Mining asteroids with AstroForge CEO Matthew Gialich | E1736

0:00And none of this would have been possible if SpaceX hadn't figured out how to do what they do. Absolutely not. Let's be honest about this. Elon led the way here. He showed that if he got the money for building Falcon 1 through Falcon 9 and Dragon, that there was a huge kind of pot of gold at the end of that rainbow. And this really allowed VC to open up to say, holy s***, these companies can actually exist and they're possible. This Week in Startups is brought to you by Squarespace. Turn your idea into a new website. Go to squarespace.com slash twist for a free trial. When you're ready to launch, use offer code TWIST to save 10 % off your first purchase of a website or domain.

0:37PILOT Grow your business sustainably and operate more effectively. PILOT provides the most reliable accounting, CFO, and tax services for startups and small businesses. Head to pilot.com slash twist and get 20 % off the first six months. And Crowdbotics Great ideas can change the world. And Crowdbotics is the fastest way to turn those ideas into code. Get a free scoping session for your next big app idea at crowdbotics.com slash twist. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to This Week in Startups. Today, I've got a really interesting interview lined up for you. Today's guest is Matt Gulich, and he is with a company called Astroforge.

1:23What does Astroforge do? Well, they're using SpaceX's ride-sharing program to get into space and launch devices that will be able to mine asteroids. And just two weeks ago, AstroForge sent its first vehicle into space, the Broker 1 vehicle. Here's what it looks like for those of you watching. Looks like two solar arrays with a box in the middle. And we'll get into what it does in a moment. But first, let's welcome Matt to the program. Hey, Matt. Hey, Jason. Thanks for having me on. All right. Why should we be trying to mine asteroids? What are on asteroids that's not here on planet Earth? What's the point?

2:07Specifically, we are starting out first with what are called the platinum group metals. So, you've probably heard of some of these, right? There's jewelry that's made out of platinum, but there's six of these elements that are used in all of our industrial applications. I mean, your cell phone has every single one of these metals in it, and we're running out of them, both as a nation but also as a planet uh there are limited resource that we're mining and we're destroying our planet as we mine it well we have a ton of evidence to suggest that there is very very high concentrations of these pgms off world and that's what they're called yeah pgm short for platinum group metals got it iridium osmium gladium platinum rhodium and ruthenium if i'm pronouncing any of those correctly you got them all correct these all come from uh asteroids or these are found on asteroids but also found on planet earth yes in fact one of the leading theories is the only reason we see them on the crust of the earth is due to asteroid impacts that have happened you know millions of years ago ah fascinating uh and these are extremely valuable metals correct they're extremely valuable and you can look at the spot prices these are traded commodities that that that are you know trade on the london spot market um they range anywhere from about four hundred dollars an ounce all the way up to about twenty thousand dollars an ounce got it so we see some pictures there uh of your satellite or vehicle uh what would be the proper vehicle internally right it's something that's traveling out there but yeah it is a satellite bus or a vehicle that will go out to the asteroid so i guess the question is uh how far out into space are these asteroids uh how much does it cost to go find one and has anybody in history ever successfully docked with an asteroid and brought materials back to earth on an unmanned mission is that something we do now so all great questions uh to answer them yes we've done it right we have sent as a human species both nasa and the japanese space agency have sent craft out to asteroids docked with them taken samples and brought them back to earth right the japanese Space Agency, the famous vehicle there was called Hayabusa 2.

4:16It went out to an asteroid and took a sample. And then from NASA, we sent out a mission called Osiris-Rex. This mission went out to an asteroid called Bennu, took a sample of it, and I believe it's dropping it off this September. So this September, we'll have re-entry from a Bennu sample, and we'll be studying it on Earth to see what it's made out of. So yes, space agencies have. Private companies have not, and we are definitely forging a path here into the future that hasn't been done before. these are very very low cost launches for us we are taking a lot more risk than a large space agency would take and that's the only way that the business case really closes here right you have to think differently you have to think cheap and you have to think non-scientific and that's exactly what we're doing all right so let's talk about that a little more specifically it's really affordable to get to space because of the engineers and the progress made at spacex correct?

