Convince an Investor with Your Confidence in Your Businessa & Yourself

The common way of funding that women use is maybe their own savings, they use public funding possibilities quite frequently, not Banks. Banks, it’s very seldom, but they talk to banks very early and investors as well, business agents I would say. They are able to attract business agents and then it really depends how confident they are about their business and the growth opportunity of their business to attract institutional investors.

And you need to convince these investors, these people that this is really a good opportunity, that there is really, every investment I make, I need to be convinced that this investment has the potential to grow exponentially and have a high return. Basically I know that not every investment I make will be successful because it’s a high like I described earlier. It’s a really a high risk, but potentially high return situation but I know these companies might encounter situations where they not able to be successful.

It’s really important that you show an investor a potential growth of your company. I mean revenue and market share and if not revenue then maybe an asset which is developing to a high-value asset like maybe a pharmaceutical drug. There is no revenue but there is a clear path to a product which has a high potential for revenue and is interesting for pharmaceutical companies. So that is what you need to show an investor to convince him to invest [in] into your company. This takes confidence in your business idea, your product, and yourself that you can make it happen. Therefore I think this is where you should invest your time into, that you really do your market research, that you really talk to your customers, that you really understand the market, what’s going on there, and that you’re really able to ask the questions. And the more you know about this, the more confident you are about what you are saying, we will feel it, and that’s a very important thing to understand.

Even if investors ask tough questions, these tough questions are about understanding really what you are proposing and understanding if you really know what you’re talking about and if you really are convinced. Don’t take it [personally] personal. Try to win these people over to your vision. That’s your task and if you’re able to do that and I’m always very convinced, and my colleagues too which are male they are always convinced when they say ‘they really know what they’re talking about. Yes, it really convinced me, they really have an idea.  And because, we know these early-stage companies there will ups and downs along the road and we want to have people who are able to adapt to situations and find solutions and this usually comes from really understanding products, markets, customers.