How to Raise Money
Paul Graham's definitive essay on early-stage fundraising, distilled from watching hundreds of YC companies raise. Covers why fundraising feels harder than it is, breadth-first search weighted by expected value, getting to yes/no fast, and the dangers of raising too much or letting fundraising drag on.
A Guide to Seed Fundraising
YC's comprehensive seed fundraising manual: when to raise, how much, SAFEs vs. priced rounds, meeting mechanics, negotiation, and closing documents, written by a YC partner for first-time founders.
How I raised a $5.1M seed as a first-time, female, solo founder for a biotech moonshot
Halioua details exactly how she raised $5.1M pre-product for a dog-longevity biotech as a solo, first-time, female founder: building the narrative for a moonshot, sequencing investors, and handling deep-tech skepticism.
The Option Pool Shuffle
The classic teardown of how VCs quietly lower your effective valuation by putting the option pool in the pre-money. Includes the math and negotiation scripts to fight back.
A Fundraising Survival Guide
Graham on the emotional reality of raising: why fundraising is demoralizing by design, why investors herd and stall, and how to keep morale and the company alive through the process. Written mid-financial-crisis.
Postmortem of a Venture-backed Startup
The CEO of Sonar (millions of downloads, ~$2M raised) explains the company's death: chasing engagement over growth, a failed nine-month attempt to sell rather than cut costs, and how investor incentives shaped the endgame. Read by over a million people.
My Startup Failed and This is What It Feels Like
Durkin founded 99dresses at 18, got into YC, lost her co-founders, and watched committed funding fall through at the worst moment, killing the company. An emotionally raw account of a collapsed round, visa pressure, and winding down.
SparkToro Raised a Very Unusual Round of Funding & We're Open-Sourcing Our Docs
After his bruising VC experience at Moz, Fishkin raised $1.3M from 35 angels under a novel structure allowing profit-sharing distributions instead of requiring a huge exit, and open-sourced the legal docs so others could copy it.
How to Raise Investment
The Monzo and GoCardless founder (later YC partner) condenses raising ~$400M across six years into a practical guide: sequencing angels before VCs, running a tight process, and why business quality dominates fundraising tactics.
Black Swan Seed Rounds
Altman observes that the best investments he's made were rounds nobody else wanted, and the hottest, most oversubscribed seed rounds mostly produced mediocre outcomes. Explains why consensus and quality are inversely correlated at seed.
The Non-Obvious Guide to Fundraising
A 4x founder turned VC lays out what actually drives fundraising outcomes beneath the standard advice: psychology, sequencing, the 'ladder of proof', and how VCs really talk about deals internally.
Raising a seed round 101
Aggregates advice from founders and investors who have collectively seen 1,000+ seed raises, organized as a step-by-step process with benchmarks for round size, dilution, timeline, and meeting counts.
What I Wish I Knew About Fundraising as a First-Time Founder
A former a16z partner turned founder describes how different fundraising looks from the founder's chair: what she got wrong despite knowing the investor side, and the gap between VC theory and founder practice.
What Seed Financing Is For
Wilson's short, sharp definition: seed money is for building product and finding product-market fit, nothing else, and rounds sized or spent otherwise create broken cap tables and stranded companies.
Term Sheet Series Wrap Up
Index to Feld and Mendelson's 2005 series explaining every clause of a VC term sheet: liquidation preferences, anti-dilution, protective provisions, drag-along, and which terms actually matter. Later became the book Venture Deals.
The Problem with Taking Seed Money from Big VCs
Dixon's classic warning about signaling risk: when a large multi-stage VC seeds you and then declines to lead your A, the market reads it as a kiss of death, regardless of your actual progress.
How to Develop Your Fundraising Strategy
Suster's process playbook: qualify investors like a sales pipeline, research partners not firms, sequence your best prospects after warm-up meetings, and manage the raise like an enterprise deal.
The Rise of the Solo Capitalists
Named and documented the solo-capitalist phenomenon: individual investors raising nine-figure funds and winning competitive rounds against firms, and what founders gain and lose by taking their money.
How to Convince Investors
Graham on the substance of persuasion: convince yourself first, be a domain expert, and make the truth about your startup legible rather than performing confidence you don't have.
High Resolution Fundraising
Argues for rolling closes on convertible instruments instead of monolithic rounds: take committed money immediately, reward early conviction with better terms, and dissolve the herd-waiting equilibrium among seed investors.
The Fatal Pinch
Defines the default-dead trap: moderate growth, months of runway, and an assumption investors will save you. Explains why bridge rounds usually don't come and what to do instead (cut costs or grow into default-alive).
How to Present to Investors
Practical demo-day-era advice on presenting: explain what you do in the first sentence, show a demo, and optimize for being understood rather than impressive.
I Know Everybody Told You to Send Your Fund-Raising Decks as a Link. Here's Why You Should Just Send the Deck
Suster argues against DocSend-style gated links from the receiving end: friction kills investor attention, deck-tracking paranoia is misplaced, and your deck's job is to travel inside the partnership without you.
How to Pitch Your Company
Seibel's formulaic, repeatable pitch structure: a two-sentence company description anyone can repeat, traction, unique insight, market size, and the ask, with examples of each done well and badly.
Process and Leverage in Fundraising
Seibel on the mechanics of leverage: investors respond to scarcity and competition, so batch your meetings, create parallel processes, and never negotiate from a single-bidder position.
How to Raise a Seed Round
YC partner Aaron Harris's operational seed-raising manual: preparing materials, building the target list, running meetings in a compressed window, and closing with SAFEs.
Safe Financing Documents
The official home of the SAFE: current post-money SAFE documents, side letters, and YC's user guide explaining caps, discounts, and dilution math.
