Many thanks to my friend Julien Uhlig for occupying the speaker’s chair today at Tribify’s very first Relationship Sales Mastery event!
So you know what’s hard? Raising money is hard.
Raising money is hard for startups and rapidly growing companies. It’s hard because the people with the money—venture capitalists, at this level—get a LOT of inbound. A successful venture capitalist has to turn the volume WAY down on the marching band of hopeful people parked right outside his front doors if he hopes to have a coherent thought. He employs lookouts, gate-keepers, inbox-readers, and nay-sayers whose ONLY job in life is to, you know, say NAY and keep just about everybody off his back.
Meanwhile, raising money is also hard for venture capitalists! The very tactics they employ to reduce the noise also risk screening out real opportunities and fatally insulating them from the industries they hope to capitalize.
What both sides need is a trusted channel, one that can reliably put high-quality opportunities in front of just the right investors.
Julien Uhlig is CEO and Host of EX Venture Night, by FAR the largest online funding event for green technology. Julien’s events have introduced thousands of startup management teams to hundreds of interested venture capitalists within a context of trust and high quality both expected and delivered. During a period when most in-person meetings were just not going to happen, Julien has capitalized on constraint and grown ExVenture Night into a major player at the technology venture funding table.
Julien didn’t come to us out of nowhere! He’s a renowned leader in the field of microgrids and biomass-to-energy systems. He led energy research for the German Federal Ministry of Economics, conducting program research for 54 companies and 16 research institutions, including Siemens, SMA, Remondis, Fraunhofer Institute, and many others.
Julien was Director of the AUTARK Institute of Energy Research in Germany, an energy advisor to Germany’s Federal Minister of Economics, and CEO of Arensis, a biomass-to-energy portfolio company of the Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator. Beyond ExVenture Night, Julien is working on the treatment of ocean waste and the construction of massive open-water farms for carbon sequestration in Indonesia, where we both live.
So let’s think about the ExVenture Night audience:
- The venture capitalist, who employs a full-time staff to tame his inbound.
- The startup founder or CEO, who cannot afford to waste bandwidth on empty promises.
I think it’s safe to say that NEITHER of these people is going to be swayed by a canned invitation from an unknown email address. If Julien wants either of these people to show up and participate in ExVenture Night, he’s going to have to build a RELATIONSHIP with them. And if he wants ExVenture Night to have a seat at the table, he’s going to have to build those relationships AT SCALE… which, if you look at his numbers, is exactly what he does!
Today Julien took a deep dive into just how he accomplishes this. See the video below for details!