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.)
I’m writing this kind of jetlagged but there are still a couple topics I want to get off my chest today. I’ll give a quick 1min rant on attending startup conferences, share the past week’s Tier 1 funding rounds, and give you my recommended VC essays & podcasts. Plus, I’ll go on a deeper rant about the importance of investor trackers when fundraising (and what many founders get wrong).
FYI - this Saturday I’m headed on vacation for one week, so no Into the Ring next week. I’ll be back the week of Sep 7th.
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!
In today’s issue:
Jorian’s 1min take: the peril of startup conferences
Tier 1 funding rounds: what rounds did top VCs lead the past week? (August 15-21, 2026)
VC essays & podcasts: my recommendations for the week
Today’s deep dive on how to fundraise like a pro: updating your investor tracker
1. Jorian’s 1min take: the peril of startup conferences
I can’t tell you how many founders go to big startup conferences hoping to meet VC-backed founders and find their next investors.
The vast majority of the time, founders come back home with almost no new connections — all they have are some cool stage photos to share on LinkedIn.
One of the problems with startup conferences is they are often chock full of founders who haven’t raised yet and are looking to fundraise for the first time. And so if you fall into this bucket, you end up meeting a lot of founders just like you.
And unfortunately, those are not the founders who can intro you to VCs (at least not today) because they too are seeking to get intro’d to VCs.
I think startup conferences are often a waste of time for founders. If you do go, make sure you’re deliberate about who you’re meeting, and try to set up those meetings in advance. Otherwise, you’ll be wondering why you paid $800 with nothing to show for it.
2. What funding rounds did Tier 1 VCs (a16z, Sequoia, USV, etc.) lead the past week? (August 15-21, 2026)
[healthcare] General Catalyst: led a $116M Series E into Cityblock Health (MedCity News - link)
[AI x voice] Menlo Ventures: led a $280M Series B into Wispr Flow (TechCrunch - link)
note: the announced Tier 1 deals this past week were quite light, likely due to VCs/startups not wanting to invest while folks are on vacation
3. This week’s recommended VC essays & podcast episodes
Newsletter: “Own Your Intelligence: A How-to Guide for Sovereign AI” (link) by Sonya Huang, Partner at Sequoia Capital. Recently you’ve had Alex Karp of Palantir and Satya Nadella of Microsoft share the importance of companies owning their intelligence in AI instead of giving it to the frontier labs. Huang walks through how Sequoia portfolio companies are navigating this trend, and gives a guide for creating your own sovereign AI.
Newsletter: “Clouded Judgement 8.21.26 - What Could Go Right?” (link) by Jamin Ball, Partner at Altimeter Capital. Too often investors are focused on what can go wrong with an investment, whereas what separates the top quartile from bottom quartile VCs is the positive outliers, not the negative ones. Ball walks through this and I appreciate his optimistic take.
Newsletter: “The ‘Permission Gap’ opportunity for startups” (link) by Adrian Radu, Partner at Khosla Ventures. Radu gives his take that the “permission gap” explains why we’ve let AI take over in some areas, but are hesitant to do so in others. And he uses this to share where he thinks there’s opportunity for the next era of AI startups.
Newsletter: “The Supply Side” (link) by Kirsten Green, Founding Partner at Forerunner Ventures. Green gives her thesis on what supply-side bets need to get built in order for AI applications to flourish. She walks through three: the capability layer, the control layer, and the model layer.
4. Today's Deep Dive on How to Fundraise Like a Pro: investor tracking
I recently wrote a post on LinkedIn ranting about why not updating your investor tracker daily can cost you a term sheet.
In that post, I shared a common scenario I see:
a founder is able to condense dozens (maybe even 50+) VC meetings into a short window of one or two weeks (yay!)
in each of these meetings, follow ups are discussed - the VC says things like “send me your data room” or “I’ll discuss with the team on Monday” or “let’s meet with your co-founder next week”
the founder has an investor tracker spreadsheet, but they aren’t maintaining it, so all of these follow ups are stored across the founder’s head, in email, and in Granola call notes
inevitably, some follow ups get missed from the founder’s side
and while some VCs are chasing the founder and making it clear-as-day what the next steps are, others are lurking in the background — they have the potential to write a term sheet, but aren’t chasing the founder yet
Founders, it’s these VCs - the ones who are busy, have other stuff going on, or haven’t gotten to a point of complete excitement yet - who you may accidentally lose if you’re not updating your investor tracker on a daily basis.
Investor trackers are tedious, but AI can help
If you spoke to me in 2024, I would’ve given you this advice about investor trackers: they’re tedious, but take the time to manually update them on a daily basis.
Now in 2026, I would say investor trackers are still tedious to update, but AI can help ease some of the bore of updating them. With Claude, ChatGPT, Granola, Superhuman, etc. you can easily have your AI assistants help you update your investor trackers.
So I think there are fewer excuses than ever to be skipping this investor-tracker-updating work.
What is an investor tracker and what goes in it?
I quickly want to define what an investor tracker is. It’s a spreadsheet, CRM, or other tool where you’re able to track all the investors you want to speak with, what stage of your “funnel” that investor is in, what previous interactions you’ve had with the investor, and what the next steps are.
Those are the key ingredients of a high-quality investor tracker, in my opinion. Of course they can also include valuable things such as who is making the intro, who the partner you want to reach out to is, what tier you’d rank the VC in, etc. — but I don’t want to overcomplicate today’s essay.
A few tips on successfully updating your investor tracker:
regardless of if you’re using a spreadsheet or a CRM, try to order your funnel stages so that you can quickly see how many VCs you have at different stages in the funnel. For example, if using Google Sheets, you could have “1. intro made” to “2. 1st meeting” to “3. 2nd meeting” or something like that, so that when you sort that column, it does so in a meaningful way
I also recommend using dates next to the previous interactions & next steps … for example, you might write “8.17 1st meeting held; 8.13 intro made” in previous interactions and in the next steps column you could write “8.25 follow up about scheduling 2nd meeting.” Without this, it becomes really hard to remember what happened when.
try to keep the investor tracker as cleanly formatted as possible. Founders often send me trackers that have all sorts of highlighting, colors, different sections, etc. - and no wonder it becomes such a pain for the founder to update it on a daily basis or remember what’s happening with each investor.
The pros and cons of using a CRM as your investor tracker
You might have found yourself laughing at some of the tips I shared above and thought “wait Jorian, doesn’t a CRM take care of all these issues for me?”
Yes, CRMs can solve many of these issues. And I’ve seen many founders have success building investor trackers in Attio (they’re not sponsoring this newsletter, but that’s the most common one I see founders use), Pipedrive, Hubspot, or even something like Notion or Airtable.
But…
way, way, way too often I’ve seen a founder overengineer the heck out of an investor tracker in a CRM, only for it to be too complicated to actually update.
So should you use a CRM for your investor tracker? Sure, if you actually plan on updating it.
Otherwise, I’ve been involved with many fundraises even between $10-50M that have been run on the backs of a fit-for-purpose Google Sheet that’s updated daily.
Please
Please, please, don’t make me go on this rant again. If you’re fundraising, then I urge you to update your investor tracker daily.
You’ll thank me later.
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