GETTING STARTED
Karl Dakin
Capital Coach | Stakeholder Investor Campaigns | Design, Stage, and Manage or Support | Reduce Time, Money, and Risk of Raising Funding | Increase Probability of Success! | Opportunity Management
CONTENTS
?·?????? Quick Calendar
·?????? Funding Point
·?????? Capital Coach
·?????? Successful Funding
·?????? Don Cohen Show
·?????? Subscribe – Daily or Weekly Editions
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QUICK CALENDAR
?I quickly list here upcoming opportunities where I will be sharing information, lessons in funding, or meeting in person or via videoconferencing.
?TBD – Successful Funding
June 12 - SuperCrowd Chicago – Workshop on Crafting Crowdfunding Offers
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FUNDING POINTS – GETTING STARTED
?Sometimes, it is obvious that funding is needed, but moving from the point of recognizing the need to pitch an investment opportunity may be like driving in a heavy fog without a road.
?Working forward, a small business needs to determine what capital resources it needs to achieve a significant milestone towards its fulfillment of its mission. Each milestone represents a set of accomplishments which is matched with a set of needed capital resources.
?The achievement of one or more milestones may be matched with an investor exit. Knowing the date of the exit, it is possible to engineer the financials backward to today to set a price on an investment offering.
?A projected valuation of the business at the time of the investor exit will be used to frame an investment offering – give me $X today in exchange for $Y dollars on the date of the exit.
?To complete the first few steps, the following is needed:
·?????? A cash flow projection from today until the investor exit
·?????? The term of the investment – the time from today until the investor exit
·?????? The needed rate of return by the investor at the time of the exit
If there are investors standing ready who are ready to invest for the term in expectation that they will receive their needed rate of return and the business cash flow projection shows that it will have enough cash in reserve to buy out the investor, then it becomes a matter of putting together the pitch documents and presenting them to investor candidates.
?However, the small business:
·?????? May not have a business model that shows how it may earn a profit
·?????? May not have completed a cash flow projection
·?????? Team may not be capable of creating a cash flow projection
·?????? May not know any investor candidates
·?????? May not know the needs of investors:
o?? Needed term of the investment
o?? Needed rate of return
o?? Needed risk level
·?????? The cash flow projection shows that the small business will not earn enough profits to provide the investor with the needed rate of return
·?????? The investor candidates do not believe the cash flow projection
?All of these challenges may be addressed with time, money, and people.
?Small businesses may still find that their investment opportunities do not match those of anyone they know and may not be attractive to investors.
领英推荐
?These challenges may also be addressed with time, money, and people.
?Often, a small business finds itself in a chicken-and-egg situation: It needs funding to raise funding.
?If the small business cannot raise the cost of the capital campaign or bootstrap itself to a position where it can make a winning pitch, it may find itself unable to move forward.
?In that, the cost of a capital campaign is far less than the money needed to start and grow the business, raising money or bootstrapping the development of a capital campaign is a demonstration of the ability of the leadership team.
SUCCESSFUL FUNDING
Emiliano De Laurentiis, the CEO and Founder of Knowledge Avatars, was a guest on my Successful Funding show yesterday where we talked about key questions about what is called artificial intelligence (AI). We demonstrated CAP by giving it prompts that generated responses out of proprietary data that I had provided and generated responses out of OpenAI’s Chat GPT 4.0.
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CAPITAL COACH
?I am now field evaluating the Capital Coach, an artificial intelligence learning management system avatar (AILMSA) that I have trained on the topic of funding. The Capital Coach is embedded as a widget on my Dakin Capital website at https://dakincapital.com/CAP. The Capital Coach represents a proprietary data set on the Knowledge Avatars learning management system with licensed access to Open AI. Could you give the Capital Coach a try and ask it questions about funding?
I am working with Knowledge Avatars to make CAP the ultimate tool to support small businesses and community projects in raising funding. Two current challenges are (1) training the AI avatar to match specific funding situations and (2) explaining that a highly personalized AI avatar is so much more than a chatbot powered by a Large Language platform. Unique, non-public information to an individual or an organization cannot be obtained through a chat bot. The recent advances in AI have narrowed the field of prospects who stand to gain from personalized AI to high-net-worth individuals, professional service providers, organizational leaders, and other similarly placed who work with fast-moving, fast-changing information that may never be public.
Please share your feedback. Karl Dakin at [email protected]
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DON COHEN SHOW
On Monday, I was a guest on Don Cohen’s show, where we talked about promotion – the act of sharing information to gain awareness and solicit action. You may see a recording of the show at:
I enjoy being a guest, engaging in conversations with other guests, and building communities with Don, using LinkedIn as a communication channel. Every show is its own adventure as we start with a word of the day and then see where the conversation goes from there.
Don is an expert on LinkedIn, particularly on the use of Live streaming to build brands and communities. We will discuss using LinkedIn as a social media platform for building communities that support raising funding.
All shows where I have been a guest can be viewed on Don Cohen's LinkedIn page under Posts.
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This Instant Funding newsletter is now available in a Daily Edition or a Weekly Edition. You may choose between this Edition, published seven times a week, or the Weekly Edition, published once a week. If you are already subscribed to the Daily Edition and wish to change, just ‘unsubscribe’ and then ‘subscribe’ to the Weekly Edition.
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Karl Dakin, the Capital Coach
Dakin Capital LLC
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Capital Coach | Stakeholder Investor Campaigns | Design, Stage, and Manage or Support | Reduce Time, Money, and Risk of Raising Funding | Increase Probability of Success! | Opportunity Management
10 个月What is your next step to raise funding?