How Founders Raised Millions Through Relationships
Five real stories. Five different strategies. One common thread: they built trust before they needed anything.
The Exit Network
Benn Stancil, Derek Steer, and Josh Ferguson had never started a company together when they left Yammer, but they'd just watched Microsoft pay $1.2 billion for it.
That number matters because of what it meant to everyone in their orbit: Founders who'd worked alongside them, operators who knew their code, and executives who'd seen how they handled pressure. And in Silicon Valley, money follows trust.
"Yammer was seen around the Valley as a success. Anybody coming out of Yammer still had that success sheen to them, us included, whether or not that was deserved."
They started Mode Analytics with a pitch deck, and at the idea stage they raised a seed round.
"We raised roughly half a million dollars from folks coming out of that acquisition, or people we had built connections to through it. We were raising it off of an idea and off of people trusting us as individuals they had worked with before."
The lead investors were people who'd sat next to these founders in meetings and watched them build, ship, and handle the chaos of an acquisition, so they already knew the answer to the question every early-stage investor is really asking: Do I trust these people with my money?
By Series D, Mode had raised $80 million in total and eventually got acquired for an unknown amount, but the whole engine started with a half million dollars from people who didn't need to be convinced because they'd been watching for years.
Your network from your last company is your first fundraising asset, so if you're young and inexperienced, get a job in a company first and spend a few years learning how companies run, and build trust with the people you work with. Those people will believe you can do it on your own when you're ready, and even if they don't have the cash to invest, they will certainly know people who do, and those warm introductions to investors will mean the difference between life and death.
The Strategic Advisor
Ron Levin had the idea and two co-founders he trusted who were former colleagues from Booking.com as well as a market he understood deeply — what he didn't have was credibility with investors.
He was building an enterprise travel platform in a space with no obvious champions, so tier 1 investment firms had backed no one in the market. Since most early-stage investors hate to lead and look stupid if it goes badly, they had to find a way to get noticed.
Instead of hiring a PR firm or attending a conference, Ron called Johannes Reck, the co-founder and CEO of GetYourGuide, a travel company that had raised serious money and was on a steep growth curve.
"I knew him professionally through my work at Booking. Get Your Guide is at a place where we want to be in five years. They've raised a lot of money, he's been very successful. It's in the travel space, but not directly competing with what we do. That's the kind of advisor we need."
He offered Johannes equity in exchange for credibility and connections, and it worked.
"He was extremely helpful early on. He helped us gain credibility with investors and knew the right people. That's the kind of equity that's wisely spent."
This wasn't a trick. Ron didn't find a famous name to slap on a pitch deck. He found someone operating at the level TravelPerk aspired to reach, in the same industry, with the right investor relationships. He made a clear value exchange. And he went in knowing exactly what he was asking for.
TravelPerk eventually became a unicorn and he stepped back to let his co-founders run the company, moving on to become the Managing Partner of Alumni Ventures, a massive firm with global reach.
While most advisors clamoring for equity in the beginning stage of your business are useless and don't deserve it (and most investors don't care about your advisors as much as they do your operating team), the RIGHT advisor can be a massive boon to your potential success. Before you go into a raise, ask: who in my industry is five years ahead of me and not competing with me directly? Who has the investor relationships I need access to? If that person can actually do something specific for you and open those doors, then they're easily worth 1–2% of your company, and any smart investor will appreciate your effort.
The Relationship Hierarchy
Emily Lomban didn't have a network of investors when she started raising for Froged, her B2B SaaS product built for Spanish-speaking markets, and being a female founder instantly hurt her since 2% of all VC money goes to women.
What made it worse was that she was based in Spain, which is far more conservative and slow-moving than anyone in Silicon Valley.
So Emily had to do something unique to stand out. She spent time studying how intros actually work — not how investors say they work. She mapped out what she called a hierarchy of introductions, and she built her entire fundraising strategy around it.
"The best introduction you can get is from another investor who has invested with them and has been successful in that investment. The next is an investor they're close with. But you can also be introduced by another startup they've invested in. There are different kinds of introductions you can get. Getting in touch with investors this way is like a fast track."
She never cold-pitched an investor she hadn't at least found a warm path to.
"I have always tried to get introduced by someone else and not directly approach them except in specific cases, like investors I met at an event or was part of a webinar with. In those cases, yes, I reached out because I had something in common with them."
She also understood that closing an investor is a process:
"You need to build confidence with these investors. It's not just in the first contact that they're going to say yes. Normally they have to see a bit of your story and how it's evolving over time."
