Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Vlad Cazacu. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I’m Vlad, CEO and Co-Founder of Flowlie – we’re building the fundraising OS that helps tech founders spend less time raising capital and more time building their companies. After years as a VC investor (most recently at Fuel Venture Capital), I saw firsthand how much time gets wasted on fundraising operations and wanted to change that.

We created Flowlie to be your all-in-one fundraising command center. From runway planning to investor discovery and intro path analysis, we help founders cut their fundraising time in half while making smarter financing decisions. Whether you’re raising your first round or you’re a seasoned pro, our platform adapts to your needs – making complex workflows like coordinating hundreds of stakeholders to drive calendar density and following up with the right message on time manageable.

What truly sets us apart is our commitment to democratizing access to professional fundraising tools and knowledge. As a second-time founder and author of “When They Win, You Win,” I understand that building a startup is challenging enough – fundraising shouldn’t be the part that slows you down. Our global team is laser-focused on making complex concepts like valuation benchmarks and dilution intuitive, ensuring all founders, regardless of their background, have the systems and data they need to succeed.

How’d you meet your business partner?

I actually met my co-founders through two different chapters of my life. Mark and I first connected while working at Fuel Venture Capital, where we quickly discovered we shared the same frustrations about how broken the fundraising process was for founders. We’d spend hours debating how to make it better – not just for the founders we were backing, but for the entire ecosystem. When we were ready to make our next career move, we realized that it would make a lot of sense to partner up and work on this together.

Gio’s story goes back even further – we met during our undergrad years at the University of Rochester. What started as a friendship built on late-night study sessions and shared dreams of entrepreneurship evolved into a strong partnership. After graduation, we stayed in touch and kept bouncing ideas off each other. When I started thinking about Flowlie, I knew his technical expertise and our years of trust would be invaluable so it became an obvious decision to partner.

It’s funny how life works – Mark’s operational and investing experience, Gio’s technical mindset, and my background in venture capital created this perfect storm of complementary skills that built the foundation of this business.

Can you talk to us about how your side-hustle turned into something more.

My entrepreneurial journey began during my time at the University of Rochester, where I balanced night shifts working at Starbucks with launching BarterOut – a startup helping students automatically sell and purchase textbooks between semesters. Though BarterOut became ramen-profitable and even received an acquisition offer (which I turned down), its real value came from teaching me the fundamentals of company building by doing everything wrong. Those late nights while studying taught me invaluable lessons about persistence and time management.

A notable milestone was publishing “When They Win, You Win” – a book about supporting entrepreneurship that became a bestseller at launch. This project, developed during my time in venture capital, helped crystallize many of my observations about the challenges founders face and ultimately led to the creation of Flowlie.

Flowlie wasn’t conceived as a side project – it was the natural progression of my experience across four venture capital firms, where I analyzed hundreds of startups and witnessed firsthand the inefficiencies in the fundraising process. At the same time, since we were all working full-time jobs at that time, we had to start by working nights and weekends. We launched our first beta while we were all juggling several responsibilities but when the time was right, we decided to go all in. The transition from investor to founder was a deliberate move driven by the clear opportunity to solve a systemic problem in the startup ecosystem but the path to implement it wasn’t obvious from the beginning and required balancing multiple jobs before making it a reality.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.flowlie.com/
• Instagram: a
• Facebook: a
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vladcazacu/
• Twitter: https://x.com/cazvlad?lang=en
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@flowlie
• Other: https://www.thefundraisingdebrief.com/

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