If you are looking to raise your post seed round or series A. I would highly recommend you find a way for venture investors to seek you than you seek them. The process is much quicker and you get better terms. How do you do that?

First you have to understand how the venture process works like most other processes, they go through stages. For the purposes of our discussion, I am going to define the process into 3 steps.

Venture investors have associates or principals, who are smart young folks whose job it is to do due diligence, source new deals and keep their eyes and ears on the ground to new opportunities. Many folks malign them, but they are good folks mostly and have their heart in the right place for most parts.

Many of them are from a Ivy league B school and most likely have been at a management consulting firm after that like Bain or McKinsey. They tend to think very much top down, but I have know a few folks to hustle and pound the pavement as well.

I spoke with 5 associates and principals over the last week to understand their role and the new changes so I thought Id share some of their thinking to help you.

Venture principals have categories of companies on their radar or spaces. Given their background in management consulting, thats to be expected. They think top down what are the meg-trends, which are the big industries ripe for disruption and which sectors are ready for startups to innovate in. This is important to know. They may have a few companies, but many a sector is likely in their radar.

The associates then spend about 2-6 weeks doing a deep-dive on that sector meeting entrepreneurs, talking to companies, reading research reports (not necessarily in that order) and forming an opinion. Most of them will pick a theme or category based on their experience and some level of comfort.

Then, they would present their findings to the partnership meetings on Monday. If all looks good, (and I am grossly simplifying), they get a yellow light to go ahead and source / look at companies. Not a green light, mind you, thats only given if they have already a list of 3-5 companies identified on their shortlist.

After the partnership meeting, they will be assigned a executive sponsor partner someone who can make decisions to write a check on behalf of the firm. The associate has to provide a weekly status update to the partner, who in turn will brief the rest of the folks if they find something hot to invest in.

With the yellow light, the associates then tap into their network to get proprietary deal flow usually folks they went to college with, or folks they met at some conference or others they read about on blogs like Geekwire, TechCrunch, etc. In the last 2 years, many folks are also sourcing from angelList or other platforms.

Thats the opportunity for you. Meet with the associates and principals, because not many folks take them seriously. They cant write checks, so most folks ignore them. They are the most crucial part of the equation to get on the shortlist of companies within the radar. Typically 7-10 of the 30-50 companies the associates meet will make the shortlist.

The best way to make the shortlist is to get you other startup friends and CEOs to recommend what you are doing to the investors.

The next step is the spotlight the executive champion and your associate will usually meet the 7-10 companies for 2-3 meetings and finally pick 1-2 to bring to the entire partnership.

The process I explained above works most of the time. It may happen that the entire process is completed in days as well. I had a chance to speak to 3 partners at venture firms as well, and they attributed about 40% of the deals to this part of the process. The rest were the partners networks and recommendations from invested company CEOs legal partners, etc.