Investor outreach and relationship-building
Warm introductions, forwardable blurbs, investor research, ongoing updates, visibility, pre-raise relationship cultivation, and selecting aligned investors.
32%
Best tweets about Fundraising
50 Best Tweets About Fundraising (2026)
Browse the best tweets about startup fundraising, including seed rounds, investor outreach, pitch decks, valuation, terms, diligence, and founder lessons.
Startup and venture fundraising, investor outreach, pitches, rounds, valuation, terms, diligence, market conditions, and founder experience.
- Creators
- 43
- Updated
Original Xholic analysis
What 50 top Fundraising posts reveal
Fundraising posts emphasize product and customer evidence, a clear founder-led narrative, investor relationships built before a formal round, and process momentum. They also caution that fundraising is not the same as business progress, that high prices can increase future constraints, and that rejection and process demands can be costly for founders.
- Dominant tone
- Positive
- Median score
- 11.9
- Leading format
- Opinion
- Recent posts
- 34%
44% of posts
All-time engagement
36% of posts
Published in 90 days
Conversation map
The themes creators return to
Early-stage market conditions
Changing standards for seed and pre-seed, capital supply, AI-era fundraising, geography, fund behavior, and evolving investor underwriting.
22%
Pitch narrative and founder signal
How clarity of thought, storytelling, conviction, founder-market fit, responsiveness, and personal presence shape investor belief.
22%
Readiness, traction, and fundability
Whether founders have enough product, customer proof, metrics, runway, and market timing to raise; emphasis on building momentum before pitching.
22%
Fundraise process, urgency, and competitive tension
Running concentrated processes, creating momentum and FOMO, securing term sheets, calibrating raise amounts, and knowing when to pause a stalled round.
20%
Venture tradeoffs and alternative company paths
The distinction between fundraising and business progress; VC expectations, board pressure, venture-scale outcomes, bootstrapping, profitability, and M&A choices.
20%
Valuation, deal structure, and dilution
Valuation framing, priced rounds versus SAFEs, escalating caps, round size, ownership, and the consequences of raising at high prices.
12%
Founder resilience and the emotional cost of raising
High-volume rejection, confidence, stress, ghosting, fundraising as a full-time burden, and the interpersonal experience of the process.
10%
Tone and stance
Sentiment Positive leads
Author posture Supportive leads
Performance benchmark
- Median likes
- 44
- Median reposts
- 4
- Median replies
- 7
- Median views
- 4.8K
Posts with media make up 40% of this collection. Their median all-time score is 10.1, compared with 12.5 for text-only posts.
Format mix
- Opinion 36% · score 11.2
- Story 22% · score 13.0
- Announcement 14% · score 12.7
- Tutorial 14% · score 7.29
Consensus and debate
Where creators agree, and where they do not
Shared view
Readiness is framed as more than a deck
Multiple posts argue that product, customer evidence, metrics, a defined customer, and a clear plan matter when deciding whether to raise; decks alone are presented as insufficient.
Shared view
Relationships can be built before a formal round
Posts describe visibility, early relationship-building, warm introductions, and progress updates as ways to build investor familiarity and conviction before or during a raise.
Shared view
Narrative and founder presentation are recurring investor signals
Posts present clear thinking, a credible future trajectory, storytelling, and founder-led conviction as important parts of early-stage investor assessment.
Shared view
Momentum is frequently advocated in fundraising process advice
Several posts recommend concentrated outreach or processes that communicate traction and investor interest, rather than allowing a round to extend indefinitely.
Open debate
Compressed process versus lead-investor fit
Some posts favor tight processes and competitive tension, while another argues that founders should spend meaningful time assessing whether a prospective lead is a long-term mutual fit.
Open debate
Round optimization versus the costs of venture financing
Some posts discuss valuation, SAFEs, and process design as ways to improve fundraising terms or flexibility. Others warn that large rounds and high valuations can bring higher expectations, board pressure, and fewer viable exit paths if revenue does not catch up.
Open debate
Access advantages versus fundraising-optics concerns
One founder describes San Francisco as improving access to customers, investors, and fast fundraising. Another criticizes a broader venture environment in which technical founders may struggle when they lack pitch and fundraising-visibility advantages.
What performs
Patterns behind standout posts
Top-scoring outliers cover founder signals, rejection, and valuation
The three cited posts are among the analytics outliers: the anti-signal post scored 353.54, the rejection narrative scored 209.32, and the valuation-framing post scored 245.61.
List posts had a higher median score than the overall set
LIST posts had a 32.36 median all-time score, compared with an overall median of 11.93. Cited examples include anti-signals, raise-readiness criteria, and fundraising mistakes.
Media posts had a lower median score than text posts
Media appeared in 20 of 50 posts (40%). Its median all-time score was 10.09, below the 12.46 median for text posts.
Statistical standouts
- View standout post 1 Score 353.5 · 29.63× median
- View standout post 2 Score 245.6 · 20.59× median
- View standout post 3 Score 209.3 · 17.55× median
- View standout post 4 Score 140.9 · 11.81× median
- View standout post 5 Score 128.8 · 10.79× median
Creator landscape
Who shapes this conversation
The five most represented creators account for 20% of the selected posts.
-
1. 1752vc
@1752vc
2 posts
-
2. Hang Huang
@hanghuang_
2 posts
-
3. Hustle Fund 🦛🌽💛
@HustleFundVC
2 posts
-
4. Ivan Burazin
@ivanburazin
2 posts
-
5. Rohit Mittal
@rohitdotmittal
2 posts
-
6. Steph from OpenVC
@StephNass
2 posts
1752vc focuses on outreach and avoidable process mistakes
1752vc’s two cited posts provide a momentum-oriented pre-seed outreach example and a list of fundraising mistakes. Analytics list 1752vc as the highest-median-score top voice, at 60.28 across two posts.
