I meet 1,000+ founders every year. Most are bad at fundraising.

I also interview 100+ of the world's best founders on my podcast each year. Most are incredible at fundraising.

One raised $14M in 17 days. another was 3x oversubscribed on a $3M round. another closed a seed in hours from a single X post. All are first-time, unproven founders.

They don't waste time becoming "friends" with VCs. They have a business to build. They treat fundraising for what it is: a process where you manufacture FOMO as fast as possible, take the money, and move on.

This video breaks down the 4 steps the best fundraisers use to raise fast. The same 4 steps taught at YC and 500 Startups (where i went). The same 4 steps you can run on thousands of VCs worldwide to close $2-3M in weeks not months.

Why You Should Listen

• Why you need to reach out to 50 VCs on the same day just to end up with three term sheets.
• How to engineer intro blurbs that make VCs feel like they're already late to the game.
• Why setting fake deadlines is the fastest way to destroy all your credibility with investors.
• How one founder raised $3M in five weeks by starting with a $1.5M target and driving FOMO.

Keywords startup podcast, startup podcast for founders, product market fit, finding pmf, fundraising, raising a seed round, VC pitch, FOMO, startup fundraising playbook, term sheets, investor meetings, Pablo Srugo, venture capital

Chapters

• 00:00:00 Intro
• 00:01:30 Step 1: Build a List of 50 Qualified VCs
• 00:06:00 Step 2: Engineer the Intros
• 00:14:00 Step 3: Compress the Timeline
• 00:20:00 Step 4: Manufacture FOMO
• 00:26:00 Three Rules to Never Break

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Surojit spent 14 years at Google building mobile ads into a $100B+ business and then took Coinbase public as Chief Product Officer in 2021. In early 2023, before "agent" was even a word in AI papers, he started Ema in stealth—betting on a future where teams of AI agents would replace the "human glue" inside Fortune 500s.

In this episode, Surojit breaks down how a Hitachi deployment across 55,000 employees became Ema's true PMF moment, why he spent the first year obsessed with SOC 2, ISO 42001, and air-gapped architecture before chasing revenue, and why one client just cut their HR team from 1,000 people to 550 by automating 65,000 monthly job changes.

Why You Should Listen

• Why true PMF is when your average salesperson can sell the product without you in the room.
• How a single Hitachi deployment unlocked credibility for every Fortune 500 deal that followed.
• Why a cold email—not a warm intro—turned into Ema's largest partner today.
• How partnering with PwC and KPMG became a faster wedge into the C-suite than any conference.

Keywords startup podcast, startup podcast for founders, product market fit, finding pmf, AI agents, enterprise AI, AI employees, Fortune 500 sales, Surojit Chatterjee, Ema, agentic AI, enterprise software


Chapters

• 00:00:00 Intro
• 00:02:00 Hitachi Was the PMF Moment
• 00:04:10 What Ema Actually Does
• 00:11:48 From Coinbase to a Pre-ChatGPT Bet
• 00:28:48 The Cold Email That Won a Top Partner
• 00:30:52 Small Dinners Beat Massive Conferences
• 00:36:11 The Moment of True Product Market Fit

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Sean was spending four days a week inside customer warehouses at Amazon Shipping when he noticed the same thing everywhere: back-office admin staff churning every six months, buried under the same repetitive claims and reshipping tasks. He talked to eighty-five warehouse owners, quit Amazon in July 2024, and cold emailed his way to a pre-seed round within weeks.

In this episode, Sean breaks down why he paused all sales to rebuild BackOps as an enterprise-grade platform, how an SOP recorder that takes eight minutes replaced months of deployment delays, and the scrappy enterprise playbook—from sending donuts to warehouses to building the customer's board deck for them—that wins $300K Fortune 500 deals.

Why You Should Listen

• Why talking to 85 customers before writing a line of code is worth more than anything.
• How an eight-minute screen recording replaced months of SOP-writing delays.
• Why "what are your problems?" fails in enterprise and a pointed use case wins eight out of ten times.
• How to structure pilots that auto-convert so you never end up in post-pilot purgatory.

Keywords startup podcast, startup podcast for founders, product market fit, finding pmf, supply chain, AI automation, enterprise sales, BackOps, first-time founder, warehouse operations, logistics AI, Sean McCarthy, agentic AI

Chapters

• 00:00:00 Intro
• 00:02:24 Beating a Giant on 5% Odds
• 00:09:25 Eighty-Five Warehouse Interviews
• 00:16:33 V1: A Slack Bot for Reshipping
• 00:22:05 Pausing Sales to Rebuild for Enterprise
• 00:34:49 The Scrappy Enterprise Sales Playbook
• 00:48:23 Two Intentional Wow Moments in Every Demo
• 00:53:40 The Moment of True Product Market Fit

Send me a message to let me know what you think!