John Kim - How to Raise a Few Billion Dollars - [Invest Like the Best, EP.482]

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Colossus

Investing, Technology, Business

4.7 • 2.5K Ratings

🗓️ 14 July 2026

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | Apple Podcasts | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Today my guest is John Kim. John is one of the world's top and most prolific fundraisers. He was chief client officer at General Catalyst, where he helped raise many of the firm's flagship funds. He is now chairman and president of corporate development at Lila Sciences, a company building scientific superintelligence, where he has helped raise several hundred million dollars. He is also the author of The Tao of Fundraising. This conversation is really a guide on how to raise money from someone who has done it at the highest level. We talk about why persuasion equals desire minus fear, the difference between belief and trust, the laws of fundraising, and how to build the consensus that moves big pools of capital. Please enjoy my conversation with John Kim. For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠here⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. ----- Become a Colossus member to get our quarterly print magazine and private audio experience, including exclusive profiles and early access to select episodes. Subscribe at ⁠colossus.com/subscribe⁠. ----- ⁠Ramp’s⁠ mission is to help companies manage their spend in a way that reduces expenses and frees up time for teams to work on more valuable projects. Go to⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠ramp.com/invest⁠⁠ to sign up for free and get a $250 welcome bonus. ----- Trusted by thousands of businesses, ⁠Vanta⁠ continuously monitors your security posture and streamlines audits so you can win enterprise deals and build customer trust without the traditional overhead. Invest Like the Best listeners get a special offer of $1,000 off Vanta when you go to ⁠vanta.com/invest⁠. ----- WorkOS⁠ is the infrastructure B2B and AI-native companies use to sell to enterprise. It covers everything enterprise security requires: SSO, SCIM, RBAC, Audit Logs, AI governance, and more. Trusted by 2,000+ fast-growing companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, and Vercel. ----- Rogo is the AI platform for finance. They're building agents for Wall Street that are trained to understand how bankers and investors actually do work: from diligence and modeling, to turning analysis into deliverables. To learn more, visit rogo.ai/invest. ----- ⁠Ridgeline⁠ has built a complete, real-time, modern operating system for investment managers. It handles trading, portfolio management, compliance, customer reporting, and much more through an all-in-one real-time cloud platform. Visit⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ridgeline.ai⁠. ----- Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant. Timestamps: (00:00:00) Welcome to Invest Like The Best (00:02:02) Introduction of John Kim (00:02:39) Money Moves at the Speed of Trust (00:05:06) How to Start a Fundraising Campaign (00:08:03) Persuasion Equals Desire Minus Fear (00:12:20) How to Raise a Few Billion Dollars (00:15:58) The Benchmark Story (00:18:36) The Law of Differentiation (00:24:13) Law of Tradeoffs and Law of Pipeline (00:27:52) The Karpman Drama Triangle (00:30:42) Oprah Winfrey (00:33:49) Most Common Fundraising Mistakes (00:38:35) Secretary of State (00:45:40) The Inner Game (00:47:38) The Kindest Thing

Transcript

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0:00.0	Ramp is the only platform built to make your finance team leaner, faster, and better,
0:04.0	saving businesses 5% annually on average so you can stay focused on growth.
0:08.7	Ramp customers grew revenue 3.2 times faster than the average American business.
0:12.9	Visa, Versel, Cursor, Stripe, Notion, 11 Lab, Shopify, and 70,000 other businesses all run on Ramp.
0:19.3	Mind us too, and so should yours.
0:21.0	Learn more at ramp.com slash invest.
0:24.2	Felix by Rogo is a personal finance agent that turns a single prompt into finished
0:28.5	client-ready work using your firm's own templates, context, and standards.
0:32.4	Send Felix an email like, take these comments and turn them for me, or update my tracker
0:36.5	with the context of these
0:37.5	emails, or run the ability to pay math on this buyer, and Felix sends back finished PowerPoint
0:42.5	decks, Excel models, and sourced research. Felix works the way your team already does,
0:47.6	delivering work quickly and accurately around the clock. Learn more at rogo.a.ai slash Felix.
0:53.5	Open AI, cursor, anthropic, perplexity, and Versel all have something in common.
0:57.6	They all use WorkOS.
0:59.4	And here's why.
1:00.2	To achieve enterprise adoption at scale, you have to deliver on core capabilities like
1:04.3	SSO, Skim, Rback, and Audit logs.
1:07.5	That's where WorkOS comes in.
1:09.0	Instead of spending months building these mission-critical capabilities yourself, you can just use WorkOS APIs to gain all of them on day zero.
1:16.2	That's why so many of the top AI teams you hear about already run on WorkOS. WorkOS is the fastest
1:21.6	way to become enterprise ready and stay focused on what matters most, your product. Visit WorkOS.com
	...

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