5:05I mean, space has been on the up for a while. We've seen SpaceX, which was backed off of the government programs as we've gone forward. But yeah, SpaceX has revolutionized the price to get to space. More specifically, recently, they've revolutionized the price to get to the moon. I mean, think about it. We're launching from the moon. If I was going to tell you 10 years ago, we were going to fly to the moon, you could have laughed me out of the room. The rocket at that time would have been a Delta IV and that would have been around$400 million. We can do it for fraction of that cost now, which then allows us to send these very cheap vehicles into space and take a lot more risk.

5:38The ride is just that much cheaper. Got it. So you've sent the blocker one up. What are the chances it finds an asteroid? And then I guess subsequently, what's the chances that it comes back? So broker one went up to show that we could mine an asteroid in space. It is just in low earth orbit. It is not going outside of earth's gravity. Well, it is orbiting the earth right now. And we'll start experimentation with it shortly to show that we can refine what we expect to be one of these asteroids right this ball of iron with very high concentrations of pgms on it okay so there's a low earth orbit asteroid um that we brought up our own asteroid oh i got it right we're just proving that this can work in space bring your own that we can mine in space yep nobody has been able to really refine in space right and that's a big process of what we need to do so we want to prove that in a very cheap easy to use six u cubesat which to be fair spacex still has the transporter missions that's we went on and those are a fraction of the cost that we could have even got to space 10 years ago so um what does that cost wall park to send something up these days um obviously we're under ndas with a lot of these companies we can't talk about but you can go look on spacex's website right a rideshare slot is about 1.1 million dollars to send i believe those are 200 kilogram slots got it okay so their standard ticket price is a million bucks it's very affordable we're not talking about tens or hundreds of millions of dollars but the key to your innovation is you're going to do the mining in space so does that mean this i mean i'm sorry to be a neophyte here but does that mean there's like a drill bit on this thing and it's going to drill in take a sample and then process it and say hey this is dust oh this is platinum let the dust flake off and just only bring platinum back so the way we do it is we go out to the asteroid we dock with the asteroid use the right word there right these are very small bodies they're about 30 meters in diameter.

7:26So we're talking very, very small rocks that we're docking with. We use a process of directly heating the surface till it vaporizes. So there is no actual mechanical parts here. This is all done with a laser. We vaporize the surface, we collect that vapor, and then we sort it. And this is essentially the experiment we're testing out in low Earth orbit. We've proven it to work in our thermal vacuum chambers on Earth. That allows us to sort out platinum from stuff we don't care about, right? Iron, cobalt, other trace minerals in these asteroids. And then we bring back only the platinum group metals.

7:57Now, the reason for that is bringing back is still expensive and weight in space means a lot. We only want to bring back the stuff that's worth a lot of money. We are kind of limited on what we can bring back. So that's how we do it. So the lasers pick out the good stuff, you sort it out. Then how does it get back? Because every time I see something come back, it burns up. These asteroids burn up before they hit. So how is your vehicle designed so that it can bring back the payload? And how many ounces is it going to bring back? Yeah, so I mean, our vehicle has a heat shield on it. And the nice thing about our heat shield is we're not bringing back humans, we're not bringing back really experiments, we're bringing back raw commodities, right?

8:38This is a block of metal, which means we can come in a lot hot and heavier than really any other spacecraft. There's a lot of presidents for doing this before NASA has done deep space return multiple times. So we really understand the physics behind deep space return and it all comes down to sizing the heat shields correctly got it on average with our projections right now and our trajectories we can bring back right around a thousand kilograms of platinum group metals per mission so that's what we're aiming to bring back uh what is a thousand kilograms um it's about a ton symmetric ton wow pgm's permission you're gonna be able to bring a ton back okay so how big is your vehicle is it like the size of the vehicle a car it's not that big the vehicles that we will mine with are about 200 kilograms what's the size of them she said the asteroids were about 100 feet wide or something.

9:23So the vehicle itself is 10 feet, 20 feet? Vehicle is about the size of a mini fridge. It is not a big vehicle when you look at it. Yeah. Well, platinum is very, very dense, right? So the atomic weight is very, very high. So we store this metal right behind the heat shield. It's volumetrically actually not that much material that we bring back. If you can tell from the podcast lately, we've been doubling and tripling down on Founder University to launch. In fact, It's basically the future of our venture capital firm. And that's awesome because I'm working with a couple of hundred early stage founders really early and getting to see what tools they use.

