Fundraising for First-Time Founders: A First-Principles Guide ($70M Raised from 1,500 Investors)
A first-principles walkthrough of how early fundraising actually works, synthesized from Biyani's experience raising roughly $70M from about 1,500 investors across three companies. Covers how to think about investor incentives, sequencing, and running a process.
Fundraising StrategyRaise ReadinessPre-SeedThink Like a VC: Erik Torenberg's Favorite Seed-Raising Tips
A compilation of seed-raising heuristics anchored on a Paul Graham paraphrase: pretend you're the VC, adopt their incentives, and convince yourself you'd invest, then that you could convince your partners too.
Fundraising StrategyFundraising PsychologySeedThe Team Slide Is Under-Theorized: Fixing the Most Generic Slide in Your Deck
Founder Collective's content lead tears down the pitch deck team slide, the slide that looks most identical across all startups, and shows concrete ways to make individual achievements legible to investors.
Pitch DeckStorytellingSeedTAM Is Overrated, Go-To-Market Pull Is Underrated
Yin argues investors over-index on TAM slides while founders under-argue market pull and go-to-market, and explains what she actually wants to see instead of a top-down market-size number.
StorytellingPitch DeckPre-SeedThe Pitch Deck Is a Vehicle for Emotions, Not Facts
Chen's much-quoted maxim: the #1 fundraising mistake is treating the pitch deck as a delivery vehicle for facts when it is actually a delivery vehicle for emotions. It anchored his broader public work on narrative-driven deck design at Runway.
Pitch DeckStorytellingAny StageArchived