At pre-seed you are selling a team and a story, not metrics. These videos cover raising your first outside money: angels, pre-seed funds, and how much traction is enough when there is barely a product.
28 min
YC partner Brad Flora's Startup School talk on how startup fundraising actually works: what investors are looking for, how rounds come together, SAFEs, and how to run a tight process. Draws on YC batch data and his own founder experience.
58 min
Hustle Fund GP Elizabeth Yin takes live pitches from real founders and gives unfiltered feedback in real time, explaining her actual investment thought process as she reacts to each pitch.
47 min
Michael Seibel's SaaStr session on pitching a seed-stage startup: the exact structure of a two-minute pitch, the most common ways founders confuse investors, and live Q&A with founders in the room.
22 min
Rella co-founder Natalie Barbu documents exactly how she closed a $1M pre-seed round as a first-time founder: her investor pipeline, the number of meetings, how she handled passes, and the close.
47 min
Ex-YC founder Diego Rojas (Shieldbase AI) shares fundraising lessons across YC and post-YC rounds, including what worked in investor conversations for an AI startup and what he'd do differently.
9 min
Angel investor Alicia Syrett catalogs the real reasons angels and VCs say no — most of which founders never hear — drawn from hundreds of her own pitch meetings.
1h 3m
Hustle Fund's Elizabeth Yin on her high-volume portfolio strategy, how tiny first checks change the founder-VC dynamic, and her outlook on seed fundraising.
52 min
Former YC president Geoff Ralston's fundraising fundamentals lecture: round mechanics, dilution math, SAFEs, investor psychology, and process design for a first raise.
45 min
YC CFO Kirsty Nathoo explains SAFEs versus priced rounds with worked cap table examples, showing exactly how caps, discounts, and stacking SAFEs dilute founders.
7 min
YC founders confess their actual fundraising mistakes: optimizing for valuation, taking bad money, serial meetings, and misreading investor interest.
3 min
Michael Seibel explains why fundraising works differently in Silicon Valley than everywhere else: risk appetite, check-writing speed, and what that means for founders elsewhere.
7 min
Michael Seibel's practical guide to cold-emailing investors: structure, brevity, credibility signals, and real examples of what gets a reply.
6 min
Seibel contrasts pitching investors with pitching customers: investors buy the upside story and the market, customers buy the solution — and mixing the two kills both.
27 min
YC's Kevin Hale on pitch construction: clarity, the 'legible, obvious, conductive' framework, and live rewrites of muddled startup one-liners.
Dalton and Michael respond to criticisms of Y Combinator and explain how YC actually affects fundraising outcomes, including honest discussion of demo day dynamics.
Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel at TechCrunch on YC do's and don'ts, including how founders should think about applying, demo day, and post-batch fundraising.
59 min
YC's Carolynn Levy (inventor of the SAFE) and Kirsty Nathoo teach investor-school mechanics: instruments, rights, and what founders and angels each misunderstand about early-stage paperwork.
17 min
Recent YC Startup School session defining the key terms founders must know before raising: SAFEs, caps, pro rata, option pools, board seats, and liquidation preferences in plain language.
36 min
At TechCrunch Disrupt 2024, VCs give live unrehearsed feedback on audience members' actual pitch decks, disagreeing with each other about what works.
25 min
Hustle Fund reviews a real startup's deck slide by slide, narrating the investor's inner monologue and cataloging the seven mistakes they see most at pre-seed and seed.
27 min
Founders pitch live at Startup Summit and get immediate teardown feedback from a founder-turned-GP, covering deck structure, delivery, and fundability.
4 min
NFX's James Currier maps the four types of pitch decks and the six things a VC must know by the end of any of them.
15 min
Early TWiST legal-basics segment on raising from angels: convertible instruments, accreditation, and the paperwork of a first close.
17 min
Hustle Fund explains the YC SAFE and dilution with worked examples: post-money caps, stacking, and the cap table founders actually end up with.
11 min
Slidebean's Caya compares SAFEs, convertible notes, and KISS instruments with real numbers, from his own experience raising for Slidebean.
57 min
Jason Calacanis answers founder questions about raising a seed round in 2026: current check sizes, AI-market dynamics, accelerator math, and what he funds today.
A walkthrough of raising startup funding as a first-time founder, from someone who raised angel through Series B as a solo founder in Silicon Valley.
8 min
Jason Calacanis explains how to cold-email angel investors in a way he'd actually answer, with the exact structure and signals he looks for.
23 min
Seedcamp's Carlos Espinal teaches raising capital at Slush's founder school, drawing on his book 'Fundraising Field Guide' and hundreds of Seedcamp deals.
27 min
Pear VC's Pepe Agell at Slush on raising your first round: readiness signals, meeting dynamics, and how Pear decides on pre-seed companies.
1h 7m
YC co-founder Jessica Livingston on entrepreneurship through the venture lens: stories from early YC batches, what founders misread about investors, and how the best founders handled early fundraising.
AIVA TECH co-founder Lucia Mari Sanguino details raising a $1.5M pre-seed: the funnel, the materials, investor objections, and how the round finally assembled.