Personal accounts illustrate operational and emotional costs
First-person posts describe fundraising competing with launch work, the strain of repeated rejection, and frustration with investor ghosting, complementing the tactical advice in the set.
Posts contrast venture fundraising with other company paths
Several creators argue that investor interest is not market validation and discuss the strategic tradeoffs among raising venture capital, pursuing M&A, or building toward profitability.
Since the previous snapshot
What changed since Aug 12, 2026
- 80% of the selected posts remained.
- The creator count changed by 0.
- The leading sentiment moved from Negative to Positive.
How this analysis was made
Themes, sentiment, stance, and post format are classified per tweet. All counts, shares, medians, creator concentration, freshness, and performance comparisons are then calculated directly from the published snapshot.
Xholic's all-time score compares engagement while accounting for reach, post age, and creator consistency. It is used for relative comparisons within this collection.
This report analyzes the exact 50-post snapshot shown below. AI identifies editorial categories and drafts explanations; all statistics are calculated from the snapshot, and every narrative claim is checked against cited posts before publication.
Best Fundraising tweets
Top Fundraising tweets from 43 creators
Ranked 01–50
- 01
@andruyeung ·
I was featured in the @nytimes this week. They asked me what reasons I've seen VCs pass on founders for. There's an unspoken language in startup land called "anti-signal" ... these are the subtle red flags that make an investor not want to invest. I don't agree with all of them, but these are the ones I've seen after talking with hundreds of VCs: 1. You took part in a pitch competition (why are you on a stage competing for $10,000?) 2. Your deck is too polished (signals you are desperate for capital) 3. You're too available (the more available you are, the less valuable your time looks) 4. You reply too slowly (speed is an edge. Slow responses read as low competency.) 5. You have a bad eye for design (in consumer, taste is everything) 6. Your writing is full of AI tells (outsource your voice, and they wonder what else you've outsourced) 7. You don't know your numbers (TAM, CAC, retention, burn. Self-explanatory.) 8. You're "always fundraising" (always fundraising reads desperate, and never building) 9. You say you have no competitors (reads as naive and under-researched) 10. You're raising too late (two months of runway signals desperation and bad planning) 11. You have low energy (early on, the founder is the product. If you can't bring conviction, why should they?) I don't agree with all of these, but this is what I've seen in the field. Part of being a venture-backed founder is learning to play the fundraising game and knowing when to challenge the assumptions behind it. What did I miss? P.S. the good VCs will know how to look beyond these anti-signals ;)
- 02
@Tocelot ·
fundraising masterclass from @travisk on valuation: "I'm always saying it's at least this and it can go up, but I start low... so it only goes up, so that everybody's pumped, leaning forward" start low, get bid up. anchoring initial price too high is a rookie mistake
Watch video
- 03
@Clara_Gold ·
I realized fundraising was the first time in my life I got rejected at scale. And honestly, as a woman, I was not emotionally trained for it. Before the feminists come for me, let me make my point. I think the first real arena where most people experience power, desire, status, and rejection is dating. And dating trains men brutally. A lot of men learn very early that if they want someone, they have to walk across the room, risk looking stupid, get rejected, survive it, and do it again. They learn that rejection is volume, timing, targeting. It’s a numbers game. A lot of women are trained very differently. Especially if you’re a pretty girl, you don’t usually walk into a bar looking at a guy thinking: “Can I have him?” You only think: “Do I want him?”. You don’t build your identity around shooting your shot 100 times and surviving 99 no’s. You don’t get trained to ask directly, get rejected publicly, and act normal 5 minutes later. You get trained to be “chosen”. To be impressive enough that the opportunity comes to you. And then you start building a company. And the whole paradigm changes. Suddenly, everyone can say no to you. Investors say no. Candidates say no. Customers say no. And when your rejection muscle is weak, your brain does the dumbest thing possible: it makes the “no” mean something about you. That you’re not smart enough. Not compelling enough. I think this is one of the most underrated gender differences in fundraising. Not that men are inherently better at it. But a lot of them have built thicker rejection scar tissue earlier. They know how to hear no and keep moving. They know how to make it less personal. They know how to treat it like volume, timing, targeting, iteration. I didn’t. I’ve raised 3 rounds. On the surface, the story looks great: I raised with Sequoia, OpenAI, Khosla. Woohoo. The real story is less sexy: every round wrecked me. I lost 5kg each time. I probably donated a few years of life expectancy to the cap table. Because every round, I only got 1 term sheet. One. EVERYONE else said no. And when almost everyone says no, your body does not care about the intellectually correct explanation. It only hears: Maybe they’re right. Maybe you’re not that compelling. Maybe you’re not the founder you thought you were. For a long time, I thought confidence meant learning not to take the no personally. I don’t believe that anymore. Maybe some people are built like that. I’m not. 30 years of being trained to be chosen does not turn into resilience because someone in a Patagonia vest says fundraising is a numbers game. So now I think confidence is something less glamorous. Confidence is taking the no very personally. Letting it ruin your day, losing your appetite, spiraling for hours… And still taking the next meeting. Confidence is just being bothered as f*** and not letting it make you smaller. I still don’t fully believe my own BS as I’m writing this, but I guess that’s the point. Can’t wait for the next round to find out.
