Seed is the most crowded, most competitive stage in venture. Here is what seed investors look for, how large rounds actually come together, and how founders stand out among thousands of pitches.
1h 6m
Canva co-founder Melanie Perkins recounts pitching for three years and being rejected by more than 100 investors before closing Canva's first round, including how she reworked the pitch around each objection. She details the kitesurfing-with-investors period in Silicon Valley and how rejection shaped the company's strategy.
1h 9m
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky talks with Jason Calacanis about the company's early days: living off credit cards, the cereal-box hustle, and the wave of investor rejections at a $1.5M valuation before YC and Sequoia came in. Strong sections on what rejection taught him about conviction.
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.
26 min
YC partners share real investor horror stories from their founder days and from companies they've advised: exploding term sheets, tranched deals gone wrong, investors behaving badly after wiring, and how founders should protect themselves.
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.
1h 26m
Long-form conversation with Upfront Ventures' Mark Suster on how to pitch VCs, why he dislikes demo days, what separates the best founders, and how Series A decisions really get made inside a firm.
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.
9 min
Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel break down rookie mistakes founders make around investor terms and incentives: what investors actually optimize for, misaligned terms to watch, and how naive founders get squeezed.
An Australian health-tech founder walks through raising a $5M seed round led by Blackbird: how the process ran, what materials mattered, and what surprised them.
Haus.com CEO Jonathan McNulty explains how the company raised a $7.13M seed round that included Tim Ferriss, covering how they built the investor list and landed non-traditional angels.
21 min
A young founder gives a step-by-step retrospective of raising $5M: sourcing investors, sequencing meetings, creating urgency, and closing, with real artifacts from the raise.
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.
8 min
Sendbird CEO John Kim on why most startup CEOs fail, drawing on his own near-death fundraising moments and what actually earned investor conviction.
51 min
Stitch Fix founder Katrina Lake at Stanford ETL on building the company through investor skepticism about women's retail, raising less than peers, and going public anyway.
1h 7m
Zapier CEO Wade Foster explains why the company raised only a tiny seed round and never went back to the well, plus contrarian takes on growth and hiring that follow from profitability.
12 min
Brian Chesky reads an actual rejection letter Airbnb received from an investor, then unpacks what the rejections got wrong and how the founders kept going.
25 min
ICEYE co-founder Rafal Modrzewski on raising for a satellite company in Europe: convincing investors to fund hardware with long timelines, and how each round's story evolved.
23 min
sennder co-founder David Nothacker walks through his company's first fundraise at Slush's founder school: what worked in the process, mistakes made, and how they picked investors.
1h 11m
A longevity startup founder explains to TWiST why they raised in Japan instead of Silicon Valley: investor appetite differences, valuation trade-offs, and cross-border round mechanics.
23 min
A female founder and her investor jointly recount going from seed to Series A during the pandemic: both sides of the same deal, including what the VC saw internally.
53 min
Union Square Ventures' Fred Wilson in a long-form TWiST conversation on how USV picks investments, his views on founder-investor relationships, and stories from Twitter/Tumblr-era deals.
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.
10 min
Elizabeth Yin's three concrete tips for raising a Silicon Valley seed round as an outsider, from her experience as both a funded founder and a fund GP.
1h 11m
Freestyle's Jenny Lefcourt on making non-consensus bets, avoiding hype-driven investing, and what founders misread about how seed VCs form conviction.
53 min
Jenny Lefcourt walks through her 'ultimate pitch' framework slide by slide, showing exactly what a seed VC wants in each part of the deck and the meeting.
1h 7m
Mark Suster returns to TWiST on the ANGEL podcast: alignment between founders and investors, setting reality with your board, and raising in down markets.
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.
YC's Aaron Harris on how to get meetings with investors and run them: intro paths, meeting stagecraft, reading interest honestly, and converting interest into checks.
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.
14 min
Dalton and Michael debate when a startup should bootstrap versus raise venture capital, including honest talk about which businesses are venture-shaped at all.
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.
33 min
Founders at YC's Female Founders Conference compare fundraising experiences: rejection patterns, investor bias, and tactics that worked, with disagreement between panelists on the right approach.
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.
VC Peter Harris rips apart a real pitch deck for Appointment.com on camera, slide by slide, explaining what he'd need to see to invest.
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.
3 min
First Round's Bill Trenchard on pitch deck structure: ordering slides to build conviction and where most decks lose the room.
22 min
Wilson Sonsini partner Becki DeGraw walks TWiST through negotiating a term sheet: which terms actually matter, market norms, and where founders should spend negotiating capital.
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.
46 min
Aaron Harris on fundraising in the AI era: how AI company valuations diverge from SaaS norms, what investors currently over- and under-weight, and process implications.
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.
Jason Lemkin's fundraising workshop on what it takes to get funded now: real conversion rates from pitch to check, and what SaaS metrics clear the bar.
SaaStr session on six things no one tells you about raising a seed round: the emotional arc, ghosting, party-round pitfalls, and closing dynamics.
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.
56 min
Startup Boston bootcamp on raising a seed round: process design, materials, investor targeting, and Q&A with local founders and investors.
53 min
Stanford CS183F Startup School session on how to raise money and succeed long-term, connecting fundraising decisions to company outcomes years later.
24 min
Kruze Consulting's Scott Orn on writing investor updates that work: cadence, structure, the ask section, and how updates set up the next round.
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.
2 min
Mark Suster on qualifying which VCs are actually right for your startup: stage fit, check size, partner-level fit, and portfolio conflicts.
9 min
NFX on why VCs now expect founders to move dramatically faster, and how speed itself became the core fundraising signal in the AI era.
49 min
Startup Grind panel on overcoming bias while fundraising as an underrepresented founder, with firsthand accounts of coded feedback and the workarounds that got checks written.
52 min
Stanford GSB's Building Momentum session on diversity in venture fundraising: data on funding gaps plus firsthand founder and investor accounts.
30 min
Stanford's Grit & Growth episode on fundraising as a marathon, following emerging-market founders through multi-year capital journeys across grants, angels, and VC.
11 min
Slush fireside chat on the psychology of raising money: fear, rejection resilience, and the mental game of a raise, told through the speakers' own rounds.
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.
28 min
Flagship's David Berry on fundraising for deep tech: milestone-based financing, syndicate construction, and communicating scientific risk to generalist investors.
23 min
Web Summit panel on finding the right VC match: founders and investors debate how much fit matters versus just taking the money.
15 min
Web Summit talk on winning funds and influencing investors: pitch psychology and meeting dynamics from the investor's chair.
58 min
Startup Grind London panel on the snakes and ladders of fundraising: founders trade stories of near-misses, lucky breaks, and process disasters with investor commentary.
26 min
Startup Grind breakout on fundraising and valuation for AI startups: how AI valuations are being set in the current market and what justifies premium pricing.
29 min
Stella & Dot founder Jessica Herrin and Jenny Lefcourt — co-founders together in the 90s — compare notes across founder and investor seats on what raising money really takes.
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.