Fundraising Advice for Early-Stage Founders

About The Talk

When you’re in the beginning stages of your startup, it could be challenging to raise your pre-seed or seed round that will help you get your startup off the ground.

At the early-stages, it will be hard to have enough data or even a product to show investors, so what exactly should you be pitching when you’re raising?

To learn more about what early-stage investors look for, we’re excited to chat with Samara Hernandez, Founding Partner of Chingona Ventures.

Join us as we chat about

What makes startups/founders interesting to her
How founders should decide how much to raise
How to pitch your startup
Common mistakes and pitfalls in fundraising

Our Guest

Samara Hernandez

Founding Partner of Chingona Ventures

Samara is Founding Partner of an institutionally-backed pre-seed stage fund, Chingona Ventures, focusing on investing in technology and technology-enabled companies all over the U.S. Prior to this she was an early stage investor at MATH Venture Partners, an early-stage venture fund investing in technology start-ups with differentiated approaches to customer acquisition. In this capacity, she led new investment review, diligence and execution. Prior to venture capital, Samara worked at Goldman Sachs, where she was continually ranked top 5 in selling financial products, providing market insights, advising on portfolio construction, and consulting on business practices. She started her career in the Fixed Income, Currency and Commodity (FICC) group where she led multiple technology enhancing projects across global exchanges. Samara is actively involved in the Chicago tech community and passionate about helping underrepresented groups get into STEM education, venture capital and entrepreneurship. She co-founded the Latinx Founders Collective organization to bring together Latinx founders, investors, and community leaders to support the entrepreneurial ecosystem.

Samara earned an Industrial and Operations Engineering degree from the University of Michigan and a master’s degree in Business Administration from Northwestern University.

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Everyday at 10AM, we speak with founders, operators and experts about their experiences and advice for other founders. The talks are focused on topics that will help early-stage entrepreneurs need to survive and thrive. Membership includes access to our live daily talks as well as any talk you missed.