- 04
- 05
@BigBrainBizness ·
Peter Thiel: "The value is never a premium on the past. It's always a discount to the future." Most founders walk into a fundraising negotiation anchored to the wrong number. They point to the last round, list everything built since then, and argue for a premium on that progress. Investors push back. The whole conversation becomes a fight over the past. Thiel thinks this framing is conceptually completely wrong. Investors aren't buying your history. They're buying your trajectory. And the moment you understand that, your entire approach to pitching valuation changes. "The way I always think one should try to pitch a company or the value of a company is by explaining why it will be worth a lot more in the future. The investors are getting to invest at a point that's a lot cheaper than it will be for the share price a year, two, three years from now." He learned this firsthand at PayPal. In late 1999, PayPal closed a round at $45 million. Three months later, they raised again at a $500 million valuation. A 5x jump in a single quarter. The obvious question: how do you convince anyone to accept that? "The way we presented the round was: this is going to be the last round before the IPO." That single reframe changed everything. Investors stopped looking backward and started looking forward. "It doesn't matter what happened three months ago. You're getting in at a discount to the IPO." The founder who can paint a compelling picture of where the company is going will always negotiate from a stronger position than one defending where it's been.
Watch video
- 06
@1752vc ·
Most founders overcomplicate pre-seed fundraising emails. The ones that actually get replies are usually dead simple: “We recently released the product. Growing 20% month-over-month. Half the round is already committed. We have more investor conversations lined up next week and a few openings left — interested?” Short. Specific. Easy to respond to. Investors see hundreds of inbound emails every week. If you can’t establish momentum and credibility in the first few lines, you’ve probably already lost them.
- 07
@ItzSuds ·
Founders need to call their shot or get out of the Arena I thought being a founder & raising venture dollars was my pre-destined birthright. I didn’t realize that it was actually a line of credit against my reputation. A few weeks ago I was on call with a long time friend who was going back out to raise for a new co. He had a thesis on an interesting product he wanted to build, but he had no plan. I asked him some basic questions - who’s going to use this, how much would they pay for it, who are you going to hire to build and sell this? “A lot, …hedgefunds?, I don’t know.” I explained to him that as a credentialed second time founder, he will get a chunky seed round, but that’s the last round of funding he’ll ever raise it he raises on his potential instead of his plan. Outside of institutions like YC, we are in a time where you can’t just start a company to follow your curiosity and “figure it out”, that’s reserved for the 18-22 year olds from Stanford. No, as a founder in 2026, you must call your shot. You need to know what you’re going to build, who you’re going to sell to, who you’re going to hire to build/sell it, and the exact roadmap you’re going to execute against to reach $1b ARR in 7-12 years. A lot of founders who are in network and know they can raise take advantage of it, but they’re don’t realize that they’re 12-18 months away from being unfundable & dying when they run out of cash. Don’t raise on potential. Don’t take a line of credit against reputation. Call your shot and swing hard for a homerun, or get out of the arena until you know what you’re playing for.
- 08
@StartupArchive_ ·
Sequoia’s Doug Leone explains what made Drew Houston’s pitch for Dropbox great Dropbox raised a $1.2 million seed round at a $5 million valuation from Sequoia in 2007. Eleven years later, the company went public at a valuation of $9 billion. In hindsight it’s a home run, but in 2007 Dropbox was far from a sure thing. Online storage was a commodity with lots of competition. But Drew Houston’s clear thinking stood out and helped secure the venture funding from Sequoia. Doug Leone recounts: “Drew Houston was going to launch a company in a crowded market, yet he could clearly articulate why none of the existing products were going to make it. Crystal clear thinking is one of the things we look for—not a fancy slide pitch.” Don Valentine and Ben Horowitz also emphasize the importance of clear thinking and the ability to tell a great story if you’re looking to raise venture capital. Ben argues: “Storytelling is the most underrated skill… Companies that don’t have a clearly articulated story don’t have a clear and well thought-out strategy. The company story is the company strategy.” So if you’re raising money, make sure you have a good story that you can clearly articulate. Why does the world need your company? Video source: @StanfordOnline (2014)
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- 09
@tkexpress11 ·
the #1 mistake that founders make in a fundraise process is asking for too much $ out of the gate ALWAYS start with a lower number than you're targeting, work towards collecting the first term sheet, and then build up through competitive tension to your desired amount asking for too much and then circling back to investors who've passed with a lower ask is a death sentence. You're signaling that you don't have interest in the round some founders mistakenly think that the raise amount should be driven by your budget NO - your raise amount is driven by market forces: perceived strength of team, traction/execution to date and how good you are at fundraising
- 10
@romanbuildsaas ·
"Being in San Francisco doesn't matter. You can build a company from anywhere." You're right. Today you can build from Paris, Stockholm, Lisbon, even a remote village in Transylvania. But San Francisco helps. In ways you won't understand until you're here. Last week someone signed up on our website. Big account. I checked his location: San Francisco. I reached out. Two hours later, I was in his office. Two days later, he added 300 accounts to our SaaS. 300 x $99. That's $29,700 in MRR. From one meeting. And he could add 300 more in the coming months. Everything is expensive here, so business has to move fast. But it's not just about customers. I'm European. I have a French accent. And I feel the difference the moment I say I'm based in San Francisco. People look at you differently. To US customers, you're instantly more credible. Walk into any coffee shop here. Every single person is a future customer, an investor, a future hire. Or the intro you've been waiting for. Then there's fundraising. We're raising right now. We almost closed a $4M round in 5 days. In Europe? Almost impossible at that speed. Personally, I'd rather live somewhere calmer. Vilnius. Lisbon. But for work? If you're building an ambitious tech company and you're not in San Francisco, you're starting with points behind your competitors. Whether you like it or not.
