How the Myth of the Hot Round Hurts Founders

Here's a fun little paradox in fundraising: Founders and the media love to talk about how quickly funding rounds happen these days—think about the big, rapid-fire raises from OpenSea, DataBricks and others—but when you watch a fundraising process from start to finish, it’s never as fast as it seems. Even the tidiest-looking processes, ones that seem to kick off on day X and sign term sheets on day Y, aren’t what they appear to be.

The best-run rounds are always running, just at different levels of intensity. This breaks some brains because founders want to believe you’re either fundraising or you’re not. In reality, great founders are always fundraising. It’s just that sometimes they call it “fundraising” and sometimes they call it “building relationships.”

This is an important point for founders to internalize because the illusion of fast, aka hot rounds hurts companies. Specifically, founders come to expect that they can emerge from a hole, say “We’re raising” and be done in a few days.¹ The early-stage market hasn’t taken quite the same beating as later-stage or public markets, but still, now is no time to be stupid. The truth is that nearly every fast round I've ever seen (and I’ve seen many) actually started months earlier with careful relationship- and narrative-building or extensive work by an investor—or in many cases both.