Some fundraising truths hold at every stage. Timeless advice on pitching, investor psychology, and process that applies whether you are raising your first check or your fifth round.
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.
1h 0m
Backstage Capital's Arlan Hamilton on going from homeless to VC, her $5M crowdfunding raise for her own firm, and educating underestimated founders on how capital actually works.
47 min
A founder who failed 22 times before building a $2.5B company tells My First Million the full arc, including the fundraising dead-ends, near-bankruptcies, and the raise that finally worked.
1h 28m
Sequoia's Julien Bek takes 20VC inside the firm's investment committee: how the SpaceX and Citadel deals actually went down, how memos are argued, and what kills deals at partnership.
6 min
Stanford GSB professor Ilya Strebulaev summarizes his large-scale research on how venture capitalists actually make decisions: what they weight (team vs market vs product), how many deals they screen, and how valuations are really set.
3 min
Bill Gurley argues venture capital is structurally a bad industry: excess capital, misaligned incentives, and what that means for founders taking money at peak prices.
8 min
Benchmark's Bill Gurley with Bloomberg on the VC landscape, staying private too long, and lessons from Uber's capital raising for founders and boards.
1 min
Marc Andreessen explains in two minutes what a16z actually looks for in startups and why strength of insight beats polish.
1 min
Bill Gurley on why founders and investors over-index on TAM slides, with examples of huge companies whose initial TAM looked tiny.
11 min
Sheel Mohnot tells the story of raising his first VC fund — the LP rejections, weird meetings, and scrappy tactics — a mirror image of founder fundraising.
1h 4m
Mercury CEO Immad Akhund on launching a $26M fund, what he learned angel investing in 350+ startups, and what founder behaviors predict successful raises.
1h 34m
20VC roundtable arguing why the venture market today is structurally worse than the 2021 peak: pricing, AI concentration, and exit math — and what founders should do about it.
1h 20m
VenCap's David Clark shares 32 years of fund-of-funds data: how few companies drive all venture returns, and what that power law means for how VCs must behave with founders.
1h 7m
NextView's Rob Go gives the ultimate guide to raising a venture fund: LP targeting, momentum, first closes — directly analogous to a startup round and full of transferable tactics.
1 min
Mark Suster's 'Always Be Raising' doctrine in brief: relationship-building between rounds so the round itself is a formality.
26 min
Uncapped founder Piotr Pisarz makes the case for revenue-based funding as an alternative to venture equity, explaining who it suits and its real costs.
21 min
Edith Yeung on fundraising globally: how investor expectations differ across the US, China, and Southeast Asia, and how founders should adapt the pitch per market.
1h 7m
Startup Grind panel on managing a downturn and fundraising through it: runway math, investor communication, and which rounds are possible in a frozen market.
Harry Stebbings interviewed about his own raises: building 20VC's funds from a bedroom podcast, being underestimated, and what pitching LPs taught him about pitching generally.
1h 30m
Long-form biography interview with Harry Stebbings on raising $800M in funds starting at 18: LP rejections, the grind, and specific fund-raise mechanics.