Fundraising process and momentum
Fundraising process execution: outreach, warm introductions, targeting, meeting management, follow-ups, momentum, urgency, and competitive tension.
50%
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
- 42
- Updated
Original Xholic analysis
What 50 top Fundraising posts reveal
The supplied posts frequently stress fundability, visible momentum and a clear founder-led narrative. They also present competing views on how tightly and quickly to run a raise, how much to raise, and the relative weight of traction, team and persuasion. The highest-scoring posts include application-readiness guidance, valuation advice and a founder’s account of rejection. [2049215699516838319, 2080356371393130633, 2049946550915506351, 2040444391870079485]
- Dominant tone
- Positive
- Median score
- 11.2
- Leading format
- Other
- Recent posts
- 40%
34% of posts
All-time engagement
100% of posts
Published in 90 days
Conversation map
The themes creators return to
Fundraising readiness and fundability
How founders prepare to raise: product, traction, customer proof, team readiness, metrics, milestones, and timing around fundability.
24%
Pitch and narrative
Pitch positioning and narrative: founder-market fit, clear strategy, storytelling, valuation framing, and communicating future upside.
22%
Venture market dynamics
Venture-market conditions and capital allocation: concentrated rounds, AI capital dynamics, changing seed economics, investor behavior, and geographic advantages.
20%
Round terms and valuation
Valuation, round structure, and deal mechanics: pricing, SAFE caps, priced rounds, dilution, check sizes, term sheets, and closing workflows.
16%
Capital strategy and tradeoffs
Capital strategy and fundraising tradeoffs: deciding whether to raise, how much to raise, venture versus M&A, burn and runway implications, and consequences of overfunding.
10%
Investor relationships and fit
Founder-investor relationships: building conviction before a round, selecting aligned partners, evaluating mutual fit, and maintaining investor relationships.
10%
Founder fundraising experience
Founder psychology and operating demands of fundraising: rejection, resilience, founder-led selling, cofounder support, and fundraising as a distraction or obligation.
6%
Tone and stance
Sentiment Positive leads
Author posture Supportive leads
Performance benchmark
- Median likes
- 40
- Median reposts
- 3
- Median replies
- 7
- Median views
- 3.7K
Posts with media make up 36% of this collection. Their median all-time score is 8.64, compared with 11.2 for text-only posts.
Format mix
- Other 100% · score 11.2
Consensus and debate
Where creators agree, and where they do not
Shared view
Fundability before fundraising
A recurring view is that founders should raise when they are fundable: posts point to team quality, a working product, evidence of demand or traction, clear customer understanding, and preparation for a fundraising process.
Shared view
Make momentum legible
Process-focused posts emphasize communicating specific momentum, prioritizing investors who advance the process, and sharing meaningful progress updates with investors who have already engaged.
Shared view
Narrative communicates strategy
Several posts frame the pitch as a forward-looking explanation of why the company can win. They emphasize clear thinking, a clearly articulated story, and founder-led communication of vision at early stages.
Open debate
Raise-size prescriptions are contested
Two posts recommend beginning with a lower valuation expectation or raise amount to build competitive tension. Another rejects “don’t raise too much” as a universal rule, arguing that appropriate capital needs vary by company and circumstance.
Open debate
Process urgency versus investor fit
Some posts advise founders to focus on investors who move urgently and to reconsider a stalled process. A counterpoint argues that choosing a lead investor warrants significant time because the relationship can last many years.
Open debate
Proof and founder persuasion
One view prioritizes shipping, user conversations and momentum over deck polish. Another argues that pre-PMF fundraising mainly evaluates whether investors believe in the founder. Lai’s application advice explicitly weighs team quality alongside founder-market fit and product validation.
What performs
Patterns behind standout posts
Outliers span several practical fundraising subjects
The five all-time-score outliers address application readiness, valuation framing, fundraising rejection, valuation narrative, and outreach. The highest is tweet 2049215699516838319 at 365.01, compared with a dataset median all-time score of 11.2.
Media posts had a lower median score
All 50 posts are classified in the OTHER format category. Media appears in 18 posts (36%). The media median all-time score is 8.64, compared with a text median all-time score of 11.2.