How Fundraising Stages Work
Plain-language breakdown of what pre-seed, seed, and A actually mean now, what each stage's investors expect, and how round sizes and expectations have drifted from the labels.
SparkToro Year 3 Retrospective: Investor Payback, Systemic Challenges, and V2 on the Way
Three years after the unusual angel round, Fishkin reports real numbers: profit-sharing distributions actually paid to investors, growth against plan, and honest assessment of the model's tradeoffs.
Introducing Raise Millions
Launch post for Raise Millions, Hustle Fund's free book-length compilation of tactical fundraising guidance drawn from thousands of pre-seed pitches; the post links the full free resource.
How to De-Risk a Startup
Polovets enumerates the specific risks investors price (team, market, product, execution, financing) and concrete actions that retire each one, reframing fundraising as selling reduced risk at increasing prices.
The Post YC Slump
Altman on the pattern where startups treat closing a round as the achievement, coast afterward, and die: fundraising success is a lagging indicator that buys time, nothing more.
How Funding Rounds Differ: Seed, Series A, Series B, and C
Gil maps what each round is actually evaluated on: seed buys the team and idea, A buys early product signal, B buys proof the machine works, C buys scaling economics, with implications for what to emphasize at each.
A (Brief) Anatomy of a Successful Seed Raise
DocSend's dataset of thousands of real fundraising decks quantifies the seed raise: how many meetings successful raises take, how long investors actually read decks, which slides funded decks include, and seasonal timing effects.
A Seed Round Manual for Founders: Strategies, Pitch Prep, Valuation, Traps, Tips and More
A founder who raised $1.5M+ across UK and US investors documents the whole process as a manual: what worked, the traps she fell into, and differences between London and Valley investor behavior.
Here's the Advice I Give All of Our First Time Founders
A First Round partner's standing advice to new portfolio founders, including how to work with investors after the round closes and how to set up the next raise from day one of this one.
Founder Toolkit: How to raise your seed round from top VCs & Angels
A repeat founder and angel condenses his raising experience into a toolkit: list-building, sequencing angels and funds, materials, and close mechanics, with templates.
Fundraising 101: I'm currently in NY! *Buys Flight to NY*
A young founder's candid, funny account of the performative side of fundraising: manufacturing 'I happen to be in town' moments, reading investor signals, and the theater everyone pretends isn't happening.
Holloway Guide to Raising Venture Capital
A book-length, edited, citation-heavy reference on the entire venture fundraising process, from instruments and terms through negotiation and close, reviewed by dozens of practitioners.
Some Thoughts on Seed Investing
Wilson candidly reviews USV's own seed investing record and explains how a multi-stage firm actually thinks about seed checks, follow-ons, and the reserved-capital math behind them.
A Founder's Guide to Venture Capital & Startup Fundraising
Tunguz's index of his data-driven fundraising posts organized as a founder's guide: how VCs decide, round dynamics, valuation math, and negotiation, each backed by his analyses of actual funding data.
Second Seed Rounds: How They Impact a Startup's Ability to Raise a Series A
Quantifies the second-seed phenomenon: how common repeat seed rounds are and what they do, statistically, to a company's Series A odds and terms.
For Fundraising, Seed is No Longer a Round, It's a Phase
Walk reframes seed as a multi-year, possibly multi-round phase of proving core value, not a single event, with implications for how founders should structure and sequence early capital.
A Question About Risk That Founders Forget to Ask VCs
A short, sharp diligence-reversal tactic: ask every prospective investor 'what's a risk you're more comfortable with than the average VC?' and use the answer to test fit and conviction.
Which Fundraising Round Should You Skip?
With founders now raising 3-4 rounds before Series A, Go argues the total dilution math forces a choice: decide deliberately which round in the chain you'll skip, and shows how to reason about it.
It's All Pre-Series A Now
The leading pre-seed investor argues stage labels below Series A have lost meaning: everything before the A is one continuous proving period, and founders should plan capital and milestones accordingly.
Out of the picture: why the world's best photo startup is going out of business (Everpix)
The definitive reported account of Everpix's death: a beloved product with paying users that ran out of runway mid-raise; the founders later open-sourced their pitch decks, metrics, and investor pipeline. A masterclass in how good products die from failed fundraises.
Who Gets Funded to Build in Africa? Lessons from a $7.3M Nigerian Seed Round
Uses a $7.3M seed round raised by an American founder for a Nigerian-market app to examine who global VC actually trusts to build in Africa, and what local founders face by comparison.
How to raise a seed round (from a former VC turned founder)
A former VC who crossed to the founder side demystifies the seed process from both chairs: board seats, how much to raise, investor selection, and the parts of VC behavior that only make sense once you've sat in the partner meeting.
Mattermark Has Raised $2M in Our Second Seed Round
Morrill explains publicly why Mattermark took a $2M second seed instead of the Series A she'd been pitching: two years of nonstop fundraising, a bridge from a customer-investor, and the honest math of raising below your hopes.
Are VCs Still Investing? The state of fundraising in the spring of 2020
Written inside the COVID shock: a VC candidly reports what his firm and peers were actually doing (versus saying) about new deals, and advises founders on raising into a frozen market.
Getting Out of the Startup Rat Race
After raising a $500K seed and then nearly running out of money, Pigford describes negotiating with his investors to reset expectations and step off the venture growth track, with the actual numbers Baremetrics published all along.
Dear SaaStr: What Are the Top Mistakes You See New Founders Make?
Lemkin's blunt list of first-founder mistakes, the fundraising ones foremost: assuming the next round is guaranteed, burning to a plan that requires it, and wasting months pitching the wrong investors.