20VC: Raising $400M for 20VC: Fundraising Lessons | Getting Marc Benioff Through 53 Cold Emails: How to Master Cold Outbound | 7 Lessons from 101 Decacorn Founders with Harry Stebbings (Simon Squibb Edition)

This is 20 VC with me, Harry Stebbings. Now I'm very often asked to reveal a little bit about my story, and I'm always quite reserved in doing so. I think you have to really return a lot of money to investors before you think you're worthy of being interviewed. And I think too many young VCs are too out there when they haven't made a lot of money for investors. And then I get a lot of people say, we wanna hear more about you. We wanna hear your story. And so I did a show with Simon Squibb, a brilliant entrepreneur in The UK. My mother said said that she loved the show and that she thought that it should be heard by our community and our fans. And so today, we release a very special one where Simon interviews me. You hear a little bit behind the scenes of 20 VC, the fundraising strategy for a $400,000,000 fund, how I got Marc Benioff to come on 20 VC through 53 cold emails, and many, many more cool stories. But before we dive into the show today, this episode is brought to you by Perk, the intelligent platform platform for travel and spend. Every successful founder remembers their breakthroughs, those moments in the journey that changed their trajectory, whether it was going from burning cash to building leverage or from headcount growth to operational scale. Breakthroughs don't come from spending hours buried in spreadsheets, booking and rebooking travel, or chasing their teams for last quarter's coffee receipts. That's shadow work, and that's what Perk was built for. One recent study found shadow work cost companies over 1,700,000,000,000.0 every year as employees waste hour after hour on manual, time consuming work instead of the jobs they were hired to do. Perk's AI is purpose built to automate shadow work so teams can focus on real work with real impact. Don't let anything get in the way of your next breakthrough. Leave the travel and spend to Perk. Visit perk.com/20vc today. Perk, powering real work. Just as Perk rewards your professional milestones, Daily Body Coach helps you celebrate and sustain your personal wellness wins. You know how so many founders and execs say they'll finally take care of their health once things slow down? Well, they never do. Running a business is a marathon made of high intensity sprints, and taking care of yourself is what gets you through those times performing at your best, both professionally and personally. This is exactly where Daily Body Coach comes in. Daily Body Coach is a complete high touch service for busy founders and executives, combining personalized nutrition and training with psychology based coaching to help you not just follow a plan, but actually build the systems, habits, and mindset to stay at the top of your game. Built by an exited founder and led by certified experts with masters and PhD level credentials, Daily Body Coach is fully tailored to your life, …