Broad creator participation with a small leading cohort
The dataset includes 42 creators. The top five creators account for 20% of placements; listed top voices include 1752vc, Gabriel Jarrosson and Tocelot.
Statistical standouts
- View standout post 1 Score 365.0 · 32.59× median
- View standout post 2 Score 255.2 · 22.79× median
- View standout post 3 Score 232.3 · 20.74× median
- View standout post 4 Score 128.8 · 11.5× median
- View standout post 5 Score 93.6 · 8.36× 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. Gabriel Jarrosson
@GJarrosson
2 posts
-
3. Hang Huang
@hanghuang_
2 posts
-
4. Hustle Fund 🦛🌽💛
@HustleFundVC
2 posts
-
5. Ivan Burazin
@ivanburazin
2 posts
-
6. Rohit Mittal
@rohitdotmittal
2 posts
Tocelot emphasizes team, validation and pricing dynamics
Jon Lai/Tocelot’s two cited posts emphasize team quality, founder-market fit and product validation in applications, alongside an approach of setting a lower initial valuation expectation and allowing investor demand to increase it.
1752vc focuses on concise outreach and process discipline
1752vc advocates concise outreach that communicates product release, growth and round momentum. Its other post lists avoidable process errors, including mistimed fundraising, poor investor-stage or sector targeting, long decks and daily follow-ups.
Rohit Mittal highlights capital-strategy tradeoffs
Rohit Mittal’s posts argue that capital strategy affects company strategy. They caution that simultaneously pursuing M&A and a venture round can send conflicting signals, and that large rounds or valuations can increase expectations and narrow potential exit paths.
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 42 creators
Ranked 01–50
- 01
@Tocelot ·
a few tips for @speedrun applicants: 1) brag about your team. what's the most impressive thing you've done? we look for a history of excellence - professional, academic, personal achievements, side hustles, weekend projects etc 2) founder market fit. what's your earned insight into your problem space? what gives you an unfair advantage? why will your team win vs the competition / frontier labs? 3) product validation. what have you already built? there are so many ways to quickly prototype these days. what tests have you run to validate that people want what you've built - revenue, users, waitlists etc? 4) network your way to a warm referral. this bumps you for priority review. we have >600 Speedrun founders and many more in the broader a16z network. the networking you do here reflects the work you do every day as a founder - recruiting, sales, fundraising, etc you may have noticed >50% of these tips are about the team. the most common mistake we see in apps / interviews is that founders spend most of their time talking about the product idea and not enough time on the team. whereas we base our investment process primarily on the team
- 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
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- 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
@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.
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- 05
@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.
- 06
@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.
- 07
@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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- 08
@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
- 09
@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.
- 10
- 11
@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
- 12
@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.
- 13
@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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- 14
@Mars_DeFi ·
Less noise, bigger bets. That’s the real story behind fundraising this March. Total capital raised surged to around $3.8B, slowly approaching 2025 highs and marking the strongest month we’ve seen this year. At the same time, deal count dropped by roughly 30%. This shows that there are fewer rounds, but significantly larger and more concentrated capital deployments. Here’s a roundup of projects that got funded this month. — ● 2nd • @akavenetwork About - Data storage layer and DePIN platform Raise - $6.65M Led by - @BigBrainVC, @Blockchange_VC, @nolimithodl • @SatsTerminal About - Bitcoin-native DeFi platform Raise - Undisclosed Led by - @gate_ventures — ● 3rd • @arq_finance About - Digital banking platform Raise - $70M Led by - @sequoia — ● 4th • @crossover_mkts About - Digital asset technology firm Raise - $31M Led by - @Tradeweb • @Cyclops_inc About - Stablecoin and crypto platform for payments Raise - $8M Led by - @CastleIslandVC • @interstatefdn About - Trading terminal Raise - $1.5M Led by - @mhventures — ● 5th • @QFEX About - Perpetual futures exchange Raise - $9.5M Led by - @generalcatalyst • @okx token About - Native utility token of the OKX ecosystem Raise - Undisclosed Led by - @ICE_Markets • @AxiymFinance About - Fintech infrastructure provider Raise - Undisclosed Led by - @tether — ● 6th • @utexocom About - Bitcoin-native execution and settlement layer Raise - $7.5M Led by - @BigBrainVC, @PortalVentures, @tether — ● 9th • @KASTxyz About - Stablecoin-powered financial platform Raise - $80M Led by - @QEDInvestors, @leftlanecap • @zodl_app About - Zcash-powered private mobile wallet Raise - $25M Led by - @cbventures, @paradigm • @stackbtc_ About - UK-based digital asset investment company Raise - $347K Led by - @Nigel_Farage, @blockchain — ● 10th • @useKled About - Solana-based data marketplace Raise - $5.5M Led by - K5 Global, Aglaé Ventures, Cox Exponential, Parable • @useKled About - Solana-based data marketplace Raise - $3.5M Led by - @a16zcrypto, @BainCapCrypto • Corastone About - Fintech company Raise - Undisclosed Led by - @Fidelity, @hamilton_lane ● 11th • @opnetbtc About - Security infrastructure layer for crypto Raise - $5M Led by - @further • @immunefi About - Security infrastructure layer for crypto Raise - Undisclosed Led by - @Anchorage
