If you are in London for work and the work is raising money, the evenings are a specific problem and not the general one. You are not short of dinners. You are short of a dinner where you are not being assessed.
That is the thing nobody says out loud about a fundraise. A process compresses weeks of your life into a performance, and the people you would naturally eat with are the people you are asking for money. So you go back to the flat, you rewrite the deck, and you tell yourself you will be social after the round closes.
01Why the fundraising trip is worse than a normal work trip
Three things stack up, and they are all specific to this.
You cannot be honest with anybody in the building. Your team needs you confident. Your existing investors need you confident. The new ones are pricing your confidence. A bad Tuesday, four polite no's and one meeting that went so well it is terrifying, has nowhere to go.
Every social event is a channel. Demo nights, founder drinks, the dinner an investor kindly organises. All useful, none of them off. You leave those having spent energy rather than recovered any, and if you count them as your social life you will end the process having had none.
The calendar owns you. A process runs on other people's diaries, so you cannot plan anything more than a few days out, and the things that would actually help are the things that need booking.
02The one rule worth following
Protect one weeknight that is not a pitch, not an investor dinner and not founder drinks.
Not because you deserve a break, although you do. Because the thing that goes wrong during a long raise is that your whole world becomes one conversation, and you lose the ability to tell a hard week from a bad company. An evening with people who do not know what a term sheet is fixes that faster than anything.
Put it on a Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday. Mondays and Fridays are when travel and internal calls eat everything.
03What actually works in London during a process
Something with a fixed time you did not choose
A class, a run club, a table booked for a named hour. The value is that the decision was made days ago by somebody who is not you at half past six with a laptop open. During a raise your decision-making budget is spent by about four in the afternoon, which is why the default becomes the hotel.
Sport, if you have more than a fortnight
Climbing walls, five a side, a swimming pool. Physical, requires no talking, and the London options are everywhere. A raise is largely sitting still while your heart rate is high, and the correction for that is obvious.
An evening with people who cannot invest in you
This is the one that does the real work. Six people at a table who do not work in technology, have no idea what stage you are at, and will ask you what you do and then move on to something else. Two hours of not being evaluated.
If you want the logistics of that without organising it: KF.Social runs tables of six in London on weeknight evenings, sitting at 19:00, and the London page lists the dates on sale with the night and the area for each. It is 15 pounds for the seat, you pay for your own food at the restaurant, and there is no subscription, which matters when you do not know which city you are in next month. Booking closes six hours before, you are told the restaurant six hours before and who is at the table an hour before.
The reason to mention the timings is that a process makes you cancel things. Cancel 72 hours or more before and the 15 pounds goes back to your card, and inside 72 hours it does not come back. So book the night your diary is least likely to move, which on a fundraising trip is almost never a Thursday.
04Things that sound good and are not
Coworking socials. Same conversation, different room. If you are trying to stop talking about the company for one evening, this is not it.
Waiting until the round closes. Rounds take longer than expected and closing is followed immediately by hiring, which is another two months of the same. There is no after.
Catching up with founder friends every time. Genuinely valuable and it is not a break. You will spend the evening comparing processes, which is the opposite of putting it down.
05If the raise is going badly
Then the advice above matters more rather than less, and it is much harder to take. The instinct is to work every evening, because effort is the only variable that feels like it is yours. It is worth knowing that this is when founders in a strange city stop speaking to anyone who is not in the process for weeks at a time, and that the isolation does not make the round close faster.
One evening. Somewhere with other people in it. It does not need to fix anything.
KF.Social
