I don’t fit the Silicon Valley template of someone who changes the world.
No Stanford degree sits in the background of my Zoom calls. No YC batch claims me as an alum. If I’m being completely honest with you, I barely knew what VC funding even was when I first started my company at UCSB. As a first-time founder—a 21-year-old woman of color with autism and ADHD to make things even more interesting—I entered a startup ecosystem where the statistics screamed obscenities at me constantly: companies founded solely by women receive a mere 2–3% of venture capital funding.
Let me say that again in a different way so you can truly feel how insane it is—97% of $314 billion dollars of VC funding went to male founders last year. And before you even begin to think I’m suggesting we give more funding to women for the sake of DEI, let me inform you of the VC industry’s best kept secret: women founders generate 78 cents in revenue per dollar invested compared to men’s 31 cents—in simpler terms, female founders are better at making money. However, it seems that nearly tripling returns isn’t quite as compelling as tradition. Who knew fiduciary responsibility had such flexible definitions?
Honestly, my real gripe here isn’t with the painfully obvious gatekeeping of power and generational wealth, but rather with my growing fear that we’re not actually solving real problems fast enough if women and other non-traditional founders aren’t equally as involved in building the solutions the world needs right now. If VC-backed companies account for a vast number of the products, services, and technologies that we use every single day, shouldn’t the people we trust and pay to build these innovations actually represent our current society in a realistic way? Diverse founders aren’t just a DEI checkbox—they inherently bring perspectives that tackle overlooked problems, creating faster, smarter solutions.
All that to say—I promise you that right now is the best time in the history of humanity to pick a problem, build a solution, start a company, and get investors to help you scale it across the globe. Especially if you’re someone who doesn’t fit the classic startup founder stereotype. I won’t lie and tell you that it’ll be easy, but I will still wholeheartedly ask you to join the fight because we desperately need your voice to be heard in the arena for the sake of the greater good. And I’d like to give you all the knowledge I have earned to make it as easy as possible for you to succeed, too. The unforgiving reality of being a young founder who is trying to change the world could’ve either kept me up at night in fear of failure or given me an infinite source of adrenaline to beat the odds. It’s pretty clear which of the two I chose and I hope you’ll do the same.
Every piece of advice in this post ties back to what I now know to be fundamental to all great empires: the best founders are storytellers at their core. Every investor meeting, every employee interview, every customer conversation hinges on one critical element—can you make others believe in the future you see in your mind’s eye?
Our true vision travels through narrative, not pitch decks. So today, I’m going to teach you how to change the world by telling your story to it.
Your Struggle is Your Superpower
The genesis of Nectir wasn’t a clever market analysis of the edtech landscape or an attempt to chase the latest AI funding trend. It was born directly from my lived experience of viscerally hating school—the countless hours I spent feeling lost and disconnected in classrooms that weren’t built for minds like mine. Little did I know that I was brewing the perfect recipe for becoming an edtech founder: I adored my teachers, got ostracized by my peers for being “different”, excelled at every extracurricular activity, and got abysmal grades across the board.
Then in college, while accumulating student debt at an alarming rate, I found myself paying tens of thousands of dollars for the privilege of feeling perpetually overwhelmed and misunderstood. That frustration crystalized into a clear vision: we seriously need to update our 400-year-old classroom model and create a modern, accessible, and truly personalized education system that will support every student and teacher. Especially those who feel exactly how I did—invisible, overlooked, and unsure of how to make a positive impact on the world around them.
If you know me already, you know that I share this origin story relentlessly on every conference stage, podcast, fireside chat, and media outlet that will have me—not as a performance of vulnerability, but to share the authentic foundation of our work at Nectir. I strongly believe that people should know who is creating the products they purchase and why they are even building it in the first place. And more importantly, I’ve found that telling the audience about my trauma doesn’t elicit pity from them, instead it invokes a powerful sense of hope that even someone like me can turn things around and make real change happen. It took years of me repeating my story in every room I entered, but gradually, a global community of die-hard Nectir fans began to form and grow at an exponential rate.
Students began reaching out to me from across the nation, saying “I can’t believe you’re building exactly what I need. I feel the same way you did in all my classes and I’m so glad someone is finally talking about it.” Professors saw other educators in the online Nectir community rave about their experience with us and started adopting Nectir AI in droves, even evangelizing it with their fellow faculty and staff without us even asking and helping us close 5-6 figure deals with their admin. Finally, and most surprisingly, investors who had been classically terrified of putting any capital into edtech started approaching me on every social platform possible to inquire about leading or joining our next round of funding because, and I quote, they “just couldn’t stop hearing about Nectir” (which is VC code for “holy shit, I need to invest in this startup right now”).
If you can get over your fear of embarrassment for long enough to perfect your storytelling skills, the world will beg to hear you tell it.
Now I’m personally invited to speak about creating the classroom of the future at national conferences where I am often the youngest person in the room. I lead sales calls with state leaders and policymakers to inform their decisions about adopting AI statewide. I write candidly in major publications about my autism and ADHD and how it both negatively and positively affects the way I build my company and interact with my team. I chat daily with some of the most powerful investors and operators in the industry who want to hear my opinion on what learning will look like 10 years from now because they trust my deep domain expertise.
