Hey friends, it’s Jorian—welcome to Into the Ring. I’m a startup fundraising coach and have worked with 50+ founders who’ve raised over $190M.

This week I’m excited to be in New York, spending time with founders, VCs, and folks in the startup ecosystem. To me, New York feels way more startup-y in 2026 than it did a few years ago. While SF is decidedly the primary epicenter of the GenAI boom (see Elad Gil’s article I mention in my recommendations section), so many founders I know want to build in New York.

Speaking of founders building in NYC, congrats to my friend & HBS classmate Shachar Hirshberg for announcing $70M raised in Seed & Series A funding for his AI cybersecurity startup (focused on defending attacks), Artemis. Congrats Shachar & team - I’m excited to keep following your journey.

In today’s newsletter, I’ll share a 1min take on fundraising as a 90% activity, provide a rundown of the Tier 1 VC deals from last week, give my recommendations on VC essays & podcasts, and do a deep dive on perfect answers when speaking with VCs.

As a reminder, this week I’m hosting a free 60 minute workshop on how to prepare for your fundraise. It’s at 9:30am PT on this Thursday (April 23rd) and you can RSVP here.

Last, thank you for being part of this Into the Ring tribe of 1.9K+ 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!

Fundraising is not a back burner activity.

Almost every founder who successfully raises says the same thing — that they devoted an insanely high % of their time to fundraising. Often this is 90+% during the most intense parts of fundraising.

As a founder, there are always far more things calling for your attention than you have time. And so many founders try to do it all, and treat fundraising as just one of 10+ projects going on at the time.

But a successful fundraise typically requires 50+ conversations with VCs and then dozens of follow-up conversations, document requests, and so on.

So if you treat fundraising as a back burner activity, it will likely drag on, you’ll lose momentum, and VCs will notice, too.

The choice is yours: treat fundraising as a back burner activity and spend 6-12 months on it, or spend 90% of your time fundraising and spend 1-3 months on it?

When VCs only fund 1 out of every 100 startups they see (or whatever the statistic is), you may think that everything about your meeting with the VC needs to be perfect.

One place I see this show up with founders I work with is when they’re fielding live questions from VCs. Inevitably, for each founder, there are two or three gnarly, layered questions that every VC seems to ask.

And because receiving funding from VCs is hard, founders believe they need perfect answers to each and every question a VC asks.

The thing is, there will always be a few gnarly questions for which you won’t have a perfect answer. Often these questions deal with the future - VCs asking how the market will play out, if OpenAI/Anthropic will eat your lunch, and what your defensibility will be.

And I know, you wish you had a perfect answer that would assuage every worry a VC might have. Plus, it’d be great if you had a crystal ball and could fully know the future (if you do have a crystal ball, let me know and let’s start a hedge fund!).

But that’s not realistic, and VCs know there’s tremendous risk investing in early-stage startups.

What they really want to know is your THINKING behind these gnarly questions, and why you believe in the future you see.

Often when founders get trapped by these VC questions about the future, they end up in this defensive back-and-forth with the VC. In this scenario, the founder is not ceding any turf on their “perfect” view of the future, and the VC keeps returning to one of their core worries.

Don’t do that.

Instead, disarm the VC by acknowledging their concern has some merit to it.

And then follow up with how you’re thinking through the question, and what you believe about the future.

Let's say you're building in the construction x AI space, and several VCs keep returning to the question:

"Why can't OpenAI or Anthropic just build this themselves?"

If you answer this defensively, you may try to argue that the big labs could never build what you’re building. That rarely lands.

What would I recommend? First, acknowledge upfront “sure, OpenAI and Anthropic have the talent and capital to build almost anything. But when you actually walk through what it would take for them to win construction, three things stand out.”

Then, you can get into your thinking, for example:

“The first thing that stands out is focus. Both labs are racing to build the most capable general-purpose models. Every hour spent going deep on construction is an hour not spent on the next frontier model.

Second, data. It's buried in project inboxes, bid packages, and the tacit knowledge of senior PMs. We’re building a custom data set that the big labs won’t have access to.

Third, go-to-market. General contractors buy from people they've worked with for 15+ years, and our team has personal relationships with 40 of the largest firms.”

Obviously, the above example is a bit contrived because I just made up the company & scenario.

But my point here is that you don’t need a perfect answer when a VC asks you a gnarly, layered question.

In fact, they’d rather understand how you’re thinking about the problem - which often is multi-faceted and requires nuance. And not just one, simple magic answer.

You’ve got this, founders.

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I’ve helped 50+ founders run high-quality fundraises and raise over $190M. Check out jorianhoover.com to read founder testimonials and learn more about my approach.