Hey there, it's Vadim 👋

Most founders I talk to start their raise in one of two ways: with a list that's too short, or by spraying and praying, sending to every investor they can find and hoping something sticks. Often it's both.

I don't blame them. The signals are confusing: which types of investors to approach, which ones are actually writing checks right now, and how to run a fundraising process while you're still running the science and the business.

And when you’ve been staring at the same tracker spreadsheet for hours on your own, it’s often hard to tell the forest from the trees.

That's why after writing about this for more than a year, I’m officially launching the Fundraising Intensive: a month-long live program that turns your raise into a repeatable process.

You’ll learn how investors make decisions, how to start your raise with a qualified list of investors actually investing in your space, and how to run your raise without it taking over your life.

And you won’t be doing it alone: you’ll work through it with me and a group of founders raising alongside you.

And some more fun along the way:

The cohort's weekly classes start Tuesday, Nov 17.

To get us ready, I'm opening Session 1 to the Bio Founder GPS community for free.

In 90 minutes, we'll cover:

At the end, I'll share more about the Intensive and will stick around to take your questions.

Bonuses for joining live:

To accommodate multiple time zones, I’ll be running this across two days:

Can't make either? Register anyway and I'll send you the recording.

To get us ready for the live session, let’s do a brief diagnostic.

In the last issue, I asked everyone where your raise was getting stuck: knowing who to reach out to, not converting the outreach to meetings, not converting the meetings to diligence, or not getting through the last mile to a commitment.

When a raise stalls, most founders I talk to go back to the pitch deck.

They do another rewrite, another round of edits, another file called v14_FINAL_final (we've all been there 🙂).

Sometimes the deck really does need improvement.

More often, though, another culprit is at play, and the deck just happens to be the easiest thing to change and still feel productive.

From what I've seen, a raise tends to stall in one of four places: the list, the outreach, the first meeting, or the process that ties them together.

Let’s check the warning signs.

This one is sneaky, because it feels like progress. Investors take time to meet, ask good questions, and maybe even request access to the data room.

Then things quiet down.

A likely culprit? Those funds may not be writing real checks to begin with.

When I reviewed 41 life science funds that closed in the last 18 months for an issue this August, I realized that only a handful could actually write a check.

The other funds were real funds with real capital, but that capital had a different job: opportunity funds reserved for existing portfolio companies, later-stage vehicles, and funds restricted to one institution or geography.

Those are the easiest to spot, just by checking the fund thesis, which they state publicly.

Then, of course, there are the zombie funds or angels 🧟‍♂️

These investors will take your meetings, ask for decks, and give thoughtful feedback.

But haven't made a new investment in more than 18 months, and the chance of you turning that tide is fairly slim.

My advice: take the top 20 names on your list and answer two questions for each:

If fewer than half of your top 20 survive, you've found your bottleneck. The good news is that this is the easiest one to fix.

If you’d like to go deeper: the different investor types and how to score each one are the heart of the live session.

When I ran a poll in February, getting responses to investor outreach came out as your #1 challenge, ahead of finding the right investors.

When I audit founders' outreach, the emails are rarely “bad.”

They're usually professional and well-written. The problem is that they could have been sent to any fund, at any point in time.

There's no reference to what this investor has actually backed or their thesis, and no sign of momentum, like how much of the round is committed or when you plan to close.

And the follow-up is usually some version of “just bumping this to the top of your inbox.”

None of these are dealbreakers, and it may feel like we’re splitting hairs. But combined, they strip your outreach of the most important things in a fundraise: relevance and momentum.

My advice: pull up the last few investor emails you sent and check two things:

If you’d like to go deeper on this: this is Week 2 of the Intensive, where we write, review, and send your outreach together.

You leave the call feeling good. They said the science was interesting and that they'd “circle back with the team.” Three weeks later, you still haven't heard from them.

Two possible culprits: the meeting was a presentation of your story rather than an investment opportunity for the fund, or it ended without a specific next step and a date - or both.

My advice: look back at your last three investor meetings and ask yourself:

If you’d like to go deeper on this: this is Week 3 of the Intensive, with a prep brief for every first meeting.

This is the hardest one to see from the inside, because every individual conversation looks fine.

The pattern usually goes like this: you talk to one or two investors at a time, wait to hear back, and only then move on to the next. You treat each conversation sequentially, months go by, and the round never really moves forward.

And if someone asks you if you’re raising capital, you say - of course, in biotech, aren’t we all? 🙂

This is why this is quietly hurting your raise:

From an investor's point of view, an opportunity like that feels evergreen. There's no reason to move now, so in a world of flashy objects and opportunities, they wait.

The founders who close their rounds tend to run a defined campaign window instead. Their top-priority investors and warm intros go out in the same week, conversations run in parallel, and there's a real internal close date that everyone, the founder included, works toward.

My advice: try to answer this quickly: how many investors are at each stage of your raise right now (contacted, first meeting, follow-up meeting, diligence)?

If you’d like to go deeper on this: I'll show you what a well-run raise looks like, start to finish, in the live session.

If you read the last section and thought “all of the above,” you're in good company.

Fundraising in general is hard, but fundraising in life sciences and biotech? Well, it’s not for the timid - but it’s also why we’re all here.

So here's your homework for this week: pick the stage where your raise feels stuck and run these checks. It should take you no more than 30 min.

Then reply to this email and let me know where you land. This will be super helpful, and we can dig into it more in the live session.

See you next week and in Session 1 of the Fundraising Intensive!

- Vadim

PS: Session 1 is free for the Bio Founder GPS community, and the starter list and tracker are only for those who join live, so save your seat here if you haven't yet.

PPS: Know a founder planning to raise in the next six months? Forward this to them. They can subscribe at biofounder.io, and Session 1 is open to them too.