How do you build an investor network before you raise?

Why the network decides the raise

When we analysed our own portfolio at Octopus Ventures, over 70% of the investments we made came from founders we already knew of before the raise started. One of them became a unicorn after we rejected the founder twice, at pre-seed and again at seed. He kept the relationship alive, kept showing us the company growing, and stayed close to one of my colleagues. At Series A we led the round. The meetings that close rounds get booked through relationships that existed long before the deck was finished, and a small network usually means a slow fundraise. If you can't get in the room, you can't raise.

Your network is invisible, which is different from missing

Founders come to me in one of two states. Either their connections are scattered across LinkedIn, email, WhatsApp and old jobs with nothing tracked anywhere, or they've decided they have no network at all and have stopped looking.

My client Kimberly was in the second camp. Stuck mid-raise, no meetings coming in, telling me on every call that she didn't have a network. She was close to quitting. Then we structured what she had: LinkedIn, email, past colleagues, even personal connections. Within a week she found warm paths she had completely overlooked, including a former colleague who had worked with angels and a family friend one step from an investor. Those conversations turned into more conversations, which turned into warm intros. By the end she had met over 40 investors and raised a round of more than $1 million. Nothing about her network changed in that week. What changed is that it stopped being invisible.

Weeks 1 to 2: sweep everything into one place

Sweep your whole world: LinkedIn connections, email threads, calendar history from the last two years, past colleagues, advisors, personal socials. A trick I give founders who insist they know nobody is to export their LinkedIn connections as a CSV and go through it properly. You're pulling out anyone who might plausibly open a door later, and putting them in one place, whether that's a spreadsheet or a CRM. For each person, a quick note: who they are, what they do, who they might know.

Then the part everyone skips. Book catch-up calls, at least five a week. Until you speak to people you have no idea who is willing to help, who touches your space, and who is a dead end. Aim to end up with 40 to 50 live connectors. Going much past 50 usually means the extra names can't help you. And expect the Pareto pattern I see on every single raise: around 20% of those connectors will end up producing 80% of your investor introductions. You can't know in advance which 20%, which is exactly why you meet all of them.

Days 14 to 80: give first, then make the small ask

Here is where founders sabotage themselves. They get a connector on the phone and ask for investor intros on call one. It works like proposing marriage on a first date. However great you are, the other person hears pure transaction: is that all you wanted me for? An introduction puts the connector's reputation on the line, and they won't spend that for a stranger who is visibly extracting.

So the rule for every call in this phase is to frontload value, then make one small easy ask. Value can be an intro to someone useful from your own list, which is the cheapest gift you have. It can be a resource or a sharp perspective from your corner of the industry. I tell founders to keep a post-it on their screen as a reminder to stop the conversation and offer it. Then, at the end, no investor ask. Just: "I'm trying to meet more smart people in the space. Who are one or two people you think I should speak to next?" That single question turns your network into a tree. One call becomes two, two become four. Your surface area of luck keeps widening, and none of it feels transactional because you paid your way in first.

While this compounds, don't let the investors you do know forget you. As a VC I tracked 3 to 7 companies at any one time, and my decision slowly shifted from "do I like them?" to "can I convince my colleagues?". Monthly updates and the occasional 30-minute progress meeting kept those companies on my list. Steve Mendel, who built ManyPets to a $2bn+ valuation, was the cleanest example I saw of why this works: every single thing he said he would do, he did, inside the window he named. That reliability, communicated consistently over time, is what "traction" often means in practice.

The last 14 days: the activation window

The most common way founders waste a good network is activating it slowly. Intros dribble in, one meeting this week, two the next, then a gap while someone's on holiday. Over three months you've had ten calls and no momentum, and you're permanently restarting the engine.

Charlie, a founder I worked with, had a strong network and had still spent months grinding through exactly that on his previous raise. This time we did the opposite. Two weeks before the round opened, we went to every connector at once: "We're opening the round on this date. Here's who we want to meet. Who can you introduce me to?" Then we followed up every couple of days, confirming names, seeing who was in and who went quiet. A few days before launch, everyone made their intros at once, because they'd been prepped and knew the date. The meetings stacked. He opened with density, met more than 35 investors, and closed a $5 million round.

The window does two jobs. It shows you who your strongest connectors are before you need them, and it lines the intros up so they land together. Before you open, you want 1 to 3 warm paths into roughly 70 to 80% of your target list. Get there and the first two weeks of your raise look like a launch. Warm intros outperform every other channel by a distance, and I've broken down why in how warm introductions to investors work.

Gian Seehra Ex-Octopus Ventures, part of deploying $200M as a VC. 3x founder, raised $16M. Has coached 120+ founders who have raised $250M+ collectively.