How to use Distill for fundraising
If you are using Distill to fundraise, this takes you through the features in Distill you need to know about.
If you're looking for more general advice on the fundraising process, see my guide on finding a lead investor (for first time founders raising pre-seed or seed).
If what's below is too long to read, here are just the bullet points on using Distill for fundraising:
Look at the investing history of funds and people on their Distill pages to see if they are a fit and if they invest at the stage you're raising for.
If it's a larger fund, use the "Find the right person" feature on the fund's Distill profile to figure out which partner is most relevant.
Figure out who to ask for an intro from using the "intro paths" section on a person's Distill profile. This ranks mutual connections based of the strength of evidence they know each other.
Add investor profiles to a Distill list which you can use as your mini CRM. You can add a status column, notes, AI assessment questions to do research and an intro paths column to ask others to help with intros.
Bonus features: use the GMail plugin to look up new people from email and the calendar integration to see what you have in common with people ahead of meetings.
Investing Data
If you go the Distill profile for a VC fund or for a person who's invested in startups, you'll see a special "Investments" section on the profile. The companies they have invested in are broken out by category so you can browse them and they are organized with the most recent first.
On profiles for VC funds, you'll see a table of how many investments they've made in the past two years, how those break out by stage and which of the investments they were the lead investor for.
To see if the VC Fund or person is a fit, you'll want to go through their investments on Distill to see if the companies there are similar enough and if any might be a conflict of interest for them. You can click on any investment to bring up the full profile for that company.
Find the Right Partner
If you are looking to pitch a larger fund like a16z, it can be hard to know which partner there is the best fit for what you are working on. From any VC Fund profile (or company profile in Distill generally), look for the button called "Find the right person".
Clicking on this opens up an agent experience where you tell Distill what you're working on and what round you are raising. Ask Distill which partner there would be best to go pitch and it will come back with some analysis and the most likely people to get in touch with.
Intro Paths
If there's an investor who you think is a good fit, the best way to get them to meet with you is to ask someone credible to make an introduction. On a person's Distill profile, open up the "intro paths" section to see your mutual connections ordered with the strongest paths first. Distill looks at information like work history overlap and investing history to figure out if people actually know each other or not.
Investor Search
There are a lot of ways to find VC investors to reach out to. Distill is most helpful at the moment doing deeper research on each VC fund and partner. The other area where Distill is uniquely useful is looking for angel investors or founders in your wider network.
Click on the "Search" tab on the left in Distill. From there just enter what you're looking for. Use a People search if you're looking for individual partners at VC funds, angels or founders. Use a Company search to look up VC Funds based on stage, geo and investment focus.
Distill Lists
On any profile in Distill, there's an "add to list" button in the upper right. Lists are super simple in that you can just add any person or company to one, you can create public links to a list and you can invite others to collaborate with you.
For fundraising, I would recommend the following:
Add a Status column so you can keep track of who you've reached out to or not.
Add some Assessment Questions like "what similar companies have they invested in", "what are recent seed deals they have invested in" and "what advice do you have for pitching this person".
Add an "intro paths" column so you can select which intros you're going to ask for before you run through sending all the emails. This way you don't ask the same person for like 20 intros (or at least start with the ones you care most about).
Invite your co-founders and advisors to the list so they can also add to the Intro Paths column in case they have anyone in their network who'd be a better path.
Add a notes field for any thoughts you need to remember, when you're meeting witht them, how the pitch went, etc. Just keep in mind others you share the list with can see this.
Have a separate list for VC funds that you are looking into and once you pick out the partner you're going to get in touch with add them to your other Distill list with all the individual investors on it (which will include angels).
Bonus Features
Bonus feature #1: integrate your calendar with Distill. You'll get a daily email with new people you're meeting with and what you have in common with them. You should read this (as well as the profiles) of investors before you actually pitch them.
Bonus feature #2: use the Gmail plugin for looking up people right from email. If you use Superhuman, they have their own version of this and if you use outlook… are you really a startup? I'm joking, we'll add outlook support later.
The Gmail plugin is especially useful when new people get added to an email exchange with an investor and you need to look up who those people are. Like how many years of experience do they have, what have they been writing about, etc. If you click on "other details" on a Distill profile you can see their estiamted age.
