John Kim - How to Raise a Few Billion Dollars

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:00)
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**SPEAKER_2** (1:53)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of PositiveSum. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of PositiveSum. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of PositiveSum may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. To learn more, visit PSUMVC.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (2:21)
Today my guest is John Kim. John is one of the world's top and most prolific fundraisers. Over his career at General Catalyst, he helped raise billions of dollars and turn GC into one of the largest venture firms in the world. Today he's chairman and president of corporate development at Lila Sciences, a company building scientific superintelligence, which has raised over $500 million.
John is also the author of The Tao of Fundraising. This conversation is really a guide on how to raise money from someone who has done it at the highest level. We talk about why persuasion equals desire minus fear, the difference between belief and trust, the laws of fundraising, and how to build consensus that moves huge pools of capital. Please enjoy my conversation with John Kim.
We were chatting before and you said, if you were to rename your book, you had an idea what you'd call it. How would you rename it?

**John Kim** (3:06)
As I wrote the book, The Tao of Fundraising, I had this idea that I wanted to put something philosophical out in the world because fundraising isn't just a idea of persuasion. It's actually a way of life that the actual interacting with people through the lens of them as the center of your conversation is a way of life. And that way of life requires a certain level of responsibility. When you start to get good at understanding how people work and how people react and how they will react to me or to you or to other personas, you can actually use that for your own selfish needs or you can use it for good. So I called it The Tao of Fundraising. But in the end, I don't know how many people actually care about that philosophy. What most people want to know is how do you get money? I think I probably would have just renamed it Money Moves at the Speed of Trust because the entire book really is about that. How money pools in areas and people hold on to it and resources. We can put a lot of words around what actually motivates people to move in a direction.
And that's really important. Making sure you say, hey, I want the money to move in this direction, not that direction.