Hey friends, it’s Jorian—welcome to Into the Ring. I’m a startup fundraising coach for top founders and have worked with 60+ founders who’ve raised over $270M. (Want to work with me? Check out more details at jorianhoover.com)

Over the past week I’ve eaten four burritos in SF. No complaints here.

Okay, moving on beyond burritos…

In today’s newsletter, I’ll give a 1min take on sending angels SAFEs/wire instructions right away, share last week’s Tier 1 funding rounds, suggest some recommended VC podcasts & newsletter editions, and do a deep dive on aiming to be 95% (and not 100%) ready for your fundraise.

As always, thank you for being part of this Into the Ring tribe of 2,000+ startup founders and operators/investors from OpenAI, Anthropic, a16z, Lightspeed, etc. If you think someone else might like this newsletter, they can sign up here.

Now onto today’s newsletter!

At least once a month, a founder tells me they had an angel interested in investing in them for $25K to $100K, but they told the angel to wait … and sure enough, when they went back to the angel a couple months later, they declined to invest.

Founders, if you have an angel who wants to invest in you, consider sending the SAFE document for their signature and the wire instructions ASAP.

Sometimes this means sticking your neck out and choosing a valuation cap for your SAFE.

But most founders wish they had done that, rather than stalled the angel until they were “ready” to collect angel checks.

I want most of you to stop reading this essay right now.

That’s right, the vast majority of founders I come across underprepare (and sometimes severely underprepare) for their fundraise, and they’re shooting themselves in the foot.

If you are going out to fundraise and are trying to skate by without putting together a pitch deck or memo, building your investor list, and running a process—then I want you to stop reading this essay.

For the rest of you, please keep reading.

I want you to meet a particular type of founder. It might even be you.

This founder often has a strong resume and has the social credibility they need to fundraise. This is their first time building a startup, and so they don’t want to screw fundraising up.

So they learn what they need to put together to prepare for a fundraise, such as:

And so this founder, let’s call them the perfectionist, goes out to prepare all these items.

The problem?

The goalpost for being 100% ready keeps moving. After all these items are complete, traction slows a bit, so they want to work on that. After getting a couple more deals in, now the story doesn’t feel quite right. So back to the drawing board with the pitch deck. Now some of the confirmed intros have gone stale, and so they need to re-ask for new intros.

As a result, the fundraise kickoff (you know, the part where you actually meet with investors) keeps getting pushed back months and months. And now fundraising has turned into a 6-12 month project instead of a 2-4 month one.

Yes, but this is because most founders are way underpreparing for a fundraise before speaking with investors.

And so to them, my message remains: I really want you to “fully prepare.”

But to the founder who has gone too far, who wants to prepare “100%”: I want you to instead prepare 95% for your fundraise.

See, startups and fundraising are uncertain endeavors. VCs are taking a bet on you without having a crystal ball for what the future will exactly look like. So your 95% is perfect, and well worth the months of time saved versus trying to prepare 100%.

(and just as a reminder, 100% is not possible. Because if you go after that, the goalpost for 100% keeps shifting)

So what do you do if you find yourself in this pickle of overpreparing for your fundraise?

If you’re in this position (and again, most of you are not) then I recommend you give yourself a deadline of when you need to start speaking with investors by. And then whatever you have ready by then is what you use to go out to investors with.

It’s scary going out to investors, because even if you’re a hot startup, most of them will tell you no.

And that’s vulnerable.

But what’s even scarier is being sucked into 100% readiness hell and dragging out your fundraising kickoff way into the future.

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Are you a founder who wants to run your best fundraise? I’ve helped 60+ founders raise over $270M - here’s how we can work together.