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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.