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.
The Fundraising Wisdom That Helped Our Founders Raise $18B in Follow-On Capital
First Round distills lessons from over 1,000 rounds raised by its portfolio into a tactical playbook for follow-on fundraising: narrative construction, running a tight process, benchmarking traps, and partner-meeting dynamics.
Invest in Lines, Not Dots
Suster's most famous mental model: every founder-investor interaction is a dot, and investors gain conviction from the line those dots draw over time. Argues founders should meet investors months before raising and show progress against stated plans.
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.
Front Series A Deck
Collin publishes the actual deck Front used to raise its $10M Series A, slide by slide, with commentary on what worked. Later viewed over 2 million times and followed by her Series B, C, and D decks.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Debt is Coming
Danco argues that recurring-revenue businesses funding predictable growth with dilutive equity is a historical accident, and predicts the rise of revenue-based and debt financing for startups. Sparked a wide industry debate.
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.
Playing Different Games
The essay that explained the 2021 Tiger Global phenomenon: how deployment velocity, price insensitivity, and low-friction terms let some funds play an entirely different game, and what that means for founders choosing among capital providers.
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.
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.
How to Raise a Series A
Distilled from YC's Series A program data: how A rounds actually happen, why 'we'll preempt you' conversations mislead founders, benchmark metrics, and running a deliberate A process instead of drifting into one.
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.
How I Raised My $11.5M VC Fund
Yin documents raising Hustle Fund I with funnel numbers: hundreds of LP conversations, conversion rates, and tactics. Fundraising for a fund mirrors a startup raise, and she shows the whole pipeline including the rejections.
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.
Overdosing on VC: Lessons from 71 IPOs
A seed VC analyzes 71 tech IPOs and finds no correlation between capital raised and outcome quality: the most efficient companies returned more per dollar than the most funded. Argues overcapitalization is a drug with real side effects.
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.
Financing Options for Startups (MBA Mondays)
The index post for Wilson's MBA Mondays series covering every startup financing option: friends and family, angels, convertible debt, venture debt, preferred rounds, and when each fits.
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.
How Much Funding Is Too Little? Too Much?
Part of Andreessen's legendary 2007 startup guide, written as a founder before a16z existed: how to size a raise against milestones and market windows, the pathologies of too little money and the subtler pathologies of too much.
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.
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.
My Conversation with Substack Co-Founders Chris Best & Hamish McKenzie Fresh Off Their $100 Million Funding Round
Newcomer interviews Substack's founders immediately after their $100M round at $1.1B: how the round came together after a rocky stretch (including a crowdfunded raise when VCs cooled), and how the narrative was rebuilt.
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.
The Hardest Round to Raise for Startups
Data analysis showing Series B is statistically the hardest round: seed enthusiasm has faded, growth-stage proof isn't in yet, and the company is valued on early scaling evidence alone.
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.
What Are Pre-Seed Rounds & Why Do They Exist?
An early definition of the pre-seed round from one of the investors who named the category: what qualifies ($750K or less, pre-product), why the category emerged, and how it chains into institutional seed.
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.
How We Think About Pre-Seeds at NextView
The investor-side view of pre-seed construction: why NextView prefers small aligned syndicates over large party rounds at this stage, and what that means for founders assembling one.
The growing dissonance between two business models (SaaS and VC)
A SaaS-focused VC admits the venture model's power-law needs are increasingly mismatched with how most healthy SaaS companies actually grow, and explores what that means for founders choosing capital.
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.
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.
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.
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.