How the VC Fund Spacecadet's Unusual Pitching Tactics Paid Off

Spacecadet is a new early-stage fund by two founders who are expert marketers.
They showed off their skills by pitching to investors with an unusual, animated pitch deck and game.
Their tactic paid off, and they ended up raising millions more than they planned to receive.

It’s no secret that for investors who dream of running their own venture-capital firms, raising that first fund can be a daunting task. But after a record-breaking year for venture capital, many aspiring VCs are joining the Great Resignation and leaving their jobs to launch new funds.

With steep competition for limited partners — those who invest in VC funds — such emerging fund managers need to find ways to stand out from the crowd.

The former founders and angel investors Daniel Eckler and Wisam “Wiz” Abdulla had this mindset when they launched Spacecadet. Both had spent time mentoring startup founders after their own exits (Eckler founded the microblogging sites Piccsy and EveryGuyed, and Abdulla founded the human-resources tech startup Hazel), and Eckler had done four years consulting for ad agencies in New York. The two had known of each other in the startup ecosystem for years before they discussed starting their own fund. They soon decided that the marketing help they could offer startups was one of the ways they could stand out as an emerging fund in a crowded marketplace.

They also decided to focus on Web3, education, and sustainability and to invest in the seed and preseed stages, which is often a point in a startup’s journey at which founders haven’t yet mastered their messaging.

“A lot of those companies aren’t ready to think about distribution or awareness or a lot of these things, but all of them can benefit from an incredibly strong story to recruit better, to raise more money at their next round, to have more internal cohesion around what they should be doing,” Eckler said.

The two landed on the name “Spacecadet” to capture both the hardworking diligence of an astronaut and the dreamier, out-of-the-box artistic sensibility they hoped to bring to the table.

Coming up with the thesis of their fund was a no-brainer, but then came the hard part: execution. Then it hit them: “If marketing is what we’re going to be doing for startups, we should probably do an incredible job of that for ourselves as well while we raise this fund and have that speak to our ability to do that for others,” Eckler said.

They began with their pitch deck, spending months building something unusual: an animated deck. They also built an accompanying game they called “Unicorn Hunt” which anyone could play to win a $10,000 prize in the fund.

They settled on a retro-inspired, pixelated style for their branding that played off their name, and topped it all off with a gift idea for their LPs: personalized mini Lego astronauts that would stand out from the more standard VC swag that “LPs are used to receiving in the mail,” Eckler said.

—Chrissy Cowdrey (@ccowdrey) January 18, 2022

Going with an unusual deck was a gamble, but as soon as they shared the pitch deck with their first LPs, the positive feedback came rolling in.

“We got floods of emails of people responding being like, this is the best deck I’ve ever seen,” Abdulla said. And once their deck made it to Twitter, Spacecadet landed 15 new LP applications on the first day, including their first $250,000 check.

The two now have an oversubscribed fund of $10 million, $4 million more than their original goal, they told Insider, with several all-star LPs like Marc Andreessen and Chris Dixon. With that much interest, they’re also still accepting a few final LP applications, they said. They believe the interest is due to the care they put into making their fundraising strategy match the vision of their fund.

“All the LPs that we’ve talked to are overloaded with emerging fund managers,” Abdulla said. “Everyone’s raising a fund today. And so for them, our totally different and wild approach was a very fresh perspective that people were excited to be involved in.”