It can be tempting for founders when they’re thinking about seed funding to go out there and recruit loads of advisors, on the assumption that it looks good investors.
Thing is, it doesn’t. Investors know that if there’s two founders and ten advisors and no traction, they can just intuit that actually those advisors aren’t really doing much, because there simply isn’t enough work to do.
Like if you have a marketing advisor, and there’s no money yet to actually spend on marketing, what is that advisor going to do? At best they are being purely strategic. (At worst the company has agreed to give the advisor a ton of equity that doesn’t align with the effort that they’re putting in.)
Advisors make more sense with targeted problem solving – e.g. you might need specific advice in selling into a very tight niche, or you might have being doing some import/export shenanigans and need specific guidance operationally.
What doesn’t do anything is on the slide where you have “team” – investors just look at that and know who the key team are, and all the other little circle pictures and blurbs of everyone else just kind of fades out.
Keep the team tight.