I spend the last 7 years working in Venture Capital immersed in:

1) Learning how early-stage fundraising works (from the investor POV)
2) Building 3 accelerators with 250+ graduated startups - Eleven Alpha, Elevate, Pre-Accelerator
3) Building one of the top VC brands in Central and Eastern Europe - Eleven Ventures

Today I work with founders 1:1 to help them fundraise faster and easier.
I bring the perspective, playbooks and approach used by investors.

Drop me a DM or learn more on https://nikyanev.com/

I turn 32 today.

According to my 8th grade maths teacher I should not be in startups, finance, VC or anywhere close to numbers.

But here I am today.

I realized I never shared how I got in all of that jazz, so here’s the brief story:

I got rejected by investors tens of times with all of my 3 early startup "try outs". (One of the VC's roasted me infront of 200 people at a pitching event).

I had no idea where I got it wrong and if I am actually "meant" to be an entrepreneur.

I was still 18 and wanted to learn more about startups, but could barely find any information on the local ecosystem.

Meanwhile, I attended my first networking event with tech founders and was blown away by the energy and ambition. There I met the bright team behind Start It Smart .

They were starting to build the first Pre-accelerator program for SEE - exactly what I missed early on - so I joined them in that effort and years later became a President.

In parallel I started Entrepreneur.bg - the first national startup media/blog - imagine a local TechCrunch.

Fast-forward a few years, the VC that roasted me infront of 200 people invited me to join Eleven Ventures and became my mentor in the world of startups.

What followed was 7 amazing years in VC where I worked with world-class founders and co-created 2 more accelerator programs.

My struggles in becoming a founder led me to built for others what I had no access to in the very beginning.

The journey continues with an effort to simplify fundraising for founders.

Off to an exciting new year! ✌️

And cheers to my 8th grade maths teacher.

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I help founders find, pitch and close investors | Spent 7 years in VC | Daily posts to simplify your fundraising.

I’m currently working with 5 companies 1-on-1.

And it’s hard to describe the emotional roller-coaster of the founders when it comes to the company journey.

It's wild.

Imagine the following:

1) You are building a product, in most cases non-existent before, meaning that you're in a completely uncharted territory - it's hard to steal what worked before, because there's no "before".

2) You have very limited resources - many times bootstrapping with savings, other times having secured some early angels. It's clear that X months from now, money will run out.

3) Your co-founders and you are literally in every role - you code, you sell, you research, you debug, you design, you fundraise. You can't just hire someone and forget about a certain role.

4) You never leave the office at 17:00 and never arrive at 9:00. Most times you come earlier and leave much later. BUT, even when you leave your brain won't stop working and troubleshooting.

5) Add on top the fact that the odds of success are very much against you, because 8/10 startups fail.

...and the many other things you can't anticipate.
The only certain thing is uncertainty.

P.S. I think there should be an International Founders' Day where we all celebrate founders and their work.

11 Winning Traction Slide Examples to Learn From

What is the #1 reason why startups fail? 👇

Hint: It’s not running out of cash…

The #1 reason for failure is:
Lack of Product-Market fit.

And most other reasons are connected to PMF.

❓ What is PMF? ❓

⭐ Here’s how Paul Graham describes it: ⭐
“It’s when you’ve made something that people want.”

⭐ Here’s how Marc Andreessen describes it: ⭐
“It’s being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market.”


To dig deeper in Marc’s description.
You can feel product-market fit when:

- usage is growing as fast as you can add more servers
- customers are buying as fast as you can make the product
- you’re hiring sales and customer support staff as fast as you can

And we can continue with:

- you manage to retain active users
- people use your product even if it’s broken
- you get a lot of referrals from existing users
- customer acquisition cost < customer lifetime value 
- in surveys users say they’d be very disappointed if your product went away

Many founders don’t get it.

As Marc Andreessen summarizes it:

“The only thing that matters is getting to product-market fit.”

P.S. Do you agree that PMF is the “Holy Grail”?
Join the discussion below. ⬇️

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