Navigating the rocky road: our lessons learned raising VC funds

Hey, we are Ramón Rodrigáñez and Andrea Marino, Co-Founders at Nova, the Global Top Talent Network.

Welcome to Talent First, our newsletter where those who believe that talent is the most important resource in the economy get together.

Every week, we cover a new topic related to attracting, hiring, developing, and retaining talent, as well as the learnings from our journey building Nova.

In this edition, we touch upon some of the key moments of our founders’ journey, some of those discussed more in depth in our podcast episode. We hope you’ll enjoy it as much as we did while recording it.

Summary

1. The road to fundraising: We revisit Nova’s evolution, highlighting early mistakes, such as scaling too quickly and fundraising too soon, and the lessons we learned along the way.
2. The challenges of fundraising: From pitching 250+ investors to navigating the sales process, we share the toughest lessons of fundraising: creating leverage, avoiding premature hiring, and understanding the FOMO effect.
3. The importance of network and brand in fundraising: How Nova’s trust network and brand-building efforts helped us secure funding—even when our metrics weren’t perfect.
4. What we would do differently (and what we learned): Key reflections from our 18-month journey: how we’d structure our fundraising process differently and the importance of living frugally during lean periods.
5. The Future ahead: With €3.2 million raised, we’re gearing up for international expansion, AI advancements, and a lean, scalable future.

1. You don’t scale. Product-Market fit does.

In the beginning, we confused motion with momentum. We hired quickly, launched fast, and told ourselves we were scaling. But scaling prematurely is like adding engines to a paper plane, it doesn’t matter how fast you fly if you’re not aerodynamic. In the early stages, your only job is to find signal. Anything that distracts from that, fundraising, hiring, PR, is noise. Find product-market fit. Only then do you earn the right to scale.

At Nova, we confused the world economy's momentum with PMF, and we paid for that mistake heavily.

2. Fundraising is a game of leverage, not luck

We pitched 250+ investors. That sounds impressive until you realize how inefficient it was. We weren’t selling equity, we were trying to sell certainty in a world we didn’t yet understand ourselves.

Fundraising is not about being convincing; it’s about being obvious. Obvious businesses raise with ease. The rest need to manufacture leverage.

Leverage looks like this:

• Momentum: multiple investors circling at once.
• Scarcity: clear timeline and capacity constraints.
• Social proof: warm intros from trusted networks.
• Preparation: knowing the investor better than they know you.

Designing the gameplay is as important as executing it. You will, of course, adjust and iterate your pitch over time, but make sure you engineer for leverage since the beginning.

3. Play long-term games with long-term investors

When we started, we saw investors as gatekeepers. Now, we see them as partners.

The best investors didn’t just ask for our numbers. They asked about our philosophy of hiring, our deepest fear in building Nova, and our conviction around market timing. These are the ones who stick with you when the metrics wobble. What we learned is that relationships compound. Start building them before you need money. Just like with talent, “dating before you’re hiring” builds trust before transactions. The network is the moat (we might be biased here).

4. “Brand is trust at scale”

What made Nova investable, despite early metrics that were far from perfect, was the network effect of trust. Our members became our ambassadors. Our mission became our signal.

Brand isn’t what you say about yourself; it’s what others say about you when you're not in the room. And in fundraising, investors are always asking the room. In uncertain environments, trust beats traction.

5. Mistakes are inevitable. Waste is optional.

Here’s what we’d do differently:

• Live leaner. Until you are pre-product market fit, every expense that does not get you closer to PMF is a liability. Money at this stage gives you time, the less you spend on non-core things, the more time you have.
• Raise later. Capital magnifies execution. If your execution is misaligned, more money speeds up your demise.
• Compress the timeline. Letting the round drag on diluted our energy. Fundraising is a full-time job, do it intensely, then exit fast.
• Build optionality. Don’t depend on one investor, one hire, or one narrative. Always have more than one way to win. We learnt this in 2022 and we did not make that mistake twice.

6. Capital is not the goal. It's the byproduct of clarity.

With €3.2 million in the bank, we’re not celebrating the raise. We’re celebrating what it enables: the ability to go deeper into AI, expand internationally, and continue building with a focused, lean team.

Raising money doesn’t make your company valuable. Solving a real problem, for real people, at scale does. We are still early in our journey. But we now understand the rules of the game we’re playing a bit better. We will still make mistakes, but we will be better at recognizing the patterns and adjusting fast. If you are curious to dive deeper, listen to the story directly from us on the special Nova Podcast episode we launched 👇

https://youtu.be/jKXsqjzGUng

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