- 11
@sohan_zhang ·
one of the most frustrating experiences about the fundraising process is how decent respect gets thrown out the window one VC fund scheduled 3 meetings with myself and the team over 3 weeks, the last of which included an in person meetup that I took the courtesy of meeting them in the hotel they were staying at in SF. after a conversation, they mentioned that they would get back to me at the beginning of next week. cue 5 days later and i ask for an update. ghosted. i sent follow-up updates, as requested, over the span of a week, and still no response. i completely understand rejection, but it's very frustrating to take multiple meetings over weeks and get completely no response. future YCombinator founders, check the Bookface for investor reviews.
- 12
@khushkhushkhush ·
lot of fundraising advice on 'running a really tight process' and creating a ton of fomo to get a deal done. i'll take the counter here. the founders i know that are happiest with their lead investors spent significant time with the partner on their deal to see if it was a mutual fit. not everything is a game. you are entering into a 10 year partnership with someone, it would likely behoove you to get to know them really well before giving them a massive chunk of your company. also, some investors do really well in the first few meetings and then become totally different people after several hours spent together
- 13
- 14
@adriannalakatos ·
if a vc fell asleep on your call this week, that’s on them. but here’s how to make sure the next 50 meetings you take are with people who will actually fund you: don’t start til you’re ready. i review hundreds of founder applications a month, and most start fundraising too soon. if you’re using investor calls to figure out what you’re building, you’ll burn 4 weeks and come out more confused than you started. here’s the checklist i’d use to know if you’re actually ready to raise. you’re ready when: → you and your cofounder have shipped together 3+ months → something real exists. ugly demo off localhost counts → proof people want it. 5+ weekly users, LOIs, or a paying pilot → you can name your customer and their exact role in your sleep → one core metric moves weekly (and you know why) → you know your unit economics (CAC, payback, gross margin) → one channel works at small scale → your “why now” is sharp (tech shift, regulation, buyer urgency) → your materials are tight (deck, demo, metrics, milestones) → you have a process ready: target list, warm paths, 4-week calendar you’re not ready when: → you have a deck and nothing else → you’re raising to hire the technical cofounder you don’t have → your customer is “anyone with X problem” → you can’t explain why people churn → pricing is a guess → “we’ll go viral on x” is your channel plan → “AI” is your why now → the core is outsourced → no milestone plan tied to next round unlocks → you need the money to start learning 7+ from the ready list? run a tight 4-week process. don’t drag it out. fewer than 7? spend 30 days flipping 3 items from the “not ready” list first. don’t spend 6 months chasing money you could’ve raised in 6 weeks.
- 15
@tbpn ·
When @travisk was fundraising Uber's round that valued it at $70B, he ran four rooms simultaneously out of their New York office for an entire week, each booked in 90-minute slots across 12-hour days: "This is how we'd fundraise: we had four rooms in our New York office booked for a week with an hour-and-a-half slot on each. So for 12 hours in a day, four rooms going in parallel." "I'm in the $250M-and-over club, that's one room. Then there are these other rooms, down to the fourth room, which is like $25M checks. There's a guy who works for a guy, who works for a guy, who works for me who's doing that room." "But we're oversubscribed. So we started putting multiple investors in the same room. We were like, 'We're just out of slots dude. Let's go.'" "The storytelling we did, anybody on my team could tell that story and make it happen. And that was a big part. It was the story... then there is making it scalable so that there are 10 different people in a company that can pitch it at any given time. And that’s when you take it all the way."
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- 16
- 17
@arian_ghashghai ·
i've seen a few rounds now where the founders reject a priced round (i.e. every new investor pays the same entry price) to raise on SAFEs with rapidly ascending valuation caps. they end up securing more capital with less (future) dilution than if they had taken the priced round: > early priced rounds being put on the back burner. more net dilution (sometimes) + more admin headache (sucks for VC markups!) > fundraising is a live auction atm > being an auction, priced round term sheets box in how much a company can raise (and at what cost), limiting how much a company can leverage its "hotness" factor to raise cheap capital feels like something needs to be fixed here: > priced rounds are absurdly archaic (administratively) and much too slow/painful vs SAFEs (I'm always bemused it takes a couple of months to go from signed TS to closed round i.e. wired capital). As a pre-seed investor, I'm also not unhappy about founders raising their seed rounds on SAFEs as it kicks the can down the road on my dilution (i.e. potentially better for DPI) = very little incentive to do priced rounds from both sides > schizophrenic VC behavior that disregards the entry price (i.e. paying 2x vs what the VC before me paid yesterday) under the pretense that "wHaT IF its THe nexT FaCeBoOK" is financially irresponsible and unsustainable as fudiciaries of LP capital
- 18
@rohitdotmittal ·
talked to a founder recently $3.5M ARR, growing 50% year over year, 90% gross margins, customers who've been around for 4+ years. they raised $18M total. burning about $300K a month. roughly 12 months of runway and they were doing what a lot of founders in this position do parallel tracking exploring a series B on one side, having quiet M&A conversations on the other. keeping all doors open. hedging bets. it's actually one of the most expensive mistakes you can make in this process here's what happens when you try to do both on the fundraising side, investors are pattern matching constantly. they want a founder who is irrationally committed to building something massive. the moment they sense you're also talking to acquirers, the conviction signal breaks. they don't say it out loud. they just get slower. more diligence. more questions. less urgency on the acquisition side, buyers are doing the same thing. if they find out you're raising a round, and they will ask deals need internal champions to push them through. a lukewarm founder kills that energy fast so both processes quietly degrade. you're putting real time and emotional