Vlad Cazacu is founder and CEO of Flowlie, a fundraising operation system that helps startup founders find the right investors and the warm-intro paths to reach them. Originally from Bucharest, Romania, he started an automated textbook-trading company in college — turning down an acquisition offer eleven months in — then researched entrepreneurial support systems worldwide and published a book on the topic, which opened the door to venture capital. He spent his early career as a VC across three firms in New York, Austin, and Miami before building Flowlie. Flowlie began as an investor product to help VCs triage deal flow, ran for roughly two years on nights and weekends, and pivoted 180 degrees when founders being diligenced on the platform asked for the same intelligence about investors before their meetings; that founder-facing product has now been his full-time focus for two and a half years. His conviction: fundraising should be run like any other process, and structure, data, and network intelligence can level the playing field between founders who raise a few times in a lifetime and investors who do it every day.
“The way we're thinking about it is leveling the playing field. For most founders, they do this maybe three, four, five times in their lifetime. An investor does this every single day, day in, day out.”
“Everyone has a sales process, everyone has a hiring process, everyone has a marketing go-to-market process. Very few people actually have a fundraising process.”
“We are not a marketplace — big disclaimer — we're not a broker. We're not trying to be a middleman of any sort. Our goal is to help you uncover the right people for your business.”
“That's how we got to Flowlie: by building the wrong product nights and weekends for about two years before the pivot.”
“What we don't promise founders is that if you use Flowlie you'll raise capital — that's outside of our control. But our promise is you're going to have the best shot at raising, and we're going to try to save you somewhere between 100 and 300 hours per raise.”
“If you were to go to HubSpot and try to enrich Sequoia, it will try to treat Sequoia as a target you're trying to sell your software to.”
“You won't be able to find all the investors in Flowlie, but what you will find is all the investors who have actually been deploying over the last four years.”
“The biggest piece of advice I always give on fundraising is: think of it as 80% preparation, 20% execution.”