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11:11And so when it comes back, okay, you got the heat shield. I got that. But then how do you catch it? Is it going to have a parachute on it? Does it hit the water? If it hits the earth, I mean, it's just going to be turned to dust. So you got to have some sort of plan for landing. What's the landing plan here? Yeah, our current plan right now, and we're in discussions right now, is with, there is a giant range in Utah and by the Air Force that you can do deep space reentry from. In fact, I believe this is where Osiris-Rex is landing when they come. Multiple people use this as a range to return from space on.

11:43That's where we'll land. We use very, very small chutes to slow down the vehicle. Right now, our mask shows us hitting the earth at about 30 kilometers an hour. So we're not going super slow, but we're not going super fast. But keep in mind, this is just a block of metal. We can take risks with bringing it back that are very different from a human or scientific spaceflight. Got it. Yeah, if the refrigerator gets dented or cracked in half, it's no big deal. You're just going to pick up the pieces and you're all good. And so when you do a startup like this, how long does it take in your estimation?

12:14You guys have raised over 10 million bucks. You got 15 employees last we checked. Or maybe you've raised 23 million. I've seen two different numbers, PitchBook and CNBC. So you raised low tens of millions. How wide of a runway do you need to build a company like this? This seems quite ambitious. How long will it take for you to prove this out and then start generating actual revenue? Yeah, for sure. Sure. It's a very ambitious company and these things are very, very high risk, right? I will say this, that with our current funding, we've been able to fund our first two missions. That includes going to the asteroid.

12:46And that's what we need to do. We need to be able to prove out each one of these milestones so that we can raise additional money and get to our end goal, right? We have a lot to prove as a new company. I think any deep tech company does. You got to be able to prove you can hit your milestones to raise the next launch of capital. For us, we have a very clear plan to actually bring back our first amount of metal by the end of this decade. um and that's what we're holding to on a very kind of crystal clear schedule for us and if this works uh what does the future look like you know are you going to be just sending out dozens of these every day to collect these i mean how does it scale i guess becomes the next question so if you can pull off this insane mission and actually get a refrigerator full of platinum back to earth or whatever other one is the most expensive how do you scale it and what does that look like?

13:37Yeah, I mean, look, we can start to talk about buying entire Falcon 9 instead of doing ride share anymore and sending out multiple missions per rocket or even going, I mean, I'm sure everybody watched the Starship launch, right? You can see what the future holds for us when we go about this and we talk about sending up hundreds of these vehicles to go out into space and mine. One other thing I'd like to touch on here is while we are starting out with mining the platinum group metals, our refinery can mine really any elemental metal. So as we go out there, we can start to mine other materials, bring them back to earth, as long as the cost reward, you know, benefits us per mission.

14:08It's got to be a profitable endeavor we're going after. And that's how we look at the future. We hope long term to bring all mining off earth. Mining is a very destructive process. It accounts for a huge amount of the CO2 emissions on earth. I don't think we hear about all the time because we don't have open pit mines in our backyard, right? They're not outside of LA or San Francisco, but they're damaging to the earth. And we want to stop that and i think this is the only way to do that going forward and yeah so when uh you find that uh like alien goo or stuff like that and biological stuff that will obviously cause like an alien invasion you just don't we recognize that don't bring that back that gets we just we just leave our ship there and we never return at home good okay good i think that's really the big lesson of sigourney weaver's story arc is don't come back to earth with any of that assume humans contaminated and do not come home no matter what in all seriousness as we think about this what are the chances uh we find something out there that we are not aware of when's the last time a space mission found something in space that was a material or an element that was new to us us being human yeah it's always interesting here like when it comes to new elements we don't find them in space we do find some new molecules right in fact lindy who is running the psyche mission for NASA just had a new material named after her because we find these things as we go out into space.

15:29None of them are going to be organic matter or aliens that can really take us over. Some of them may be hazardous, they may be radioactive in small amounts, right? But that'll be cleared out with our refining process, we won't be bringing that back. And those are all things that we'll have to kind of account for as we get there. But right now we have a pretty good idea of the asteroid, what we're going after, what it's made out of, what its concentrations are. And while we can always be surprised to some extent. I think this process will be pretty clean and safe, and there's not really a worry to humanity about us bringing it back.