energy into two things and getting half results from each the deeper problem is that the two paths require completely different company decisions as Ben Horowitz says "your story is your strategy" - you have to figure out the right story, and that'll become your strategy if you're optimizing for fundraising, you want to show aggressive growth at almost any cost. burn more, move faster, expand headcount, grow the top line if you're optimizing for acquisition, you want to show a cleaner financial profile. lower burn, higher margins, revenue that looks predictable to a financial or strategic buyer. often that means slowing down in ways that look bad on a fundraising pitch you literally cannot optimize for both at the same time. the decisions conflict so before any tactical work on the acquisition - before you make the list, get the intros, hire the banker, whatever, you have to answer the question most founders skip do you actually want to sell this company not "would you sell for the right price." everyone would. but do you want to sell. is this the path you're choosing because if the answer is yes, the whole posture of the company needs to change. runway management changes. hiring decisions change. which conversations you prioritize changes. you're now building a story for a specific type of buyer, not for a VC partner deck and if the answer is no - if you still believe this can be something big, then commit to that. stop taking the M&A meetings that go nowhere. that will distract your team. raise the round or find a way to grow into profitability and own the path optionality = no progress
- 19
@tibo_maker ·
taking VC money is such a headache nobody tells you what actually happens after you take VC money. you stop building a company and start building a story for the next round projections have to be unrealistic, growth has to be aggressive "good business" stops being enough - it has to be venture-scale or you're failing by definition first-time founders chase funding because that's what X, TechCrunch, and every startup podcast celebrates. the raise IS the headline - the proof you made it they don't realize they just signed up for a completely different game I raised hundreds of thousands for my first two startups. both failed I'm now bootstrapping 5 SaaS products, trying to get each to $100K MRR. no board pressure, no forced narratives, 100% freedom - just building things that work for me VC money isn't bad. it's just a different game with different rules, and most founders just don't read them before signing the game you pick matters the most are you building a company or building a fundraising story?
- 20
@1752vc ·
8 ways founders destroy their fundraising journey: 1. Raising in August or December 2. Running out of runway mid-raise 3. Cold emailing tier-1 VCs with no warm intro 4. Demanding an NDA before the basics 5. Pitching funds that don’t touch your stage 6. Pitching funds that don’t invest in your industry 7. Attaching a 30+ slide deck 8. Following up daily
- 21
@gdibner ·
Outstanding post by Ashley Smith at Vermillion Cliffs: "A $5M check into a $40M post-money valuation for a company that is eight weeks old, with pilots that haven’t had time to churn or stick, is a different financial instrument than what we used to call a seed round. The label is the same. The risk profile is completely different. For the big funds writing scout style checks into 10-20 party rounds each cycle, totally makes sense. For YC’s LPs that get exposure to the 2-3 outliers per cycle, totally makes sense. For funds like mine? It’s getting harder to manage that risk. The founders this batch were exceptional. The why behind the companies were exceptional. It is still a hard check to write if you’re a small early stage fund." https://t.co/UgOfE1XYMC
- 22
@ivanburazin ·
Fundraising cliché: "Every no brings you closer to a yes." Sounds like BS when you're getting rejected. Even the conversations that ended in a pass when we were raising our first round helped us in one way or another. - refine the pitch - identify weak points in our story - understand what resonated and what didn't By pitch 50, I could predict which questions would come up and had crisp answers ready. By pitch 100, I knew within 10 minutes whether someone was going to invest, based on their body language and follow up questions. Sent 432 cold emails, 120+ pitches, and hit the valley of death at less than 50% of our target. But we kept going. Refined, adjusted, and pushed through until the round was oversubscribed.
- 23
@alexabelonix ·
Fundraising feels very different now. Maybe 10 years ago you could raise serious money on an idea. Maybe 5 years ago a decent MVP was enough. Now? A lot of investors want the MVP, the product, the users, the pilots, the traction, and preferably proof that people are already willing to pay. I learned this the hard way. We had an idea. We had a deck. We had a no-code MVP. We had potential pilots. But when you sit in front of an investor and they say: “Founders come to us with the same valuation, but they already have a product and 30 pilots.” You understand very quickly: the market doesn’t reward potential the way founders hope it will. Of course, there are exceptions. If you’re in San Francisco. If you have a very strong founding team. If you’ve already built and exited something. If it’s friends, family, angels, or grants. But for most early-stage founders, the lesson is simple: traction changes the conversation. So right now I’m less obsessed with “how do I raise?” and more obsessed with: how do I prove this deserves to exist?
- 24
@HarryStebbings ·
Early-stage investing is very simple. 1. Generational defining founders (top 1%). 2. Directionally correct markets, fast-growing markets. 3. Investment has to be able to return the fund multiple times. So why did @P_Bonnet just rip a $15M check from 20VC into @UsePrelude. 1. Matias Berny and @Zibra_ are exceptional. The best founders have a sense that winning is inevitable. I know that whatever candidate or customer, I put them in front of, they will close. 2. We are about to see an explosion in the amount of technology created. Way more apps. Explosion of new security threats. Twilio (their competitor) has NPS of a South American bank. 😂 Prelude has signed one of the largest social networks and e-commerce players and does many millions in ARR. (I am not allowed to say, despite every ounce of me being to keen to!!) 3. Credit to my partner Paul, he charmed Matias well before a round could come to fruition. Lesson: If you wait for a "raise" you will always lose. The best rounds are done when there is no round. You can always get a deal done. P.S. I am so bored and tired of all the BS VC fundraising announcement posts and so hope this was a little more natural with less of the comms BS.
