You’re reading The Messy Middle: weekly deep dives on leadership, startups, identity, politics, and how to make high stakes decisions that are intentional and in-line with your values.
💸 How Do You Get Capital Behind A Big Idea?
Earlier today, I spoke on a panel: Capital As Activism, and while preparing for it, I found myself thinking about how much of my career has involved making the case for things traditional markets don't always know how to value. Before I became an entrepreneur, I spent six years working in affordable housing finance. Then, at 26, I started an activewear company for Muslim women. The through line between those two chapters has always been pretty clear to me: both were about building resources for communities that were often overlooked. What I hadn't thought as much about was the role storytelling played in getting capital behind those ideas.
I worked for a double-bottom-line affordable housing investor, which meant every investment had to generate a financial return while also preserving affordable housing. Sometimes the numbers made the decision relatively straightforward. Other times, we'd look at a property that was more borderline financially, but incredibly compelling from a mission perspective. In those cases, my job wasn't simply to hand the investment committee another spreadsheet. I had to explain what the spreadsheet couldn't: who lived there, what preserving the property meant for the community, and why this particular investment was worth making.
At the time, I thought I was writing investment memos, but I was also learning something I've carried into almost every chapter of my career since: the numbers can tell you whether something works, but they don't always create the emotional pull someone needs to put their money behind it.
Looking back, that’s exactly what I was learning to do; I was using stoytelling to help the holders of capital understand what the numbers actually meant, and the impact their money could make.
tune in at 3h:10m for Capital As Activism
🧕🏽 On The Other Side Of The Ask
A few years later, I found myself on the other side of that equation. I was 26, living in New York, and trying to start an activewear company for Muslim women. I had some savings, but it’s not like I’d walked away from some crazy investment banking salary with enough money to casually finance an apparel company. I didn’t come from fashion, modest activewear was barely a category at the time, and traditional investors weren’t exactly lining up to take meetings about the Muslim women’s performance apparel market.
One day, I randomly ran into an old friend on the street. We ended up grabbing dinner, I told her what I was building, and she suggested I look into Kickstarter. She was a photographer and eventually helped me put the entire campaign together. I still think about the randomness of that interaction because I only knew this particular path to capital existed because of where I happened to be living and who I happened to run into that day.
Kickstarter gave me a way around a problem I hadn’t really known how to solve: it helped me validate my product idea, and find the capital to get it off the ground.
When I started building the campaign, I realized pretty quickly that I couldn’t just describe the product. The clothes didn’t exist yet. There was nothing for someone to try on, review, or recommend to a friend. I was asking people to put money behind my belief that they should exist. So the story became much bigger than the hijabs and shirts I was selling. I was describing the gap: women showing up to gyms, hiking trails, and yoga classes without anything built for them, and what might become possible if they finally did.
The idea underneath the campaign became very simple: this doesn’t exist yet, and you’re the reason it will.
We ended up raising nearly $30,000. What has always fascinated me is that the people who funded it weren’t exclusively Muslim women who wanted to buy the clothes. Around 30% of my backers were men, and many others were non-Muslim women. They weren’t necessarily thinking, I want this product, but they believed in what the product represented. It opened their eyes to a world in which they could imagine their Muslim friend being able to run with them, hike with them, or participate in a fitness class without having to choose between the experience and the way she wanted to dress.
📊 The Numbers Don’t Tell You What They Mean
We tend to talk about capital as though it moves according to a completely objective set of facts. What’s the return? How large is the market? What’s the growth rate? What’s the risk? And of course those things matter. I spent enough years in finance to cringe whenever someone suggests that a compelling story can compensate for bad fundamentals. It can’t. But the opposite is also true: good fundamentals don’t automatically communicate their own significance.
A market-size slide can tell you millions of people experience a problem, but it can’t necessarily make you understand why that problem matters or why this particular founder sees something everyone else has missed. A financial model can tell you what happens if a company succeeds, but it can’t make you believe in the future the founder is projecting. Storytelling gives numbers the context they need to matter.
That’s why I think we get storytelling in business wrong when we treat it as the thing you add after the “serious” work is finished. Storytelling isn’t decoration around a decision; it helps people understand what decision they’re actually making. And in fundraising and the world of accessing capital, your story isn’t simply the slide where you explain how you came up with the idea; it’s the thread that helps someone understand why the entire opportunity makes sense: why this problem, why now, why you, and what becomes possible if you’re right.
✍🏽 Before You Build The Deck
Toward the end of today’s panel, we were asked for the smallest thing someone could do to start thinking differently about raising capital. My answer was to write down one sentence: What doesn’t exist yet, and why are you the reason it will?
We tend to jump straight to the pitch deck, fundraising email, campaign page, or investor list without first getting clear on the future we’re asking another person to help create. I didn’t raise nearly $30,000 because I had some brilliant funding strategy at 26. I raised it because I could tell people what didn’t exist, why that absence mattered, and what their money could help make possible.
This is also a part of my work I want to do more of: helping founders and nonprofits build the narrative underneath a fundraise by helping other people understand what you already see so clearly.
If you’re raising right now and that’s the piece you’re struggling with, I’d love to work on it with you. You can book a call with me below.