15:58Keep in mind, we're going to very small bodies that are blasted by the solar winds and radiation all day long. We're not going to another planet that has an atmosphere that could harbor life. Yeah. And you've got some experience in crazy hardware-based startups. You worked at Bird Scooters, which had a really rough go of it. They couldn't figure out the unit economics there. and then you worked at virgin orbit and virgin galactic virgin orbit couldn't make it work and virgin galactic still in the game so tell me when you look at those three experiences what have you learned that you know that we as founders may be making software or you know apps and things that are less ambitious about uh you know this hardware production cycle the capitalization cycle and just in general how to run these companies to get the best chance of success?

16:47Yeah, I mean, I think, look, deep tech companies are very different than SaaS companies in some ways and very not different. It's still very important to be very capital efficient. Think about how you grow the company, not spend money on dumb shit that you don't need to. I mean, we have to really, really count our pennies here because they're so critical to us. The difference is the time that it takes to get to profitability and really these capital purchases we have to make. Instead of buying a SaaS subscription for 20 bucks to increase my, you know, or a subscription to open AI, like I'm buying a Falcon 9 rocket.

17:18That costs a lot more than 20 bucks a month. And so planning for that, understanding the unit economics and the financing of that are very, very important to think of. At Virgin Orbit, we learned a lot. You know, we got a lot of money very early at that company, we were able to grow, but, you know, Virgin tried really, really hard. There was a lot of great people there. Explain what Virgin Orbit did, because there's some confusion between orbit and galactic i know galactic is the one shamoth uh took by spack and that was space tourism on that galactic uh you know glider or whatever it is that goes up on top of a plane what was virgin orbit because it was a different company yeah virgin orbit we are launching a uh rocket off the wing of a 747 so from an engineering perspective like this is amazing right you get to work on a rocket that's going to be dropped off a gigantic aircraft lightest engines and try to go to space.

18:09It was a ton of fun to develop, to think about, to understand how to do it, to go through it. But at the end of the day, it pointed out one really big thing. You still have to have a business that makes sense. And at the end of the day, putting a rocket on a pad and pointing it towards space is a lot better space to start with than off the wing of an aircraft. And I think we saw that in their performance as a business. That was what Virgin missed, kind of the same thing that Byrd missed, right? Like you mentioned, the unit economics could never get there with the Byrd vehicle. When we went to Byrd, when I went to Byrd, and that's I met my co-founder Jose, there was explosive growth at that company.

18:40We were doing some crazy unheard of timelines and it really showed me how fast the company could work when everybody was in sync and really going for it. It was kind of an eye opener. But it still didn't, you know, it still needed, it doesn't matter how fast you go or how successful you are, you have to still have a business at the end of the day that makes money. And Byrd didn't have that, the unit economics didn't work out. That's been a big focus of us here. It's if this works out and if we can show that technically we can do everything we better be able to make a load of money and that's what we're going to do yeah you better be able to find i don't know some rare metals that are incredibly precious exactly exactly if you look at the the bird scooter phenomenon um it was loved and remains loved by a certain group of people in certain geographies uh but let's be honest these things cost 100 to maybe 200 bucks those scooters were costing they got the heck beat out of them and paying more than five or ten bucks you're better off jumping in a lyft or an uber x so there were better financial solutions out there with virgin orbit it seemed like a clever idea but it does it just turn out that it's uh too expensive or it's just actually not a good idea because it doesn't scale because it does seem like 747s can get up to 40 000 feet in is that just not enough enough of an advantage it's not enough of an advantage you have to overbuild that rocket a lot to handle different aero forces on it has to turn 90 degrees to go towards space which is really really difficult to do and introduces a lot of new forces and at the end of the day what do people care about in the space world they care about price per kilogram that's all that really matters how cheap can you get me to space when we're evaluating missions that's what we look at how cheap can it be to get to space and um virgin wasn't wasn't competitive there got it um and then virgin galactic that's actually working they've done some missions correct?

20:32Virgin Galactic has had a couple flights that have gone up, you know, a couple one-offs here. I think they're still having a challenge scaling that and getting it to really production for space tourism. So they have, you know, they have some, they have some challenging times ahead of them. I think like all space companies do, right? You have to be able to perform and hit those milestones and they've, they've taken a lot longer than I think they would have hoped to get there. Okay. In the early days of a startup, you need to be focused on your product and your customers, right? You build a team, you build a product, and then you embrace a customer base and try to delight them.

