I raised more than $60M, from friends and family to NASDAQ. Here is the playbook.

I raised more than $60M across every stage there is.

Friends and family. Angels. Institutional investors. Public markets across four exchanges. I have stood in front of someone writing a $10,000 cheque and someone moving millions, and I learned that the pitch changes completely depending on who is across the table.

Here is the playbook, stage by stage.

Friends and family: you are selling belief in you

There is no traction yet. No metrics that matter. They are not investing in the company. They are investing in you.

The mistake founders make is treating it casually because these people love you. This is the round most likely to damage a relationship. Paper everything. Be clearer about the risk than you want to be. The people who believe in you earliest deserve the most honesty, not the least.

Angels: you are selling a specific bet

Angels want a story they can believe and a founder they would back. They are making a gut call with real money.

What they actually want is to understand why you, why now, and why this could be big enough to matter. Not a 40-slide deck. A sharp story and evidence you are the person to execute it.

The mistake is over-engineering the financial model when the angel is buying conviction. Save the model. Sell the bet.

Venture: you are selling a path to a large outcome

Venture investors are not buying your business. They are buying the probability of an outcome large enough to return their fund. That is a different question, and if you don’t understand it, you will pitch the wrong thing.

They want a credible path to a very large outcome, a market big enough to support it, and a reason you will win it. They forgive a lot if the ceiling is high enough.

The mistake is pitching stability and profitability to people who are paid to fund ambition. Know your audience.

Institutions and public markets: you are selling predictability

By the time you are raising from institutions and listing publicly, the game flips. Now they want the opposite of the venture pitch: predictability, discipline, guidance you hit, and a story that holds up quarter after quarter.

I learned the public-company playbook as a first-time public executive: building investor relations from scratch, a reverse takeover, then the CSE, the OTC markets, the TSX Venture Exchange and finally NASDAQ. Nobody hands you that manual. You write it while you are living it.

The mistake is carrying swing-for-the-fences founder energy into a room that is pricing you on reliability. The market punishes surprises, even good ones.

The lesson that ties it together

Every stage is a different buyer wanting a different thing.

Friends and family buy you. Angels buy the bet. Venture buys the outcome. Institutions buy predictability. The founders who struggle are the ones who tell the same story to all four.

And one more thing I learned the hard way: raising money is not the win. It is a loan against a promise. The market gave us more than $60M on the way up, and then it closed on the way down. Capital is conditional. Treat every dollar as if it might be the last one available, because one day it will be.