Marc Andreessen and Parker Conrad’s best advice for raising venture capital

In the clip below, Parker Conrad (founder of Rippling & Zenefits), Ron Conway, and Marc Andreessen share their best advice for raising venture capital, which is basically: be so good they can’t ignore you.

Parker tells the story of pitching almost every VC in Silicon Valley for Zenefits and failing. Then while pitching someone at Khosla ventures, he realized what he was missing:

“I should really just find a way to be the Twitter guys”

What he means here is that you need to make it obvious that you can build a business that’s going to be a gigantic success—either via your past accomplishments (e.g. a successful exit) or bootstrapping your current business to impressive milestones.

Marc Andreessen elaborates on this point:

“Parker just gave you the most important thing you’ll ever hear, which is also what I was going to say. My #1 piece of advice comes from Steve Martin who explains in his book that the key to success is to ‘be so good they can’t ignore you’… If you do what Parker’s done and build a business that’s going to be a gigantic success, then investors will throw money at you. But if you come in with a theory, a plan, and no data then you’re just 1 of the next 1,000.”

Everything else when you’re trying to raise money (e.g. fancy pitch deck & business plan) is kind of beside the point. The most important thing to focus on is building a great business. And as Ron Conway says here: “bootstrap for as long as you possibly can.”

Full video: Y Combinator “How to Raise Money with Marc Andreessen, Ron Conway, and Parker Conrad (HtSaS 2014: 9)” (Sep 2019)

P.S. We’ve put together a YouTube playlist with every Marc Andreessen insight we’ve ever shared. You can watch it here: "Best startup advice from Marc Andreessen