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22:10Go to pilot.com slash twist. So pilot.com slash summit for their summit pilot.com slash twist to get 20 off the first six months is venture the right modality funding source for these companies like yours or should this be government partnership or you know governments making these investments alongside because elon's made it work but most of these other space companies have not i don't know if the mortality rate of space companies is actually lower than regular startups or not i don't have a collection of the you know the the list of all of them and how many have actually not worked out but uh what are your thoughts there and it would seem our government would have a very big interest in what you're doing for national security reasons so why don't they just give you a quarter billion dollars and and and do some contract with you to make sure this works because if it does work my lord this is important for national security if we don't have these rare earth metals in our competition with other parties on the planet, it would seem that you're a pretty important project.

23:17I think we could talk about governments and how they work all day long and where the money gets allocated to. At the end of the day, I need to show that I'm a profitable company with or without the government's help. I want to be a commercial space company. And in my opinion, that's what venture is built on, right? Venture is built on taking big risks for big payoffs. And that's what Astroforge is. That's what SpaceX was, right? SpaceX just hit and had that big payoff. We hope to do the same thing. I actually think this was venture was founded on. I think what we see in venture now where we have a lot of people investing in these kind of, you know, monthly growth SaaS models, you can make quite a bit of money there, but they're not going to change the world.

23:51Let's be honest about it. These kinds of companies that I'm trying to start will change the world if they're successful. And I think that's a different level for us to go after and what we're trying to do. And Venture has been great to work with so far. We have a lot of support from obviously a lot of VC firms that have been huge for us, including, you know, we came out of YC and then around with Led Byron. Yeah, but you got Gary Tan and Alexis Ohanian. So you got two amazing YC previous founders. Posterous was Gary Tan's company and Reddit was Alexis's company. So you got some really great support there from them.

24:24And then now you've just got to get, you got to level up to the next level of scale VC, I guess. Yeah, exactly. And we've had great support from our investors. And as we continue to go forward, we'll see what happens. But again, in these kind of deep tech things, it's all on us right now, we got to hit our milestones and show we can perform and make it to the damn asteroid. And that's what we hope to do the end of this year. And none of this would have been possible if SpaceX hadn't figured out how to do what they do. Absolutely not. Let's be honest about this. Elon led the way here. He showed that if he got the money for building Falcon 1 through Falcon 9 and Dragon, that there was a huge kind of pot of gold at the end of that rainbow.

24:58And this really allowed VC to open up to say, holy sh**, these companies can actually exist and they're possible. And I mean, again, 20 years ago, I think we would have been laughed out of every room because it just wasn't feasible to do. In fact, you saw this, right? Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries, the two asteroid mining companies that came before us, their cost models were just so much higher than ours are now to go try to do the same thing. I mean, both of those founders have been awesome and been very helpful to us. And I think their timing was just off. I think the timing is now for this to happen due to rideshare and the decrease in launch cost i mean planetary resources started in 2009 so they basically started not long after spacex and you're starting 12 years later or tad more than a decade later that's actually a huge opportunity for you because it would be like starting if you look at youtube you look at dropbox those services they only worked because of amazon's cloud computing offering lowering the cost of storage s1 or s3 whatever it was called back in the day i think it's still called s3 you know those kind of enabling technologies made new services available that's what you're doing you're you are a service that's made available because of the cloud platform that is spacex spacex is cloud and it's not just spacex it is the whole space economy that has really matured to the fact that we can buy satellites we can buy pretty much everything we want on the vehicle explain that the components yeah so how much of the components are you making and how much of the components are off the shelf or oems as they say yeah so uh for this the broker two mission that we are sending out we have bought the spacecraft so we are not building the spacecraft the spacecraft is being built for us now that being said we work very very closely with the people building the spacecraft because we still have to program it we have to teach it where to go we build the images on it that are going to take pictures of the asteroid we obviously do a lot of the software that's on these vehicles so it's not like we just set it and forget it right there's a lot of work that goes into it with the spacecraft but the fact that i don't have to build solar panels or figure out how reaction wheels work or buy you know an attitude system or even our propulsion system that is a huge time saver for me that's the only reason why we can do this so quickly i mean one of the claims you know one of things we did recently is we came out of we came out of starting the company and 16 months later we were in space that's actually not like a good sign on astroforge i mean yeah we were able to move quick that's actually a really good sign on the space economy and where it's at the fact that we could do that that fast right from inception to being in space in in less than a year and a half that would that's unheard of um and it's all because of that in space or the space economy well and if um yeah i don't have you ever seen how big starship is like have you seen it in person yet i have not i've seen a lot of falcon nines in person but not starship it it's wild i've been inside of one um like the cone portion of it like where the payloads go and it's like looking into the belly of like a giant you know the largest jet you've ever seen and i think you can fit 300 people inside of it if you have like seating so we can fit what a you know whatever a luxury without luxury like an international and one of those multi-deck you know airplanes are that you see going you know to asia from sfo it can fit a lot of people and or cargo and it seems to think he can get two or three more of those out this year perhaps more uh i think it's going to be pretty crazy how uh cheaper this is going to get and you might be never been against elon i think we've all seen that when it comes to space like never been against elon he has shown so much progress with spacex and obviously i mean my co-founder came from spacex we know a lot of people at spacex like yeah it is great to see what that company has done and what they continue to do and the fact that they continue to iterate this far into the game i think really goes to show how awesome of a company it is and we're really just building a company off the backs of spacex and it's amazing they can get the satellite and then you only have to build the software the drill bits whatever it is the lasers that's also amazing it's like being able to buy like i don't know an ice engine and the transmission and a bunch of other pieces to put into your car and then man you just narrows your focus to what really matters.

