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.
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 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 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.