Just value upfront.

The whole thing runs in Clay. It's not fully automated, someone still reviews the output, but it scales way better than manual research.

If you're doing outbound, try leading with something you made for them instead of something you want from them.

For a fintech client, 60% of our meetings came from cold calls. 40% from cold email.

I didn't expect that split. Email is supposed to scale better. Calling feels old school.

But fintech is different. Everyone's got a buttoned-up approach. Nobody wants to look desperate. So almost nobody is doing direct outreach.

That means the people who do it stand out.

We stood up a cold email campaign and a cold calling campaign in parallel. The phone outperformed. Not because our scripts were magic, just because we were one of the few actually picking up the phone.

The channel that feels uncomfortable is often the one that works best. Because your competitors aren't doing it either.

What channel are you avoiding that might be wide open?

Most people don't want to adopt new technology. That's true in every market.

If you have a new product or solution, the majority of your market won't want to change their ways. That's normal. Jim Collins wrote about this, the adoption curve.

But there's a small group called early adopters. Maybe 10-15% of your market. They have a big enough pain point, they're adventurous, they're willing to give new things a try.

The problem is you can't identify them from the outside. You just have to get out there.

So it's a numbers game.

If you contact 100 people, maybe 10 are even early adopters. And if your response rate is 5%, that means half a person in that group will answer.

Contact 500 people, you might get 5-10 that are willing to give it a shot. Those are your first customers. Your first testimonials. Your first feedback.

You won't win the whole market on day one. You just have to find your early adopters.

I showed up to a distributor meeting with the worst prototype you've ever seen.

I'd been cold calling distributors for three months. Finally got one to invite me to a trade show.

Problem: we only sold online. Our product shipped in a plain bag with an Amazon label.

So I grabbed some bottles, found a crappy white cardboard box, and printed out what the retail packaging would look like. Awful resolution. Looked terrible.

I walked up to Anthony and basically apologized. "I know it's really ugly, but just imagine proper lip laying and everything."

He laughed. "No, no, it looks good. I can see what it'd be like."

He placed the order. We got into hundreds of stores because of that meeting.

Anthony saw past the cardboard. He saw someone who'd been cold calling for three months and showed up anyway.

If you're waiting until everything's polished, you might be waiting too long. Give it a shot before you're ready.

If your initial market is small, you need a different VC narrative.

VCs look for billion-dollar outcomes. If your TAM is tight, they're going to pass unless you show them where this goes.

The narrative that works: evolution.

Phase one: We're a workflow tool. We help a specific user do a specific job faster and better.

Phase two: We become a data centralization tool. Every transaction, every input, every outcome flows through us. Now we have something nobody else has.

Phase three: We become the platform. The submission layer. The integration point. The thing everyone has to use.

That's how you paint picture of how a niche product becomes a billion-dollar company. Not by pretending the market is bigger than it is. By showing the path from useful tool to essential infrastructure.

If you're pitching VCs with a small TAM, try framing your story as an evolution.

When you find one growth channel that works, it gets boring. That's when you know it's working.

Most founders chase multiple channels at once.

Paid ads. Cold email. Content. Events. Partnerships. They spread thin trying to make everything work.

Early stage, you don't have enough focus or budget to market effectively to two different segments. You need to pick one and hammer it.

One persona. One offer. One channel.

When you find something that converts, you don't diversify. You optimize. You do more volume. You get better at the script. You refine the targeting.

That's how you scale from zero to one.

The exciting part is finding what works. The profitable part is doing that thing over and over until it stops working.

Pick one channel. Hammer it.

How many cold calls does it take to close one customer?

I tracked this with a client selling to small retailers. His numbers:

Connection rate: 13% (someone answers)
Demo booking rate: 30% (of connections)
Show rate: 70% (of booked demos)
Close rate: 15% (of demos held)

Stack those percentages and you get 0.4% conversion. That's 250 dials to close one deal.

He knew that every 250 calls, he'd close one customer two to six weeks later. That's the math.

This is how you forecast. You work backwards from your target. How many closed deals do you need? How many demos? How many connections? How many dials?

Once you know the math, you know exactly how much activity you need. No guessing. Just execution.

If you're doing outbound, do you know your numbers at each stage?

About 10% of Dragon's Den deals actually close.

I asked a producer after my episode. Most founders misrepresent their numbers, or the dragons back out during due diligence.

So I didn't count on the money.

I'd been talking to other investors before the show. They were interested but dragging their feet. Taking their time. You know how it goes.

The day after we filmed, I called them.

"Jim Treliving wants to invest. Just wanted to let you know."

They signed a term sheet that week.

The dragons never actually invested. But the offer created urgency. It gave me credibility. It forced a decision from people who were sitting on the fence.

Sometimes the best use of external validation isn't the deal itself. It's what it unlocks with everyone else.

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The Battle

Uli Kuenzel

Jon Caldwell

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The Battle

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Jon Caldwell

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Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Jon Caldwell's LinkedIn Performance

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