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@hanghuang_ ·
If I were a solo founder, doing Launch Week 2 and fundraising simultaneously would have been impossible. It was absolute chaos. On one side, we were shipping product updates, giveaways, a hackathon, and everything else to make LW2 incredible. On the other side, I was spending most of my time preparing for YC Demo Day and talking to investors. 10-20 meetings every day. It made me appreciate my cofounder (@tonychang430) a lot more. When launching, there are hundreds of things that could go wrong: - Last-minute bugs. - Poor scheduling. - User complaints The list goes on. If I had to focus on all of that while fundraising, I honestly think things would have fallen apart. But Tony held it together. He took over and delivered awesome results for @InsForge Launch Week 2 while I focused on raising the seed round. The best founder advice often sounds very abstract: find a great cofounder. I didn't really understand what "great" meant until that week. A great cofounder is someone you can trust most to move the company forward when you can't possibly do everything yourself. They're someone who you know will always deliver exceptional results, even amongst the chaos. Thank you @tonychang430 for being a GREAT cofounder! 🤝
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@StephNass ·
Be careful of the bait-and-switch fundraising scam. Basically, an "investor" contacts you, you get on a call with them, and at some point, during the call, they start to pitch YOU their fundraising services. You got it - they're not investors, they're fundraising advisors. And you're in a sales call you never asked for. I hate this hypocritical, time-wasting practice with a passion. And you should, too.
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@JamesonCamp ·
Had coffee with a friend today who's raised venture for three different companies We talked a lot about how some founders find it impossible to raise early on Pre-PMF fundraising has almost nothing to do with your business The TAM slide is made up. The projections are vibes. The spreadsheet is fiction Everyone knows it What's actually being evaluated is one thing: do I believe this person will figure it out no matter what happens? Can you hold a room and make someone irrationally believe in you. That's the whole game. This is why incredible operators who build real businesses sometimes can't raise a dollar. And mediocre operators who can tell a story raise $10M before they have a product. Fundraising is a performance skill. Building is an execution skill. When you find both in the same person it's rare and kind of magical. The KPI is literally vibes.
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@E_Bruxxx ·
Been noticing more and more early-stage (Pre-Seed–Series A) fundraising being led by finance folks. Quite frankly, I don't love it. At this stage, the founder should be raising capital. Not the CFO, outsourced finance consultant, or advisor. Investors aren't underwriting financial performance at Pre-Seed and Seed because, frankly, there isn't much to underwrite lol. They're underwriting vision, conviction, judgment, and the founder's ability to recruit people into a future that doesn't exist. A two-year-old startup doesn't have years of operating history to lean on. The founder is the asset. When I hear, "Our CFO is leading the fundraising process," it's a red flag. By Series B, it becomes much more reasonable—even expected—to have a Head of Finance or CFO deeply involved. Series A? Somewhat. But at Pre-Seed and Seed, the founder should own the narrative. If they can't sell the vision to investors, it's hard to believe they'll sell it to customers, recruits, future executives, or the world.
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@Hadley ·
There's a supply and demand conflict brewing at the earliest stage of venture, one that's only going to be exacerbated over the next few years. Supply of capital is shrinking. Seed round count is already falling as the VC market consolidates, and as boutique firms come up on their next fund, many are struggling to raise. That thins out the boutique middle, the firms that have traditionally led seed. Demand is moving the opposite way. More founders are entering, and AI made the product cheap to build. But it didn't make customers cheap to win, or revenue easy to earn in an increasingly competitive market. So companies still need capital, just for a different stretch of the journey. Put those together and the early stage could split in two. On one side, $10M seeds led by multi-stage funds chasing hyper-growth and decacorn outcomes. On the other, smaller niche bets taking less money at lower valuations from incubators and micro funds. Two markets, two playbooks.
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@ivanburazin ·
Whenever we're raising, I regularly check in with investors (virtually/IRL) who have taken a meeting but haven't yet committed. I share updates/progress on: - features we launched that others didn't have - overall fundraising momentum - new customer traction - product milestones - team additions This keeps us top of mind. When they are finally ready to write a check, we are the obvious choice. Many investors who initially passed came back weeks later after seeing consistent progress and asked, "is there still room in the round?" Staying in the conversation with gradual progress updates has a massive upside vs. just pitching once and forgetting.
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@Jasielinvests ·
The anatomy of a forwardable blurb: a reference for fundraising founders A forwardable blurb is a short, pre-written note your supporters can send directly to investors on your behalf. Its job is not to close a check. Its job is to get a follow-up call. Here is how to structure one: Line 1: The referrer instruction. Open with a single sentence acknowledging the referrer and making clear you have done the work for them. Reduce their cognitive load to zero. Lines 2–3: The plain-English business description. Describe what you do as if explaining to a curious, intelligent person who knows nothing about your market. Avoid jargon. Avoid acronyms. If it requires a glossary, rewrite it. The traction block with three bullets, no more. Choose your three most credible, time-stamped signals: revenue, signed contracts, pilots with a clear commercial pathway, or a regulatory development. More than three dilutes the impact of each. Founder-market fit: two to three sentences. Logos of past employers say almost nothing. Instead, answer: has this team lived the problem? Spoken to hundreds of customers before building? Spent years in the industry? The answer to at least one of those should be yes, and it should be stated plainly. The close: deck link and direct contact. End with both. A trackable deck link lets you see which investors are engaging and for how long. A direct email removes any ambiguity about the next step. The forwardable blurb is the fundraising equivalent of a warm handshake that happens without you in the room. Build it once, update it as your traction grows, and make it easy for people to champion you.
