how funds look at a new category: team 1: "cracked team, we're in" team 3: "cracked team, whats the traction" team 6: "love it, can you share the data room"

raising before launch = easiest no in venture "let me sit this one out until youre live" costs the fund nothing and kinda makes sense. polite, true, cant really argue with it either. So you just get the "makes sense" feedback and no checks. Id raise just enough to go live, and time the actual round so funds are still deciding when the launch happens So you have an audience to see you succeed. Plus easier to squeeze a higher valuation too

And similarly, you can hear 1) "Companies will just vibe code it." 2) "Anthropic is going to build this." and you can answer both objections with a customer/design partner: 1) a company with its own engineers that could have built it in-house and pays you instead. 2) customers who already signed. So switching means going to their boss and saying they picked wrong.

yes funds will look at your pipeline if youre early. But if you sell into a long sales cycle, they also discount the shit out of it. So at preseed they need something they can touch. a) a track record if you have one b) if you dont, its design partners, pilots, and Id argue they care less than yud think whether anyone paid for it. Then once somebody is actually using the product, you can answer a lot more of the questions that come up in dilligence. If I were you, Id get two design partners live before I added "$X in pipeline" or some other bs

the price you raise at follows you around for years pivot after the seed and the valuation stays. the new business starts at zero and still has to grow into a number set for the old one take a tranched round and the announcement prints the tranche two price, even though the early money came in at tranche one. your next round has to beat the headline anyway raise in a hot market and you can grow 3x a year and still get a flat round, because the next lead prices the company you are today so id take the lower val in a hot round every time

Getting to the "yes" and then fumbling the check is one of the most heart-breaking experiences Ive witnessed in the trenches. Wrote up my exp below

you cant convince me docsend is the best for sharing your deck moves slower + the email youd enter can be anything, and if youre sending a confirmation link to verify the email, then you already lost. why not just use g drive? easier to distribute, no friction. or a simple vibe-coded website, VCs can just enter the link into whatever AI theyve got and it reads the deck much faster for them.

at your A, the new lead reads your existing investors before your deck. So, a seed fund that doesnt put more in looks like an insider passing. And a corporate thats still excited on the reference call but isnt adding money looks the same. A big fund that wrote 5M with no ownership target can skip the series A, and every other that can lead the new round will ask why Aaaand if the new round gets hot, the new lead wants the allocation, so youre picking ebtweeen the lead and the earlier believers. If I were in this spot, Id know before opening the A which of your current investors is putting money in, and say it on the first call. Also ties back why investor relations is an art just as complex as raising new funds.

For a software company, my bar for venture scale is 1-3M ARR in the first two years. Building a business on customer cash is a real option. Nobody pushes you toward an exit, and building one is still a big risk. But if you want to matter in a market with a lot of money in it, I don't see why you wouldn't take money and push. Profitability is great for you, it takes a lot of pressure off your shoulders. A pre-seed investor cares a lot less. By seed you've got a wedge, first pilots and first clients. Now you need to 10x it and see if it holds up. That's what I'd pitch.

almost no fund will tell you your numbers looked stretched the pass comes back as "a bit early for us" or "need more traction". so you spend 6 months on traction, and the thing that killed it was one number on one slide

pitch logic: "its a very relationship driven industry" and so is the one youre raising from?

sleep zero hours and the rounds been open since spring

moat slide in every ai deck: "the models cant do this yet" bro the models will do it before you close the round

first call: "were doing three things. new product, new market, and a big partnership" three to six months later theyre either still doing all three and havent moved, or theyre doing one if i were you id pick the one now. a fund needs something small enough to bite on

"fintech", "AI platform", "marketplace". each of those fits like 50,000 companies a fund needs the one thing that makes yours different. founders hate the "X for Y" comparison. id use it anyway, a partner can repeat it to the rest of the firm in one line

12 drafts of the accelerator application. 5 minutes reading the deal they send you

we went back through a year of founder conversations. when founders say whats blocking the round, its access. no intros, the market, funds that dont get it underneath, most of the time, its two things. nothing a fund can check yet, and nobody willing to move first and the founders who told us "funds want proof" were right almost every time

things founders wait on before going out to VCs: the deck isnt good enough yet the data isnt good enough yet the team slide could be better it eats weeks of going back and forth. id much rather start the hard part asap