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)

This evening in SF I’m co-hosting a founder dinner with my friend Jason Shen, who’s a 3x founder/did YC in 2011/now an exec coach. We’ll be bringing together a couple dozen former/current clients and founder friends — and I’m excited to see several of you there.

Over the past week there’s been so much news in the startup & VC ecosystem, it’s tough to keep up. From Dario’s Pacing the Frontier essay to Emulate (a Google DeepMind offshoot) raising a $700M seed to Factory raising at a $5B valuation, it’s been a busy week.

For today’s newsletter, I’ll give a 1min take on if you should take first meetings with VCs in person, share the past week’s Tier 1 VC deals, give my recommended VC essays & podcasts, and do a deep dive on reviewing your funnel (and not anecdotes) to judge 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!

I get asked very often “Jorian, you talk about the importance of meeting VCs in person, so should I take all my first meetings in-person or on google meets?”

My answer might surprise you, but I recommend taking first meetings on google meets.

That’s because you can stack google meets conversations in a way that you just can’t stack in-person conversations. Meeting with 50+ VCs is exhausting enough — it gets even worse if you have to do them all in person, not to mention traversing across the country.

It’s become the standard in startup & VC circles to just use google meets or zoom (sorry Teams) for first meetings between a VC and a founder. And then as you’re going through the process with a VC, I highly recommend meeting in person at some point?

After all, do you really want to take $10M from someone you’ve never met IRL before?

Yesterday I posted on LinkedIn how a founder raising $4M told me their “fundraise was dead” because a few VCs passed, saying the startup’s traction was too low.

The founder couldn’t get these comments about traction out of their head. It had hit a sore spot for them - the founder was at $300K ARR instead of $500K which many of their peers were at.

And so they exclaimed that their fundraise was dead.

Fundraising is a mental sport, and I’ve been coaching long enough to know I shouldn’t just trust a founder saying “my fundraise is dead” at face value.

So I asked this founder, let’s pull open your fundraising CRM (in their case, Attio) and look at the numbers progressing through each stage.

Over the past two weeks, they had held 45 first meetings with VCs.

Of these:

So, 34 of the 45 VCs were still in play!

This was not a fundraise that had died, but rather one that still had a lot of life in it.

This is not just a simple “aha” essay to show you that this founder had incorrectly gauged how their fundraise was going.

Rather, I want to double down on just how pernicious focusing on a few anecdotes can be.

Fundraising can be psychologically draining for founders.

Even the BEST fundraisers get told “no” by VCs far more than they’re told “yes.” This is because VCs can only invest in 1-2% of the startups they see, so they need to pass on a lot of promising startups.

And I’ve unfortunately seen top founders get dragged down into the dumps thinking about the VCs who passed on them. Because it’s no fun having someone pass on you!

Getting down about your fundraise when the numbers show otherwise is not only the inaccurate thing to do, but it actively hurts your fundraise.

That’s because instead of focusing on the VCs who can still invest in you, where you can still move the needle, you’re thinking about the ones whose minds you can’t change.

So focus on the VCs you’re still in play with, rather than focusing on the ones who have passed on you.

Okay, not every fundraise has funnel metrics that look solid. Sometimes you look at your funnel, and realize you have a conversion problem.

Step number one is you want to assess WHERE the conversion problem is. This is why it’s so critical to track your fundraise on a spreadsheet or light CRM. If something ain’t working in your fundraising conversion, you want to know what stage it’s broken at.

Then step two is to take a corrective action based on where the issue lies. If your blurbs aren’t getting forwarded to VCs, then you likely have an issue to fix with your blurb & teaser deck. But if your first meetings aren’t converting into second meetings, then you’ve likely got to fix your first meetings.

But remember, there is an element of putting your head down and continuing to move forward with fundraising. You will hear a lot of no’s and so often the answer is to make some small tweaks here or there but continue pushing ahead.

The last thing you want to do is give up prematurely. Because if you haven’t had enough conversations, then the “yes” you’re looking for might just be around the corner.

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