So Emily didn't just look for introductions to close the round. She used the early conversations to build a relationship, share progress, and let investors watch the company develop before asking them to commit. She ran the process with that level of intentionality across 80–100 investors and closed the round after 6 months.
Not all introductions are equal, so know the hierarchy. A cold email to a VC is most likely going to get ignored. A portfolio founder recommending you is very likely to be given a chance. A co-investor vouching for you is going to get you priority.
Before you reach out to any investor, ask: who in my network has a relationship with this person, and what's the quality of that relationship?
Also: if you're early in building your network, start with founders who have already been funded by the investors you're targeting. Reach out with genuine curiosity — ask about their experience and offer value back if you can. The introduction may come naturally, or you can ask directly once you've established some rapport.
The best intros don't feel like a favor. They feel like one friend telling another, "you should really meet this person."
Raised $4.2M With No Product Because the Network Already Trusted Them
Rabi's situation defies the conventional fundraising playbook because he raised $4.2 million without a product. Literally all he had was an idea.
The pitch wasn't "here's what we've built," it was "here's who we are and what we've been doing for our entire careers."
Both Rabi and his co-founder had deep roots in the startup world as operators who'd built products, shipped real things, and developed reputations inside the networks that matter to investors.
"Almost all my life I've worked in startups, so I have that network. Going into fundraising, I had leverage that I knew what not to do. But on the other hand, I have a good network. I have friends and mentors who knew a lot of VCs."
Then he said what every founder raising on relationships eventually figures out:
"Warm intros work great. That's all I can tell you."
The intros came because the people in his network had already seen him work. They knew his judgment. They knew his co-founder's product instincts. The trust was pre-built. The round was almost a formality.
"Both of us have built multiple products over our career. The problem we're tackling is something we've worked on deeply for most of our careers. We had that kind of trust within our network that we know what we're doing."
In the end, it only took three months from the first conversation to a term sheet and another two months for the money to arrive.
Every year you spend building, shipping, and showing up with integrity is a year of investor trust compounding in your favor. You may not think of it that way, but the operators and founders you're working alongside right now are watching you and they form opinions.
If you're not raising right now, that's not a reason to put your network on pause. It's the opposite. This is when you have the freedom to show up with no agenda — to help people, make introductions, share what you know, and build the kind of reputation that makes a "can you intro me to your VC?" text feel like a gift instead of a burden.
Start now even if your raise is two years away.
The Trust Built Through Transparency
This story doesn't start with a successful raise. It starts with a company on the edge of collapse.
Daniel Todd built Influence Mobile, a mobile gaming user acquisition business, into a meaningful company — but not without going through hell first. There was a period where a key partner owed them $400,000 and was going out of business. Revenue was unstable. The company was burning.
Most founders would have gone quiet with their investors and waited to share bad news until they absolutely had to, but Daniel did the opposite.
"I was very transparent with investors. Many of my investors will say: you've told us all the good things and the bad things. And so when you're going through a downside scenario and you have a lot of relationships that you've shared all the downside scenarios with in the past, but you've overcome them, it really increases people's confidence that you can do what you say."
When he needed capital to keep the lights on, he didn't have to cold pitch strangers. He went back to angels who already knew the full picture and asked for bridge loans. His radical transparency turned a crisis into an asset, and his investors didn't just tolerate the hard conversations — they became more confident because of them.
As a result he turned the company around and today Influence Mobile brings in $70 million per year in revenue.
Most founders treat investor communication like PR: they share wins and try to avoid sharing losses in order to control the narrative that everything is going really well. Unfortunately, you married these investors, and they have the right to know what's going on in the company they're backing — and the sooner you tell them, the sooner they can help if you need it.
You don't have to be in crisis for this to work either. If you have investors or advisors, tell them the real version of how things are going. The short-term discomfort is nothing compared to the long-term credibility you build.
When you eventually need something — a bridge, an introduction, a second check — you won't be asking a stranger to take a risk on you. You'll be asking someone who already knows you can handle pressure.
The Pattern Across All Five Stories
These founders didn't close rounds the same way. One leveraged an acquisition. One recruited a strategic advisor. One mapped a hierarchy of intros. One deployed a decade of network capital. One built trust through radical transparency during hard times.
But they all did one thing that the founders who struggle with fundraising don't do:
They built real relationships before they needed anything from them.
A real relationship, built through work, through honesty, through showing up over time with no immediate agenda.
That's the thesis of everything I talk about on We Live to Build.
The pitch deck is a permission slip to have a conversation. The relationship is what closes the round.
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