I do everything in my power to tell my story as loudly and authentically as possible because I know there is something within it that every single human being who hears me will be able to relate to. And there is nothing in the world that I’ve found to convert faster into new deals, whether its from investors or customers, than the emotional tug of seeing and hearing oneself in a heartfelt pitch. I can see it in their eyes as I’m telling my story—they instantly flash back to how they once felt in the classroom or how their kids must be feeling as they navigate their educational journeys in this daunting new world. I can’t even begin to tell you how true it is that people won’t remember what you said, but they will absolutely remember how you made them feel. Never underestimate how much business is done via the heart as opposed to the mind.
Creating Your Own Signal When Nobody Will Intro You
There is one particular secret about “startupland” that I’ve come to love: your resume doesn’t matter nearly as much as who you know and who they know. The entire startup and VC ecosystem runs on “warm intros” – those magical moments where someone important tells another important person they should really meet you. The reason I love this hack is because if you’re a smart, capable, and friendly person who can figure out how to build relationships and maintain them, you essentially have everything you need to build a strong network with a high ROI.
But what happens at the very beginning of this journey when your network consists of exactly zero venture capitalists? What happens when your LinkedIn connections are filled with college classmates and professors instead of angel investors and startup founders? This was my reality when I started Nectir at 21 without any generational wealth or connections, no Ivy-league background to stand on, zero previous work experience, and absolutely no clue how to even get my foot in the door.
I’ve now raised over $6 million dollars from Silicon Valley’s top VCs in the span of 3 years. The key to success? Become impossible to ignore and they will come to you.
When you can’t rely on insider connections, you have to create so much signal that the right people will easily find you. This isn’t about shouting into the void on social media (though that’s part of it at times). It’s about creating undeniable evidence that you’re solving a real problem and building momentum that will trigger every investor’s fear of missing out.
When we first started building the Nectir brand, I became obsessive about documenting every ounce of our success—publishing detailed case studies from our early deployments, hosting webinars with our power users to share best practices, and thoughtfully spamming LinkedIn (since that’s where our target audience lives) with my analyses on why education is fundamentally broken and how Nectir is going to fix it. I never posted vague promises about “revolutionizing education” unless it was followed by data-driven evidence that proved we were making monumental positive change in every classroom that used Nectir AI. I focused on concrete results that people would actually care about seeing: What specific pain points did we successfully solve for professors, staff, and admin at various campuses? Was there a statistically significant improvement of student GPA? How much did student engagement increase after a teacher implemented their Nectir AI Course Assistants? Why did our customers choose our product over our competitors? This is the stuff they need to know to make an informed prediction of your future success and determine if they want in on it. It all boils down to whether you can communicate and prove your ability to build and sell a product that enough people want to buy.
The next step is to utilize this online brand and persona that you’ve built to begin interacting with investors, founders, and potential customers to create your community.
This can be as simple as requesting to connect with them on LinkedIn, even if you’re going in completely cold. As long as your profile is built out with valuable content that proves you’re in “founder-mode”, there’s a solid chance these folks will accept your invite. Now it’s up to you to create a thoughtful message with a concise reason for reaching out to them, e.g. “I’m working on x to solve y and we’ve had z traction so far. Would love to share what we’re building and get your feedback on it.” In my experience, being straightforward, friendly, and authentic in your initial cold outreach will often result in far better reply rates than you might expect. Every time you get on a call with an investor or a founder, make sure you ask them if they can introduce you to someone else they know who is also an expert in this space so that you can gather more feedback. This is how the fly-wheel begins.
Aim to build relationships with investors of all backgrounds (VC, angel, PE, family office, etc.) for at least 6 months before you begin raising a round. This helps both you and them figure out if you’ve got the chemistry necessary to work together for the foreseeable future to solve society’s biggest problems and generate an enormous amount of money in doing so. The first VCs to ever say “yes” and lead our preseed round already knew my co-founder and I for 2 years and had been tracking our journey. We had the leniency and luxury of getting to know them over coffee dates where we could casually ask what it would take for them to invest in Nectir and get an authentic response because neither side had any skin in the game. Their answers gave us concrete milestones to hit and exposed their wishlist for the kinds of founders they back—thus giving us the exact roadmap to getting a term sheet when we needed it most.
Nurturing and growing a genuine connection with me allowed our earliest investors to make their investment into Nectir with complete conviction because they had time to build real trust in my ability to execute at the level needed for VC-backed founders. They had ample opportunity to watch my team and I execute, iterate, and grow—far before I ever asked them to write a check. And at that point, nobody asked or cared about my resume anymore; they already knew exactly who I was and what I was capable of achieving.