- 15
@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
- 16
@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
- 17
@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
- 18
@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
- 19
@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.
- 20
@nunzi46 ·
One of the tougher things to do as an emerging manager is avoid marking your book to SAFE caps Fundraising is hard, and you want to show LPs portfolio progress It goes something like this: 2 months into raising, a company you seeded raises $5, $50, even $500M(!) Maybe it’s an institutional lead, maybe it’s SPV capital Press announces the cap as the “Valuation”…good air cover! But the fact is, the dollars came in on a SAFE with a cap What do you do? Do you take the mark? Do you footnote it? Ignore it completely? Do you tweet about it and take a victory lap, but keep the mark flat? Hard question!
- 21
@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?
- 22
@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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@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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@GJarrosson ·
"Don't raise too much money" gets repeated like gospel in startup circles. Everyone nods along like it's some universal law. It's not. It depends entirely on the business and the moment. Some founders need a small round to stay lean and focused. Others need serious capital to outbuild competitors and move fast. Blanket advice like this ignores context completely. Stop treating fundraising rules as universal truths. They almost never are.
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@MartinGTobias ·
A KPI more CEOs should be tracking is: Annual Revenue per Employee. What is it today (at pre-seed likely sucky, less than costs) Targets for each quarter going forward (should be going up) Target for each Fundraising (Seed, Series A, etc.) I have a Pre-Seed B2B software company that in the last year increased it from $100K to $1.2M. (crushing it) I have a mature pre-IPO company that is at $13M (God Tier). While early, most companies suck at this number, the whole goal of ANY company is to get to the God Tier. Or at least to the top decile of your competitors (proving you have a more profitable model.). If you are crushing this number for your stage, you will get more meetings and stand out in the fundraising crowd. While your mileage may vary, here is what I am seeing as top decile numbers at each stage. Angel: >$50K Pre-Seed: >$100K Seed: >$200K Series A: >$400K Series B: >$750K
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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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@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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@rebeccakaden ·
One or all of the law firms should build an easy to use agent trained on the docs from all the rounds they've done plus NVCA standards that lets startups and firms close straightforward funding rounds, especially initial funding rounds, completely for free. Acquire your customers for the trickier stuff that way. Alternatively, someone else should build this (maybe us?) But, either way, existing revenue models are breaking. Agents doing the work--from Fred's blog this morning on how we closed the most recent seed round we led:
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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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@GJarrosson ·
Stop polishing your deck. Founders spend weeks on slide transitions and font choices. Investors don't fund decks. They fund traction, team, and speed. Same with "never raise too much" - that's not a universal law, it depends entirely on your business. Fundraising advice on X has turned into a checklist of things that don't matter. Spend that time talking to customers instead.
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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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@acagamic ·
Founders treat market research like a fundraising task. Big mistake. The best investors don't show up during your pitch. They show up because you've been paying attention. Most founders crack open market research the week their pitch deck is due. Companies that track their market daily spot the inflection points first.
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