Why You Should Hire An Investment Banker

Why You Should Hire A Banker

Somewhere along the way, “don't use a banker” became defacto advice from VCs. Founders brag about doing 150 investor meetings themselves, chasing intros for six months, getting ghosted, burned out, and finally closing a round like they just ran a marathon with a broken leg.

Cool story. But that’s not the flex you think it is. Let’s call it what it is: unnecessary suffering masquerading as founder hustle. It’s not brave. It’s inefficient.

The myth of the “pointless” banker

There’s a deep (and weirdly emotional) resistance in tech to bringing in help when it comes to capital. Somewhere between "bankers don't add value" and "I’ll still have to do the work anyway," founders have convinced themselves that investment banking is a scam unless you’re exiting for $100M+. That’s bullshit.

The reason bankers have a bad rap, is because the venture ecosystem has grown so much, that fund managers are raking in the fees and need to justify their fees. Their LPs expect them to source proprietary deal flow. If a banker is involved, that means bankers are gettings fees and fund managers are getting fees and that doesn't look good to LPs. So VCs have been on a crusade to build their brands, reputation, and network so as not to rely on the use of bankers. They are at least trying to earn those management fees of 20%. Yes, 20%, managers often earn 2% of the fund size over 10 years. So if an LP invests $10M, that fund manager is guaranteed $2M of it.

So what role does a banker play in today's market?

A good investment banker isn’t just someone who sends your deck to a few funds. They’re your capital strategist. Your messaging partner. The person who makes sure you’re not walking into a raise underprepared, overpriced, or two months too late. They're your safe space to say things, experiment with pitches, and test new concepts that you can't bring up with your investors or board. 

The founders who say bankers are useless usually:

• Don’t understand what a good one actually does

• Hired the wrong one

• Or tried to do it all themselves and paid the price later (in time, dilution, or both)

What “doing it yourself” actually costs

If you’re raising a round, you’re not just looking for money. You’re running a sales process, and you are the product. But most founders are way too close to their own story to sell it effectively. They build their deck like it’s a product roadmap, not a pitch for why someone should trust them with $3M of someone else’s money.

So what happens?
They send 80 cold emails. They get 5 soft intros. The first 10 calls are unfocused. Feedback is vague. The round drags. Momentum dies. And suddenly that 3-month process becomes a 7-month emotional treadmill that ends in worse terms or a bridge round.

I’ve seen this play out dozens of times. I’ve lived it. I'm the founder that tries to do everything and honestly, it's the wrong approach when it comes to fundraising. Fundraising sucked all my time on my first startup and I ended up neglecting the business and our growth fell off a cliff, making us unfundable.

I started Thunder for founders like me who need help staying focused on building a great business and let the expert handle the capital raise.

Warm intros aren’t a strategy

Let’s say you do have a great network. You’ve got warm intros to a dozen decent funds.

You’re already “in the room.”

Great, but being in the room doesn’t mean you're going to close. Fundraising is all about sequencing, timing, leverage, and positioning. If you don't have a coordinated plan across investor types, check sizes, and stages, you're not raising capital. You're just an item in someone's inbox. 

That’s the real job of a good banker: not to replace you, but to remove the chaos around you.

• You focus on the pitch.

• They build the pipeline.

• You bring the vision.

• They handle the follow-ups, the nudges, the structure, the momentum.

It’s not just about intros. It’s about orchestration.

“But we’re too early to need help…”

Startups will happily outsource marketing, sales, dev, but when it comes to the most high-leverage thing in the business (capital), suddenly it’s “Nah, I’ve got this.”

The earlier you are, the more every dollar matters. Which means every misstep- undervaluing your round, choosing the wrong lead, fumbling investor comms,  costs you exponentially more.

Even at seed, we’ve seen founders go from no traction to multiple term sheets in under a month, just by tightening their narrative, targeting smarter, and avoiding common landmines. And yes, they paid a fee to get that help. But they also kept millions more in equity and closed 3x faster. That’s not expensive. That’s efficient.

Fundraising isn’t supposed to be a badge of suffering

This whole hustle culture has people confused. You don’t get extra points for running your own financial model when you have no background in finance. You don’t get extra points for cold emailing 100 investors from a spreadsheet you found on Twitter. You don’t get extra points for learning everything the hard way while your competitors are closing. You just lose time, leverage, and, sometimes, your shot.

The best founders I know aren’t trying to prove they can do everything themselves. They’re ruthlessly focused on where they add value, and they build teams (including external ones) around everything else. Fundraising is no different.

You don’t need a banker. Until you do.

Why wait until it’s almost too late?  Your pipeline is cold. Your metrics are off. Your round is stalling. You may be getting weird feedback from investors, but no one’s being direct. And now you have to call in help from a place of panic instead of planning.

The best time to bring in capital strategy help is before you hit that wall. Not after.

You don’t need a banker to raise. But if you want to run a structured, high-leverage process, protect your valuation, and actually get back to building, you might want one anyway.

Because closing a round isn’t the hard part.

Closing the right round, with the right partners, on the right terms; that’s the game.

And you shouldn’t play it alone. I'm here if you need support. Reach out.