How to get a 20x exit – and why it takes a village

They say behind every successful entrepreneur is a bad former manager. I’d add: and a great advisory board. Advisors are an incredible, hidden superpower that are massively underused in today’s early-stage founder world. As a 3x founder and now investor, I find that to be super odd because they are one of the most useful tools in a founder’s toolbox.

How else is a first-time founder supposed to get early investors? They’ve never raised money before and likely don’t have friends and family who write checks. Angel investors are hard to find without a network; it’s not really a job description you can filter for on LinkedIn.

My first US$100,000 check came from a crypto exec I met in the middle of a dusty desert, riding on the back of a tricycle – hardly something that can be replicated or taught. When raising for my last startups, more than once, I've taken US$10,000 or US$25,000 checks just to make ends meet and that hustle came without a system, a vision or a plan.

In 2017, my former University of California – Los Angeles teacher and one of the only angel investors I knew sat down with me and told me how to use advisors to get investors. Since then, most of my angel investors have come from people whose advice I sought first or through their network.

Raising the first US$1 million became systematic and far more structured. I realized that advisors are the most practical path to those first checks and I’ve been telling other founders this for years.

That’s just one thing advisors do. They do so much more. So why aren’t we talking about this?

Learn from the mistakes of others

The last company I built and exited was a venture-backed animal biotech company called Basepaws. I was a solo founder, building during the COVID-19 pandemic and pre-AI with no genetic background, no animal health credentials and a super-talented but tiny, young team. What made all the difference early on was how I built my advisory boards.

Basepaws had multiple advisory boards over the years, and I probably had 20-plus advisors across science, veterinary, legal, fundraising and general strategic support. I often called my early advisors my Power Rangers, because each one had a very specific superpower.

I would have made every mistake myself instead of learning from people who had already made them. I had a finance supermind who understood biotech and I had a Salesforce freak who taught me B2B sales and made a ton of introductions. I had top executives from Purina and Amazon and many amazing veterinarians all helping grow the business. Every person came with a new network and opened new doors.

Here’s what that actually looked like in practice:

The finance guy once stopped me mid-pitch prep and said, "You're pricing this like a consumer DNA product, like 23andMeow. Not everything 23andMe did worked, so why don’t you price it like a diagnostic?"

I had no background in diagnostics and had no idea what he meant. We spent hours on the phone and he completely reframed how I thought about our revenue model. That one conversation probably added zeros to our valuation.

The Salesforce person was obsessed with structure and knew the pet and vet space. He cold-mapped our entire B2B pipeline on a Saturday morning and sent it to me before I woke up. I hadn’t asked him to. He just saw a gap and filled it.

That map became the foundation of how we approached veterinary clinic partnerships for the next two years and I’ve shared this with other pet startups.

The ex-Purina executive once sat with me after a board meeting that had gone sideways. I was ready to make a reactive decision that would have cost us a key relationship with Chewy. He just said, "Sleep on it. Then call me."

To this day, I thank him for the relationship surviving. He made me slow down and just exhale before reacting. Sometimes you just need that extra bit of experience in the room, so you give yourself space to exhale and think.

Together, all of us threw so much spaghetti at the wall that it honestly looked like a crime scene, but we got sales. We raised money. We closed deals. Then in 2021, when our sales and data were finally growing fast and it felt like the hard years were starting to pay off, we hit a major strategic fork.

We could double down on consumer growth and our bread and butter cat DNA test and ride that momentum or pump serious capital into R&D for a new dog DNA test that wouldn’t show returns for years. My instinct, of course, was to chase cat revenue since it felt safer and I loved being number one in my category.

We were a small team with our nose to the grindstone, month after month, pushing up and to the right little by little. One of my advisors, Mat Falkowski, was a biotech CEO himself and he basically said, "If you want to keep building your cute cat brand, keep selling the current stuff. If you want to build a company that gets acquired, invest in the science asset, launch new products and become the best there."

That R&D-first decision was hard, but it completely changed our story, and Mat was there when our conversation with Zoetis shifted everything. Because we had a killer science team and we made a strategic decision to focus on R&D, we ultimately became the best in the industry for our science and that is what made Basepaws worth acquiring. Zoetis, the world’s largest animal health company, acquired us in 2022.

It was a full exit, and our earliest investors saw 20x returns. My Shark Tank investor, Kevin O’Leary, was among them, and to this day, he says we were his very best exit on Shark Tank.

Why investors actually care

When an early-stage venture capitalist sees an advisory board slide filled with credible industry names, your meeting with that investor is much more likely to happen. Serious people have already vetted you and trust is higher, your risk lower. This is one of the easiest ways to gain investor traction.

So why aren’t decks swimming with advisors? I honestly have no idea.