The secret weapon here isn’t just content creation—it’s consistency that builds credibility. One viral post might get you noticed, but a steady stream of growth insights, customer feedback, and data-heavy case studies over months and years creates an unshakeable sense that you’re clearly a leader in your space. Not to mention, this approach simultaneously gave us the most coveted reward in all of business: inbound sales. To the tune of over 90% of our sales pipeline now being entirely inbound with almost no paid marketing. Investors will naturally seek out the visible leaders in every space, but more importantly, so will customers. We’ve managed to drastically shorten our sales cycles and significantly improve the quality of each lead we pursue because our customers are coming to us fully qualified and ready to buy after seeing what we’ve achieved for other schools. It’s the exact type of buying behavior every sales leader dreams of, and it’s made possible for my team and I by just shouting about our successes from the rooftops on a consistent clip. If you understand that you’re always selling your company to both investors and customers, it becomes much easier to create a product marketing strategy that hits two very important birds with one stone.
You Have The Outsider’s Advantage—Use It.
The beautiful irony of Silicon Valley is that while it claims to celebrate innovation and disruption, the ecosystem itself is remarkably resistant to change. This creates a unique opportunity for outsiders like us—we see the problems and inefficiencies that insiders have become blind to. I’ve learned that being underestimated is actually my secret weapon. When nobody expects us to succeed, we have the freedom to experiment, fail, and pivot without the spotlight of expectation. While the Stanford CS grad with a perfect pedigree is expected to build the next unicorn in record timing, we get to fly under the radar until we’ve built something undeniable.
Here’s what I wish someone had told me when I started my company and/or your TLDR in case this blog post has gone on too long for your attention span:
1. Start with your lived experience Your struggles aren’t just personal challenges—they’re market insights. The problems that frustrate you daily are likely frustrating millions of others who simply lack the tools to solve them. My educational struggles weren’t unique to me; they were shared by countless students who became our first passionate users. What problem do you understand on a visceral level that others only comprehend intellectually?
2. Document your journey publicly from day one Share what you’re building, learning, and struggling with consistently. This creates a timeline of progress that attracts both customers and investors. I spent years publishing detailed case studies, data analyses, and educational content before most VCs knew my name. By the time we were fundraising, we had a public archive of growth that made our progress undeniable.
3. Measure what matters to your specific users Generic metrics like “user growth” aren’t enough. For Nectir, we tracked concrete improvements in classroom engagement, GPA increases, and professor time saved. These specific outcomes became our strongest selling points. Identify the 2-3 metrics that prove you’re solving a real problem, then measure and share them obsessively.
4. Build relationships before you need them The biggest mistake founders make is only reaching out to investors when they’re raising. Instead, create a list of 20-30 investors who back companies in your space, and share meaningful updates with them quarterly. Not asking for money—just sharing progress. This way, when you do raise, you’re not a stranger with a pitch deck; you’re a known entity with a proven track record.
5. Create your own community when you’re excluded from existing ones When traditional networks weren’t accessible to me, I built my own by connecting with other founders who shared my background and values. This support system became invaluable for navigating the inevitable challenges of building a company from the ground up. Your outsider perspective will naturally attract others who feel the same as you do—embrace them and support one another on your journey to success.
6. Perfect the “why you should bet on me” story Investors aren’t just backing your company; they’re backing you. Be prepared to articulate why your specific background, personality traits, and experiences make you uniquely qualified to solve this problem. For me, my neurodivergence and educational struggles weren’t liabilities—they were the exact qualities that gave me deep insight into building better learning systems.
7. Use rejection as market research Every “no” from an investor is valuable data. Instead of taking it personally, ask for specific reasons and use that feedback to strengthen your story, product, or strategy. Some of our most important product innovations came from investor concerns that forced us to think differently about our approach.
The truth is, Silicon Valley startupland isn’t actually a private party you need an invitation to attend. It’s more like a public square where the loudest, most consistent, and most compelling voices eventually get heard. Your outsider perspective isn’t a disadvantage—it’s precisely what enables you to see opportunities that others miss.
Remember this, if nothing else: the most successful founders aren’t those with the perfect backgrounds or connections. They’re the ones who refuse to quit, who learn from every setback, and who build in public with enough consistency that the world can’t help but take notice. The system wasn’t built for people like us—and that’s exactly why we’re the ones who need to break in and make it accessible for all those that will come after us. Not by asking for permission or waiting for an invitation, but by building something so valuable that the industry has no choice but to make room at the table for us.
So tell your story authentically. Share your journey in its entirety. Build in public and be proud of your wins out loud. Create your own community. Be relentlessly helpful to others. And above all, keep going even when “conventional” wisdom says you should quit.
I’ll see you at the party. We might not have been on the original guest list, but we’re the ones they’ll be talking about when the night is over.
If this post resonated with you, check out my podcast episode on the Fund/Build/Scale show, where I expand on these ideas in more detail:
Kavitta Ghai is the CEO & Co-Founder of Nectir, building AI-powered learning partners that personalize education at scale. She launched Nectir as an undergrad at UC Santa Barbara, raising $6M+ in VC funding to build the classroom of the future. Today, Nectir’s purpose-built AI infrastructure is powering personalized learning at over 100 institutions nationwide. Featured in TechCrunch and SXSW, Kavitta is a leading voice on the future of learning, speaking on how AI will modernize the teaching and learning experience while keeping accessibility and inclusion at the center of innovation.