29:09How many people do you have at the company? We have 17. As of today, we have 17, which would be crazy if I told you we're going to go mine an asteroid with 17 people. But I think hopefully with understanding that most of this can be purchased, we don't have to reinvent the wheel, we can do this with a very, very slimmed down workforce and keep it small. And that's the goal of the company. I'm not going to grow my company via headcount, right? It's important to be very capital efficient. And that's the way we do it. Incredible. I mean, if this was 10 years ago, you probably need 17 people just for the solar arrays on this, right?

29:36You probably need 200 people to do this company, but a decade ago. Correct. Now we can buy it all, and that's just, it's a game changer for us, Jason. It's totally different than it was a decade ago, and you know, I can't wait to see what happens in another decade, but hopefully we're on the forefront of showing people this is possible in a totally different regime. All right, listen, Matt, continued success. I know you've got the 17 people. Any open positions now for these lunatics who want to join you on this insane mission to Mindspace? It's a noble and insane mission. Do you have any open positions or are you full up?

30:07We got a couple open positions that we're always looking for, right? When it comes to physicists and top engineers. So if you're interested, hit me up on LinkedIn. Okay. Hit you up on LinkedIn. And then the website is? Astroforge.io. You can find out more about it there in our news articles. All right. Listen, continued success. Thank you for doing this hard work for humanity. And I wish you great success on it. And it sounds like you're going to get it done. So congratulations on this incredibly impressive effort. I really mean that sincerely. Awesome. Thank you, Jason. Thanks for having me on.

30:37All right. We'll see you next time. And we'll see all of you next time on This Week in Startups. Bye-bye. Probably the most common challenge I hear from founders is related to building. Either they are in technical and are searching for a technical co-founder, or they can code, but they're just spread to thin. This is one of the first major obstacles you're going to face, and I know how discouraging it can be. But there is a solution. Do you have a great idea, but you don't have a technical co-founder? Well, Crowdbotics can be your CTO as a service. Boom! Just like that. This means you can focus on building an awesome product and delighting your customers, rather than wasting your time on infrastructure planning, architecture compliance, and all that boring stuff.

31:17Crowdbotics also offers professional scoping to help you flesh out your project at the MVP stage and beyond. So cut out the hassle and get back to building that perfect product for your delighted customers. When you think Crowdbotics, I want you to think getting your time back to focus on product. Product drives everything in a startup. So let the folks at Crowdbotics show you how it works. Schedule a free scoping session and get your detailed build plan at crowdbotics.com slash twist. That's crowdbotics.com slash twist. Hey, everybody. Today on Founder University, the podcast, we're setting up a fundraising process and learning how to prepare for your first investor calls.

32:00As someone who's pitched my own startup for funding, and now having taken hundreds of founder calls as an investor, these are my best tips for success. Let's go. Today, we'll cover setting up a fundraising process. We'll review the funnel and how to stay organized. Then we'll prepare for your first investor meeting. and we'll wrap up with how to prepare for your post-meeting follow-up. Now we need to understand the fundraising funnel. This is the first step towards success in creating a fundraising process. Just like sales, fundraising is 100 % a numbers game. Think of this as a funnel. Here is what it should look like.