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The conventional fundraising playbook goes something like this: Build your list, craft your deck, start warming intros six months out, and prepare to spend the next year in a loop of coffee chats and follow-up emails that mostly go nowhere.

I did none of that. Not because I had some genius alternative strategy 鈥� but because I figured out, early and somewhat accidentally, that the best investors don鈥檛 want to be pitched. They want to discover you.

Every meaningful check in our $14 million round came from a personal encounter. A talk I gave. A dinner I attended. A conference I almost didn鈥檛 go to. If there鈥檚 a single lesson I鈥檇 want every first-time founder to take from my fundraising experience, it鈥檚 this: stop optimizing your outreach and start engineering the rooms you鈥檙e in.

Full disclosure: I went to . I know what you鈥檙e thinking: 鈥淥f course she raised $14 million 鈥� she had the network handed to her.鈥� And look, I won鈥檛 pretend the alumni connections didn鈥檛 open certain doors. They did. It鈥檚 a competitive advantage most founders don鈥檛 have, and I won鈥檛 insult your intelligence by pretending otherwise. Harvard鈥檚 own data shows that have gone on to found for-profit or nonprofit ventures, collectively launching over 146,000 companies globally. But even at Harvard, 鈥檚 鈥� and the vast majority of those 146,000 companies never reach meaningful scale. If a diploma were enough, far more of my class would be on .

What a diploma doesn鈥檛 give you is a mission people instinctively care about. I鈥檓 a Gen Z neuroscientist building technology to solve something my generation knows firsthand: the mental health toll of a world where social media has displaced real human connection. That mission travels on its own.

Investors don鈥檛 need convincing that loneliness is a crisis or that the way teenagers relate to each other has fundamentally changed 鈥� they see it in their kids, their families, the culture around them. When your problem is self-evident to the people in the room, the pitch is halfway done before you open your mouth.

Reverse the power dynamic

The obvious problem with cold outreach is noise. A partner at a top-tier fund receives hundreds of cold pitches a week. Yours lands in a full inbox alongside dozens of others with equally compelling subject lines.

Even if your deck is exceptional, you鈥檙e asking someone to extend trust to a stranger, based on a document, before any human relationship exists. According to , at all. Among those that are read, the conversion rate 鈥� the share that leads to any meaningful next step 鈥� sits at , even for founders who do everything right.

But there鈥檚 a less obvious problem: cold outreach inverts the dynamic you actually want. When you cold pitch, you are the one seeking. You are, structurally, in a position of need.

The investor holds all the leverage.

What I learned 鈥� through experience I did not fully understand until I looked back on it 鈥� is that every great investor relationship I have started from a moment where they came to me. And the engine behind almost every one of those moments was a room where I was speaking, teaching or simply showing up as someone who had something worth saying. I was never chasing.

Find the right rooms

None of the relationships I’m about to describe started with an email. They started with a room, a talk and a reason to be there that had nothing to do with raising money.

Any room works 鈥� if you have something worth saying. You don鈥檛 necessarily need to find yourself in prestigious halls. Any room where the right people are present, and you鈥檙e there as a voice rather than a business card, will do. A panel at a tech and wellness summit. A founder dinner in Soho where I gave a 10-minute talk on the neuroscience of friendship 鈥� the host made three introductions the following week. None of these were “investor events.” They were rooms where people who cared about the mission happened to be. In New York and San Francisco, these happen every day 鈥� on , on , through your alumni network. You don’t need a big name to get a small stage. You just need to show up and ask.

The stage size doesn’t matter. Being on it does. The big conferences won’t invite you to speak until you already have traction. That’s fine 鈥� because the rooms that actually move the needle are often smaller anyway. , founder of , came through someone who heard me at the . approached me after a sports dinner in London 鈥� a room I was in because I’m a marathon runner, not because I was fundraising. The investment followed because we were aligned on something that did matter.

Speak about the problem. Not the product. The talks that generated the most meaningful investor relationships weren’t the ones where I pitched . They were the ones where I spoke about loneliness, neuroscience, and what technology can and cannot do for human connection. The subject matter attracted people who already cared about the mission. By the time anyone asked about the company, they were already bought in on me.

Trust compounds across encounters. One of our key shareholders 鈥� a major fund 鈥� started with a partner I first met at a conference in Dubai. We ran into each other again at a New York event. And again after that. Three encounters across three cities, each one building a little more context, a little more trust. By the time we were both ready, the relationship already existed. Was it luck? Maybe. But I keep showing up in rooms where the right people are. At some point that stops being luck.

The deck gets you a second meeting. The relationship gets you a yes. An investor isn’t just a wallet. They’re betting on the change you want to make in the world 鈥� and on you. The relationship that leads to a check often starts with something human: a shared interest, a run, a conversation that had nothing to do with fundraising. That’s not a bug in the system. That’s the system.

The real lesson: Cold outreach has its place. It works for some people in some contexts, and I won鈥檛 pretend otherwise. But if you have a mission that is genuinely worth talking about 鈥� and if you can speak about it with conviction 鈥� the most efficient thing you can do is engineer visibility in the rooms where your investors already are. Not as a founder seeking capital. As a voice worth listening to.

That鈥檚 the posture that builds the kind of investor relationships where someone approaches you after a dinner, or appears in your orbit three times across three cities until trust quietly accumulates. That鈥檚 the posture that turns a shared run or a sports dinner into a check from someone who genuinely believes in what you鈥檙e building.

The goal isn鈥檛 to get lucky. The goal is to make yourself impossible to miss 鈥� every time you have a mic, and every time you don鈥檛.

is the founder and CEO of , a Gen Z platform reshaping how friendships begin and grow in person. A solo female founder and member of Gen Z herself, she holds degrees from and in computational neuroscience, neurobiology and behavior. Under her leadership, Clyx has raised $14 million in Series A funding backed by ‘s , co-founder , F1 World Champion , and , and facilitated more than 500,000 real-world friendships across six cities worldwide.

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