Most founders learn to raise the way most people learn to grieve — in public, with no preparation, and a lot of conflicting advice. Investing 101 is the room we wish someone had walked us into before our first pitch. Four talks, ninety minutes each, with frameworks you'll actually use the week after.
↳The four talks
You bring us to your community — accelerator, fellowship, founders' guild — and we run the four talks for your founders.
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explore: tap a quadrant for the archetype← strategic financial →What this talk covers
- Investor types and mandates — what distinguishes a strategic VC from a financial one before you open your mouth
- What investors have already decided before you speak — pattern-matching, thesis fit, the pre-meeting posture problem
- How to construct a meeting research discipline that fits on an index card
What you walk out withA two-axis investor-type map you can annotate before any meeting and a pre-meeting checklist that surfaces what's actually legible from public information.
Who it's forBring it to your community → -
explore: what kind of money is this?Who gives itLead VCs, Series A+ institutional funds with board seat expectationsWhat they wantGovernance, information rights, pro-rata, often a board seat or observerWhat it costs youDecision velocity. Every major call goes through a new stakeholder.When to take itWhen you want accountability pressure and the bandwidth to manage itWho gives itCorporate VCs, strategic angels, industry partners investing for distribution or IP accessWhat they wantMarket access, co-development options, first-look rights, or talent pipelinesWhat it costs youOptionality. Their strategic agenda can conflict with yours in year two.When to take itWhen their network unlocks a distribution channel you can't build aloneWho gives itMicro-VCs, angels, syndicates — capital without agenda, often no follow-onWhat they wantReturns. Minimal involvement. Updates quarterly.What it costs youLess than you think. But cap-table noise adds up when you get 12 of them.When to take itWhen you need to fill a round fast or have a relationship-based reasonWhat this talk covers
- The three capital types — controlling, strategic, and passive — and what each one costs you beyond the cap table
- The "free money allure": why bad-fit capital feels like a win in the moment and looks like a constraint twelve months later
- Frameworks for deciding which capital to pursue, which to decline, and when to walk from a term sheet
What you walk out withA capital-type scoring lens you can apply to your current pipeline — plus language for the walk-away conversation that doesn't burn the relationship.
Who it's forBring it to your community → -
the story doesn't change. the framing does.
Source: "We help founders raise money by helping them understand investors."
"We close the information asymmetry between founders and the institutional capital layer. Our four-session program has a documented 2× improvement in pitch-to-second-meeting conversion."
↳ metrics, category positioning, ROI framing"We're the studio that finally gives founders the investor literacy they should have learned in business school but didn't. If you want your work to have direct impact on whether a company survives its first round — this is it."
↳ mission, craft, stakes"You've been in meetings with investors where you couldn't read the room. We teach you exactly what they're looking for — before you walk in, not after you walk out."
↳ problem first, outcome second"You know how founders pitch investors on TV and it looks easy? In real life it's not. We run a class that teaches founders what investors actually care about so they don't waste a year getting it wrong."
↳ familiar analogy, plain languageWhat this talk covers- Why your investor story and your hire story and your customer story are different documents with the same source material
- The architecture of a pitch that adapts — what stays constant, what mutates by audience, and how to hold both without losing coherence
- How to tell the version of the story you haven't earned yet without it feeling like a lie
What you walk out withA story architecture map — one source narrative with four audience branches — plus a live exercise that surfaces the version you're least comfortable telling.
Who it's forBring it to your community → -
a raise isn't one moment — it's a sequence of five hurdlesWhat this talk covers
- The psychological arc of a raise — what you'll feel in month one, three, and five, and why each phase has a different failure mode
- How to separate signal from noise in investor feedback without either dismissing it or over-weighting it
- The founder identity problem: what happens to your sense of self when the raise is going badly and how to protect the decision-making quality you need most in that moment
What you walk out withA personal resilience map for your own raise — which phase you're in, what the specific risk is for that phase, and one concrete action to mitigate it.
Who it's forBring it to your community →
The room is the deliverable. Slides are residue.
— how we run every Joyus workshop↳Two ways in.
If you run an accelerator, fellowship, or founders' guild —
Bring us in to run the four talks for your founders. We tailor stories and exercises to where your cohort actually is in their raise. From $1,500 / talk, packaged or à la carte.
Bring it to your community → for your teamIf your leadership team is raising —
All four talks, your room, your schedule. Best when CEO + co-founders + key hires want a shared vocabulary going into the raise. From $4,500 for the full series.
Bring it to your team →non-profits, student groups, scrappy founder collectives — write us, we usually find a way.