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@rohitdotmittal ·
It feels like there will be lots of AI startup exits in the next few years, with founders not making any money. The $10M or $100M rounds and high valuations lead to more problems if revenue doesn't catch up. A big round solves one problem and creates five new ones: - higher expectations - fewer realistic exit paths - more pressure to force venture outcomes - more board power - more ways for founders to work for years and still not get paid The startup world celebrates fundraising as if it were value creation. A lot of the time, it is just deferred pain. The wrong round can look like success for 18 months and feel like failure for 5 years.
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@rheejust ·
After raising a $20M Series A in 11 days, some founders have reached out asking, “Justin, how did you raise so quickly?” The truth is, we weren't even looking to raise. About a year and a half ago, David from FirstMark reached out. I'm someone who generally hates talking to investors, so my instinct was to ignore it. But David kept showing up. Instead of sending generic "let's get coffee" messages, he invited me to in-person events where I could meet people doing interesting work. Through FirstMark's programming, I got to chat with the CTO of Duolingo, the founder of DataDog, and countless others. It was mindblowing how much David pushed us forward. And at that point, I wasn't even in FirstMark’s portfolio yet. They were just going out on a limb to build trust. Fast forward to last fall, and we were hiring a lot against revenue growth. We didn't need the money. But the relationship with FirstMark had gotten so strong that when David leaned in, we decided to run a lightweight process. The timeline: 1. Told David we'd consider raising 2. Pitched the partnership a few days later 3. Signed the term sheet within 10 days What made it fast wasn't some secret fundraising hack; it was a year of relationship-building that happened before we ever decided to raise. Whenever another investor came with a term sheet, FirstMark just kept matching or beating. They’d already done the work to understand our business, developed conviction, and were leaning in hard. So, it is possible to raise a Series A in 11 days.. ...if you've spent a long time building relationships with people who you know, believe, and trust. Speed in fundraising isn't about cramming the process or doing crazy FOMO. It's about doing the real work slowly so the last part's fast.
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@Selinaliyy ·
.@ycombinator Demo Day is coming up, and let’s be real… fundraising is a full. time. job. to make life a little easier for my fellow batchmates, I built a @bubblelab_ai workflow that does all the investor research automatically. Every morning Pearl drops a briefing into Slack with my daily meetings: • the fund’s info • average check size and investment focus • summary of our previous email threads reminding me of useful tidbits (like reminding me the investor was also competitive golfer ⛳️) Now I walk into every meeting already knowing who I’m talking to, and no more pre-call frantic LinkedIn scrolling!! thank you @fogmb for requesting this super timely usecase!!
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@ednevsky ·
If you’re building a venture startup, you would want to save/bookmark this post. This is the most up-to-date (released this month) cheat sheet of yearly revenues (think ARR/run rate) by percentile at different fundraising rounds. Super helpful for when you’re thinking about how you compare vs the rest of the market. P.S. Data by @SiliconVlyBank!
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@hanghuang_ ·
Last week at the Seattle AI Startup Showcase, I noticed most aspiring founders are climbing up the wrong tree. Too many people are thinking about the pitch deck before they’ve built something people actually want. I was there speaking about how to become a founder and how to start a company. A lot of the questions were about fundraising, what investors want to see, and how to tell the story better. Sure that stuff matters… eventually. But I think a lot of people are starting in the wrong place. A pitch deck can help you explain momentum. But it will never create momentum. If you can’t ship, improving your slides isn’t going to save you. From my experience, the best founders are usually not the ones with the most perfect pitch deck. They are the ones in the trenches, actually building product, talking to users, and learning fast as they go. Especially now, there are fewer excuses than ever. It has never been easier to build and test something quickly. That means you can find the truth much faster. So if you want to start a company, spend less time polishing the story and more time building something people genuinely want. Talk to users. Ship. Learn. Post. Repeat. Trust me: if you do this, investors will naturally come to you.
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@ttunguz ·
Why is the sub-$5 million seed round shrinking? A decade ago, these smaller rounds formed the backbone of startup financing, comprising over 70% of all seed deals. Today, PitchBook data reveals that figure has plummeted to less than half. The numbers tell a stark story. Sub-$5M deals declined from 62.5% in 2015 to 37.5% in 2024. This 29.5 percentage point drop fundamentally reshaped how startups raise their first institutional capital. Three forces drove this transformation. We can decompose the decline to understand what reduced the small seed round & why it matters for founders today.
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@MakadiaHarsh ·
I've seen a founder turn down $80k in funding to keep building alone. I've seen another take $500k and shut down in 6 months. Guess which one is still running? The one who knew his numbers. Not his pitch deck. Not his valuation. His cost per lead. His churn rate. His runway in weeks - not months. Fundraising doesn't fix broken math. It just delays it.
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@HustleFundVC ·
Brian Ma has been fundraising every 12 months for 20 years. And his biggest takeaway is that there's no universal playbook. Every raise is different. Different investors, different market conditions, different stages, different versions of you as a founder. What worked last time might not work this time. 20 years of fundraising and he's still learning something new each time. That's the real playbook.
