Hosted by Mat Vogels · 🇺🇸 US · EN · 35 episodes
Established thought leaders with verified media credentials.
Welcome to Fun Raising, the podcast where the best early-stage investors pull back the curtain on the fundraising process, one founder question at a time. If you're a pre-seed or seed-stage founder trying to figure out how to get your first check, navigate a term sheet, or just understand what VCs are actually thinking when you walk out of the room — this is the show for you. Every episode, we sit down with top early-stage investors and put them on the spot with real questions from real founders. No fluff, no recycled advice, just honest, tactical conversations about what it actually takes to raise in today's market. From crafting your pitch to closing the round, we cover the moments that make or break a fundraise. We put the "fun" in fundraising. Because someone has to.
Mat Vogels hosts Fun Raising, a business show with 35 episodes published.
Jake Storm came to venture through an unusual route: enterprise software sales at Qualtrics and Zuora, then investment banking (including working on Zuora's IPO), before Felicis. That background shapes how he thinks abou
Kenan brings a perspective that's rare even among founder-turned-investors: he's sitting inside one of the most visible early-stage programs in venture (Speedrun sees 20,000+ applications per cohort) while being only abo
Zal isn't your average seed investor. He's the solo GP behind Refactor Capital, a hard tech seed fund based in Burlingame, and he just closed his fifth $50M fund. Before going solo, he spent a decade in product at Google
This is the role-reversal episode where Mat steps out from behind the host mic and gets grilled by Ali Rohde about his own playbook. Mat invests at Harpoon Ventures (deep tech, $1M to $5M checks) and runs Black Flag, Har
Kyle's path into VC is unique and worth the listen on its own. He was a cybersecurity consultant who started the Secure Ventures podcast during COVID simply because he wanted a "How I Built This" for cyber CEOs. That pod
Jacob comes at fundraising from an unusually operator-heavy angle. Julian Capital is staffed entirely by ex-growth people (Julian himself ran growth at multiple billion-dollar companies), and they don't just write checks
Jack's path into VC is anything but standard: he spent his teens and college years as a professional online poker player until the DOJ shut down online poker in 2011, did a brief hedge-fund stint, then moved to Silicon V
Alex Roetter brings a rare operator's DNA to venture. Before co-leading Moxxie Ventures with his partner Katie, he ran engineering at Twitter and led an eVTOL (electric flying car) company. Moxxie writes $500K to $2M che
Natty brings a perspective that's rare in early-stage VC: he's a founder-turned-Techstars MD-turned-fund partner, giving him an almost uniquely high volume of reps with early-stage companies. One of his most actionable f
AJ brings a genuinely distinctive lens to venture. He built defense tech at 16, opened for the Eagles on violin, and had Glenn Fry as a songwriting mentor. That creative background directly shapes how he coaches founders
Jason Chapman brings a distinctly technical lens to early-stage investing. Before launching Convoy in 2018, he was an engineer at IBM's artificial intelligence division, writing code 12 to 18 hours a day. That background
Harrison brings a rare perspective to the fundraising conversation as both a repeat founder and one of the few CTO-titled partners in venture. He's spoken to roughly 4,000 companies over the past four or five years, and
Larsen offers a masterclass on the art of the initial pitch, and his core message is counterintuitive: less is more, everywhere. He argues that if you can't communicate your team, problem, and market in four sentences in
Matias brings a rare perspective to early-stage investing: he spent years at Goldman and Bank of America helping late-stage and public companies raise hundreds of millions in capital before joining Harpoon Ventures to fo
Riley brings a perspective shaped by volume. Between Harpoon's deal flow and the hundreds of applications coming through Black Flag, he's reviewing more pitch decks than most early-stage investors, which gives his feedba
John brings a rare dual perspective to this conversation. On the Julian Capital side, he's evaluating deep tech deals at pre-seed and seed across hardware-intensive sectors like robotics, materials, energy, and space. On
Jordan brings a go-to-market operator's lens that's genuinely rare among early-stage GPs. He ran one of the largest recruiting firms in NYC, scaling it across over a thousand startups, and that experience shapes everythi
Mat's model at MatCap flips the traditional VC playbook. Rather than writing large checks and picking winners, he invests at par value to get involved at the founding level, then makes introductions across his investor n
Andrew brings a rare lens to early-stage investing. Eight years defusing bombs for the Navy, a stint at Stanford, and time embedded as interim chief of staff at a portfolio company gave him both operational instincts and
Grant brings a rare perspective to the fundraising conversation because he came up through the industrial world, not finance. He started in oil field operations, worked pipeline infrastructure across Texas, Louisiana, Pe
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Fun Raising is hosted by Mat Vogels. The show is categorised under business and has published 35 episodes.
Fun Raising has published 35 episodes.
Fun Raising regularly covers business. It sits in the business category.
Fun Raising is accessible for guests with genuine business expertise. A personalised, episode-aware pitch will still outperform a generic one every time.
Fun Raising hasn't explicitly signalled guest openness in recent episodes. That doesn't rule out pitching. your hook just needs to be especially compelling and relevant to their recent content.
Episodes of Fun Raising average 45 minutes. a focused format where a clear narrative arc and tight preparation matter most.
Our data rates Fun Raising's guest bar at 80/100 (Premium tier). Established thought leaders with verified media credentials. Sign in to PitchCentric to see how your own Pod Score compares against this show.
Methodology. Booking Probability™ blends Listen Score, 30-day Virality, open-to-guests detection, and Apple ratings. Data refreshed every 60 minutes. Listen Score and Booking Probability are calculated by PitchCentric. Last enriched 11 days ago.
