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).

Wow, I just got back from Miami for Tony Robbins’ four-day Unleash the Power Within event (shout out to Mat, Luke, and Jeremie who I went with). I have wanted to attend something like this for a long time, and what an experience. Feeling very energized and focused coming out of it. If anyone reading this has gone, would love to hear about your experience and trade notes.

It’s really been a week of crazy tech news. From the Jensen Huang saga (spy allegations, infidelity, and his resignation) to Anthropic's IPO, there's something for everyone this week.

But I’ll keep you focused on startup fundraising, and today you’re in for one of my favorite rants: should you avoid fundraising in December? Scroll down to the bottom of this newsletter if you want my deep dive on that! In addition, I’ll give you my 1min take on being energized as a startup founder, the prior week’s Tier 1 VC deals, and my recommended VC newsletters & podcasts.

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!

Being a startup founder is incredibly demanding. Tons of context-switching, late nights, getting knocked down, and so on. This becomes much harder if you’re in a low-energy state all the time.

The best founders I work with maintain routines to keep energy high during the hard times, even when their schedules are jam-packed with fundraising calls. For example, going to the gym every day, playing pickup soccer, and ensuring they’re eating enough balanced food.

Often it feels like you can’t fit in time for exercise or eating healthy. But doing these things gives you the energy to be in a prime state during the dozen-plus hours you need to work every day (yes, I’m feeling a bit inspired by Tony Robbins).

I’m not here to share specific fitness/health advice with you, but I do encourage you to keep your fitness & health routines even when you’re fundraising.

It’s one of the best things you can do for your startup.

I had a LinkedIn post go semi-viral this week (~50K impressions) about fundraising in December, so I figured I’d pen a deep dive on the topic. Also, hello to the dozens of you who joined from that post!

Okay, let’s get this rant started.

Let me begin by sharing the “common wisdom” when it comes to fundraising in December. The idea is that starting around Thanksgiving time, everything grinds to a halt with VCs. They start going on vacation, they’re focused on finishing up the deals that came to them in September, and they don’t want to look at anything new until January.

This “wisdom” continues by arguing that you’re dumb to begin a fundraising round in November, or heck even in October, because your process will run up against this Thanksgiving-to-New-Year's window that kills all deals in their tracks.

Do you hear something familiar? This is the same kind of supposed wisdom that gets shared in the summer time. “Everyone” goes on vacation in August, and so you’re silly to begin fundraising in June or July, because you’ll run up against a similar wall.

As a startup fundraising coach, I’m lucky to speak with dozens of founders each month — not only the ones I’m working with, but also friends who are building, folks who want a quick call, or prospective clients. So I get to ask questions that get inside the head of a founder who’s scared to fundraise ahead of the holidays.

Often what I hear is fear. A belief that they’ll only JUST be able to get a VC over the line to invest in them. And that any obstacle that stands in their path will cause their fundraise to fail.

And because this "wisdom" around avoiding December fundraising is so prevalent, founders see the holidays as the one surefire obstacle they can plan around.

Before I get into actual data, I want to share another problem here: attribution bias. It’s amazing how many founders whose deals die around or after the holidays chalk it up to the holidays. “If only I wasn’t fundraising around the holidays, this deal would have happened.” Really?? And so you have all these founders telling other founders to avoid the holidays (and August) like the plague.

Because the majority of US startups run their cap tables on Carta, the company has great data on when VC deals actually get closed, not just when the press releases come out.

With 12 months in the year, you would expect 8.3% of deals to occur in any given month if every month was even. Over a 6-year period, December averaged 11% of deals whereas January and February each averaged 7% of deals. When you add these three up, it’s 25%, which is exactly the baseline.

I think what’s happening here is a pull-forward of deals closing in December. VCs are incentivized to quickly close a lot of the deals that come to them in November and early December (partly for tax & fiscal-year reasons), and so the December number is quite high. I then believe that “pull forward” causes the January & February deal numbers to be slightly lower.

But notice what you’re not seeing: deals dropping to something like 2% in January and February! There are still lots of deals closing (7% of all VC deals in January, and then again in February) - just not the 8.3% baseline.

I’m not the grinch. And I’m not here to tell you the holidays aren’t real. VCs are human (at least most of them) and do take it easier the last week or two of December.

And so I would not recommend kicking off a fundraise mid-December. Why? Because I recommend most fundraises incorporate the blitz approach, where you jam your calendar full of intro VC meetings in the first two weeks. So if that blitz period happens while VCs are enjoying family time, it’ll be harder to get as many initial meetings as you’d like.

But before then, you should feel free to kick off a fundraise. Of course, you need to make sure you have your ducks in a row — such as your practice meetings done (and having gone well), your intros lined up, data room ready to go, etc. — but if you do, then November or early December can be a fine time to start.

There’s a reason I go on this rant pretty much every November and every July. It’s because the downside effect of founders delaying their fundraises until post-holidays or post-August can be quite real.

Startups are fragile, and need capital when they hit momentum. And often, they have limited runway. So delaying a fundraise for a few months means you’re putting the brakes on growth unnecessarily.

And, if you want to hear a theory of mine…because so many founders wait until September or January to fundraise, I think these two months in particular can be extremely congested/high-traffic for the VCs. Sometimes it pays to zig when everyone else is zagging, and kick off in a different month.

My most important message? Kick off your fundraise when it’s the best time for your startup, not when “common wisdom” has told you to do so.

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