Why Fundraising Is Broken - How Founders Waste Time & Miss the Right Investors

April 8, 2026·1 hr 32 min·7 clips

Daniel Savko argues fundraising is broken because founders waste time emailing thousands of wrong investors instead of targeting the few dozen who might actually write a check.

1. Business Without BS hosts Andy Ury and Andrew Craig interview Daniel Savko, CEO of shipshape.vc, about why startup fundraising is structurally broken. 2. Daniel Savko founded shipshape.vc during UK lockdown while based in Wales; his background is in building data-driven tools for investor-founder matching, and he frames himself as someone who has experienced the capital-access problem firsthand. 3. The episode's core thesis is that the fundraising market suffers from a discovery failure: founders email thousands of investors while only a handful will ever write a check, and the tools that solve this problem are priced out of reach. 4. Savko explains that comprehensive investor databases like Pitchbook and Dealroom cost tens of thousands of pounds annually — licenses typically held by fund analysts, not the early-stage founders who need them. 5. The 'fish vaccine' hypothetical runs through the episode: a company raising £5 million for regulatory trials in Norway, Scotland, and Chile illustrates how niche businesses need to find the specific investors who understand their market, not a generic mass audience. 6. Andrew Craig describes the UK listed-market collapse: London IPO volume is down 90%+ versus its peak, and London raised less from IPOs last year than Oman, Malaysia, and a twentieth of India's total. 7. Savko links higher interest rates (currently ~4% in the UK) to reduced VC deployment, explaining that pension funds shift capital to fixed income when risk-free returns are available, shrinking the pool at the risky VC end of the market. 8. Savko describes 'zombie funds' — VC vehicles that appear active on databases but haven't made a new investment in nine months because they have no dry powder left — as a key research trap for founders who don't check a fund's recent deployment history. 9. The perverse incentive structure of investor calls is revealed: many funds take every inbound pitch meeting not out of genuine interest but to demonstrate deal flow to their own limited partners or benchmark existing portfolio companies. 10. Andrew Craig says the standard CEO mistake in UK listed markets is expecting investors to write a check after a single polished deck presentation, when the actual process requires 4–5 meetings over a year of demonstrated milestones. 11. Savko argues that social media presence — especially LinkedIn — is more important for early-stage fundraising than paying for PR, because investors research founders personally before committing capital. 12. For consumer brands, the hosts note that having no Instagram is itself a red flag, and a sophisticated investor in a fashion business would ask about Instagram following as one of their first questions. 13. Savko introduces the concept that investors 'invest in lines, not dots': a single data point at a pitch meeting is insufficient; investors need to track trajectory across multiple interactions. 14. The UK structural problem, according to Andrew Craig, is a chicken-and-egg liquidity trap: IPO supply won't return until liquidity is there, and liquidity won't return until supply is there. 15. Savko identifies Sweden and Amsterdam as relatively functional European equity markets by contrast, while noting that a proposed European unified stock exchange would likely result in a nominal central structure given how Brussels typically operates. 16. The episode touches on the compliance and legal costs of accessing international capital — potential entity flips, local bank intermediaries for Swiss investors, and US regulatory filing requirements — as costs that fall on founders once they exhaust local options. 17. The conversation is structured as a flowing three-way discussion with frequent concrete analogies — house viewings, fish farms, IBM decision-science graphs — that make abstract capital-market mechanics accessible. 18. The energy is collegial and occasionally self-deprecating, with the hosts repeatedly bouncing specific UK market experience off Savko's technical platform knowledge. 19. Founders at seed to Series A stage who are actively preparing for a fundraise and want concrete tactical advice will get the most value from this episode. 20. Listeners who are not actively fundraising, or who are already experienced in VC-backed rounds, will find much of the content familiar ground.

As heard by us

A clear look at why broad fundraising outreach wastes time.

This review treats fundraising as a practical problem, not a myth. It shows companies casting too wide a net, emailing thousands of people, then arriving at expert VCs without enough context to make the conversation useful.

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Why you'd press play

Fundraising is speed dating with fewer matches and more crying, so stop blasting thousands of investors.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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