Fundraising

Fundraising covers both sides of raising money: a founder raising a round, and a fund manager raising from limited partners. The saved material leans toward the second, and the two sides keep reaching the same cautions.

Raising a fund from LPs

• Pitching is a relationship, not a transaction. Eric Bahn: there is “never an absolute no,” because “life is a multi-turn game.”
• Samir Kaji’s tip for emerging VCs is that LPs want differentiation, but not too much: focus on one or two things you do well and that matter, since too many unfamiliar moving parts impede allocations. His longer piece, What are venture focused Limited Partners are thinking today?, reports a survey of nearly 100 LPs, 44% of them family offices, taken after public markets fell nearly 40% in March 2020.
• A small-fund manager’s candid view, in “Real Talk on Fundraising for a Small Fund” (Real Talk on Fundraising for a Small Fund (Charlie O’Donnell)): it was harder than expected, and he dislikes choosing partners on the single criterion of how much money they have. Another saved post makes the matching point from the other side: find investors who believe in your investment methodology.
• An Offer of Help to Emerging Managers (Joel Cohen) is written for emerging public-markets stockpickers, and Raising Capital from Family Offices (Zachary Rollins) notes that introductions to family offices usually come through intermediaries and that cold outreach rarely works. See Family Office, LP, Emerging Managers and Build a Fund.
• Pitch material: Ryan Hoover’s post on 13 VC fund decks that raised $500M+, and VC Pitch Decks (Alexander Jarvis) in the reading queue.

Raising a round as a founder

• Kevin Gibbon, drawing on over-raising at his previous company before product-market fit, argues that big rounds before fit raise expectations and force premature hiring and spending; he later declined a $10M “seed” and raised in small chunks instead.
• Default Alive or Default Dead? (Paul Graham) treats fundraising as something that can never be assumed: investors are fickle and respond to growth, and hiring too fast is the biggest killer of funded startups.
• Lenny Rachitsky’s megathread organises the process into preparation, outreach, navigating the process, and partner meetings plus closing. A Parker Conrad post on the advantage of SAFEs is also saved here.

Books. Asking (Jerold Panas) is a short guide to making the ask in charitable fundraising.

Where this appears

Saved tweets

• Confession - Pitching LPs is One… (tweet)
• Fundraising Tip for Emerging VCs… (tweet)
• Seeing a Lot of Startups… (tweet)
• Some Real Talk on Fundraising… (tweet)
• When Raising Capital You Want… (tweet)

Long reads: Default Alive or Default Dead?, An Offer of Help to Emerging Managers, What are venture focused Limited Partners are thinking today?, Raising Capital from Family Offices, Real Talk on Fundraising for a Small Fund (Charlie O’Donnell)

Books: Asking

Reading queue: VC Pitch Decks (Alexander Jarvis)

Other saved tweets: 🔥 A Guide to Fundraising… (tweet), The real advantage of SAFEs… (tweet), In the Past Month I’ve… (tweet), As a Founder It is… (tweet), I Am Sorry, as a… (tweet)

Saved tweets

Captured from Kyle’s Apple Notes on 2026-08-21 against link rot. The raw note text is held privately in the wiki.

• We Pulled Together 13 Vc… (tweet)