I think the biggest misconception founders have is that advisors are hard to get. They’re not. Many senior leaders are genuinely excited by the opportunity to work with an early-stage startup. Watching a seasoned executive untangle a founder’s problem in minutes because they’ve lived it before is pure art, and that adrenaline is what gets people excited to advise.

Great advisors bring decades of experience and can problem-match faster than a young founder ever could. They love doing this. All they want is an opportunity to help.

Want to spend money on an expensive consultant? Want to sign a funky non-disclosure agreement? Want to have a difficult conversation that could turn legal? Talk to your advisor first. They also open doors you simply cannot open yet and have networks of investors you can tap into.

In regulated, credibility-driven industries like pet health, biotech or healthcare, this matters even more. Veterinary and scientific advisory boards are helpful at any stage of growth. I’m working with a company right now that is setting up a medical advisory board after more than two decades in business. It’s never too late, but earlier is always better.

From founder to investor

One thing that genuinely surprised me when I crossed over from founder to investor is how seriously investors read the advisory board slide.

As a General Partner at AniVC, I reviewed 400-plus decks in 2025. I was disappointed by how few had advisors on them. Some had a handful. Some were missing that slide altogether. A strong advisory board is one of the clearest signals that a founder can sell, that the company has momentum and that someone credible already believes in them.

Why are we crafting 20-page decks packed with every ChatGPT-generated detail while completely ignoring one of the most powerful tools available?

Now, as a venture capitalist, I look for it immediately. A strong advisory board tells me the founder is coachable, can recruit people stronger than themselves, has access to experience they haven’t yet hired and is likely putting that access to work.

On the flip side, a complete absence of advisors is often a red flag. At best, it suggests the company may not yet be ready for investment.

What advisors actually do

Fundraising is the big one. You might not have raised millions before, but they have. That experience comes with nuance, contacts, late-night deck sessions, warm intros and a lot in between.

Deep industry credibility is another. Often, you need trust to get revenue. But to build trust, you need data and to get data, you need revenue. Advisors help solve that catch-22 situation. I advise the founders of RetrievAir and regularly introduce them to key people in the pet industry or suggest shows to attend or people to know.

Regulatory and legal are huge, too. Instead of spending days lost in AI tools or a fortune on lawyers, find an advisor who already lives in your exact regulatory world. There are many more examples. Yes, this takes time as a founder. I promise it is absolutely worth it. If you’re reading this and don’t have at least three advisors, that is your homework for this week.

Compensation

Another common mistake founders make is not properly compensating advisors. Advisors should be paid in equity, not cash. Cash is really only for consultants. Equity aligns advisors with outcomes, and vest, vest, vest.

Ranges that work in practice:

1. 0.1–0.25 percent for light-touch name and face on the deck, occasional call or text or Series A+

2. 0.25–0.5 percent for active, responsive advisors with a real working relationship

3. 0.5–1 percent for truly exceptional contributors, or for very early-stage companies

Again, always vest. Two years is a good default. And don’t be afraid to end the relationship if an advisor isn’t delivering. I have and I set that expectation from the start. Advisors should want to be there. When they don’t, no-one wins.

Set aside an employee stock ownership plan early and treat advisory equity as a priority, the same way you compensate your team. It’s also completely fine to have more than one advisory board if it makes sense; I had three, each with a clear mandate and each formed at a different stage of growth.

Every advisor I kept made money at exit and many continue to advise pet startups today. If you’re reading this, my Basepaws advisors – thank you for all you did for us!

So you want to be an advisor

The best advisors I’ve worked with are specific about what they’re good at, honest about their availability, sharp and opinionated and really care and want to help young founders. Having a legal, finance or science background helps and coming from a strategic company in the industry is a huge plus. If that sounds like you, you might be a great advisor for a startup.

I currently sit on five advisory boards, including Plug and Play, and one nonprofit, Petco Love. Getting ready to join the Petco Love board was what led me to dig into many more details, and while I never really found a good summary or book on early-stage advisory roles, I did find good info in Betsy Atkins’ book Be Board Ready. It’s not written for advisory boards specifically, but it has tons more relevant lessons than anything I’ve found on the topic online. If you find a good one on startup advisors, please share.

Last bit: Be wary of advisors sitting on many boards. More than eight is probably overkill and means they are mostly a name and a photo on a slide.

Solo Founder – No Team

In 2026, you can build a startup as a single founder with contractors and killer AI tools doing the work of an entire early team. But that model of solo founder/no team creates a real credibility and experience gap, especially when it comes to raising money. Advisory boards fill that gap better than almost anything else. They are more critical now than ever.

Founders who understand this early build better advisory boards and eventually become better board members themselves. This applies whether you’re building a venture-backed startup, serving on a nonprofit board or just kicking off a new project.

It really does take a village. Build yours smartly, with the right structure and with the advisory board at the CEO’s right hand.

Opinions expressed by The CEO Magazine contributors are their own.