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@ItsWillHenry ·
If you can’t close your round in 3 weeks, just stop fundraising. Because after a certain point, you’re not raising capital anymore. - “Love what you’re building.” - “Super interesting space.” - “Keep us updated.” - “We’d love to watch this evolve.” Brother, they are watching you die in real time. The best rounds have momentum. Investors move when other investors are moving. Bad rounds slowly turn founders into people who spend more time updating investors than talking to customers. And the longer it drags, the weirder everyone gets. And if after 3 weeks nobody’s leaning in hard, that’s usually the market telling you one of three things: - the story isn’t sharp enough - the metrics aren’t strong enough - or the timing is wrong Scheduling 47 more intro calls ain’t fixing this. Go back and find a better traction moment while cultivating your network. Sometimes the highest leverage move is knowing when to stop pitching and start executing again.
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@StephNass ·
👶 Amateur founders raise when they need cash 👨🏼💼 Pro founders raise when they are fundable Yeah... Fundability is a dead angle for many founders. You don't get to decide when you raise, not really. There are moments you can raise, and moments you cannot. You can raise when: - You have track record - You have traction - The market is hot You cannot raise when: - You don't have at least 1 of those 3 items Fundraising isn't a lottery ticket. Sure, you should optimize with a great deck, a solid process, some intros... But it won't be enough. You need the fundamentals. Pro founders understand that.
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@EnisHulli ·
I never saw a deck from half of our portfolio. Two of them are now unicorns. The worst time to fundraise is when you’re actually fundraising. The strongest founders raise when they don’t need to. They build relationships long before there’s a pitch. When it’s time, they compress everything into a tight window, create urgency, and stay in control. This is how deal heat is created. Not a 3 month process. A 10 day sprint. Partner meetings → term sheets. Especially in AI and gaming. In fast moving markets, you don’t wait for perfect conditions. Great founders create their own timing. 70% of our portfolio raises in the past two years happened without a formal fundraising process. When they did raise, it wasn’t a process. It was a moment.
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@thisdudelikesAI ·
Soon fundraising will be seen as lazy. 97% of startups won’t be able to justify capital as the #1 constraint. For most startups it will mean you don’t want to work hard, don’t know your market or how to sell. VC will be more about access and compute. They won’t bankroll a runway for founders. They will help them build their own.
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@HustleFundVC ·
The best fundraising tactic most founders skip: practice. Not once or twice. Get 20 founder friends in a room before you ever talk to an investor. Pitch them. Get their feedback. Do it again. Brian Ma's rule: aggregate all the feedback before you change anything. Don't tweak your pitch after every single conversation. Look for patterns across all the feedback, then adjust. It sounds basic. But most founders walk into investor meetings underprepared because they didn't put in the reps. Treat your pitch like a product. Test it before you ship it.
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@seobrien ·
Startup founders, something is happening that we’re not taking seriously enough yet: VCs are now using AI for sourcing, screening, and due diligence. Your pitch will likely be filtered by a machine. The warm intro that used to get your deck to the top of a pile now has to survive algorithmic triage. Your positioning, your team, your go to market plan, and your traction; all of it gets parsed before a human applies judgment. The relationship-driven fundraising game that founders have relied on for thirty years is being restructured around whether your company is legible to a model. I want to be careful not to overstate the impending implication; human relationships still close rounds, and a strong team and developed market (not referrals) still opens doors. But the floor is shifting and if your messaging is vague, your category is unclear, or your traction is thin (which I can almost guarantee you having seen thousands of pitch decks, it is), you used to be able to compensate with a compelling presence. That compensation is getting harder to apply. The founders who understand this will treat positioning as infrastructure, not marketing or messaging: develop it. The ones who don't will keep wondering why they can't get meetings.
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@sugandhanisa ·
I've been meeting incredible founders at events in London and it's struck me how there is a VAST divide in VC dollars going into picks and shovels agentic startups versus technical builders with world-changing missions struggling to raise money because they just don't know how to create a pitch deck, or how to stand out in a room full of founder pitches, or how to not queue up at all and get cleverer with fundraising. You could say it's part of the game, but PhDs and designers and engineers solving real healthcare problems in novel ways need better than "you just need to learn fundraising/network more". Something's not right about how VC fundraising works versus which startups actually can do something big with the capital and mentorship. You'd think accelerators/incubators would be solving it but many of them seem to be making it worse by creating crowded rooms that serve them more than they serve founders. Every time I meet a passionate founder (I love people whose passion is oozing out of them even at the risk of sounding crazy) I feel a tinge of pain about how the world works. My own position is that funds need to start specialising in specific problem areas and actually have technical theses if they want to focus on catching quality startups at the earliest stages, before even the startup knows they've got something special going on. With new VCs coming every day, the pool of generic capital that chases "hot deals" and "hot founders" (where hotness is a function of the founder's ability to play the optics game) is overflowing. I suspect this a good opportunity for new kinds of VCs to come about. Technical VCs with specific interests and opinionated theses not copied from elsewhere.
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@thesakshishukla ·
Chatted with a founder who raised $3M within weeks. Here's her advice for anyone fundraising: "Have utmost clarity on the type of investor you want to partner with." They were clear that they don't want to spray and pray. Instead, she focused only on the investors who would understand her pace, her model, and her ambition. That clarity saved the team time, energy, and countless conversations that would’ve led nowhere (and drained them). She and her co-founders spent months researching investors - how they think, what they back, what they expect, and how they work with founders post-cheque. And when they finally started fundraising, it worked. Everything moved faster because the alignment was already there. Interesting to note that in fundraising tables are turning. Founders will filter investors as hard as investors filter founders.
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