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.
This past week was kind of awesome. I ate tacos five times, celebrated a really good friend’s wedding in Nashville, and have gotten a surge of applications to work with me after I launched my new website.
Today, I’ll give you a quick take on the importance of lead VCs, walk you through last week’s Tier 1 funding rounds, give you my recommended VC essays & podcasts, and share a deep dive on phantom intros to VCs.
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: lead VCs
Tier 1 funding rounds: what rounds did top VCs lead the past week? (July 18-24, 2026)
VC essays & podcasts: my recommendations for the week
Today’s deep dive on how to fundraise like a pro: phantom intros to VCs
1. Jorian’s 1min take: lead VCs
Founders, just a quick reminder here.
If you are raising a multi-million dollar round, and building out your VC list.
…please, please make sure it is filled with primarily VCs who can actually lead your round.
Recently I’ve been seeing a lot of founders who are speaking with VCs who can only write follow-on checks. Sure, they might hear from these VCs that they’re soft “committed,” but honestly that talk is cheap and doesn’t help you secure a lead.
The way you nip this in the bud to begin with is to ensure your VC list you’re working off of consists primarily of lead VCs. Make sure that it’s a column you’re adding into your list/CRM.
Because otherwise you might end up talking with a lot of VCs who aren’t willing to stick their necks out until someone else takes a chance on you.
2. What funding rounds did Tier 1 VCs (a16z, Sequoia, USV, etc.) lead the past week? (July 18-24, 2026)
[AI x travel] Bessemer Venture Partners: led a $6.7M Series A into 30 Sundays (The SaaS News press release - link)
[AI x surgical simulation] General Catalyst & Bison Ventures: co-led an $11.5M Seed round into Inner Logic (Business Wire press release - link)
[defense x cyber warfare] Khosla Ventures: led a $30M Series B extension into Twenty Technologies (PR Newswire press release - link)
[AI x agentic security] Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) & Bessemer Venture Partners: co-led a $75M Series A into Neo Security (GlobeNewswire press release - link)
[AI x cyber warfare] Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) & Sequoia Capital: co-led a $160M Series A into Cathedral (FinSMEs press release - link)
3. This week’s recommended VC essays & podcast episodes
Newsletter: “It’s All Pre-Series A Now” (link) by Charles Hudson, founder of Precursor Ventures. Hudson, who defined what he believed a pre-seed round was in 2014, says the label no longer works. This broadly aligns with what I see - founders ask me SO often if they should call something a pre-seed, seed, or even a second seed - and it’s because the pre-seed term is broken.
Newsletter: “I’ve Changed My Mind. Early Stage Venture Funds of $100 Million or Less Should Hold Almost No Reserves for Follow-On.” (link) by Hunter Walk, Partner at Homebrew. Interesting read here - Walk argued that because follow-on rounds now routinely come so soon after the initial check, the “information edge” that smaller VCs used to have has gone away - so he’d rather spend his capital on net-new investments.
Newsletter: “The Power of Patience” (link) by Rick Zullo, Managing Partner at Equal Ventures. Banger of a post - just to give you a teaser, two of the quotes I loved from this piece were “Patience is a form of arbitrage” by Mike Maples and “Fundraising is an extremely expensive form of price discovery” by Andy Golden of Princeton’s endowment.
Podcast: “Leading Anthropic’s First Ever Round” (link) on the 20VC podcast with Harry Stebbings, with guest Matt Murphy, Partner at Menlo Ventures. Fun podcast where Murphy walks through leading Anthropic’s first-ever round and how it was nerve-wracking (they had to pull together a syndicate and break many of Menlo’s internal rules). And they speak about how tough Series A has become.
4. Today's Deep Dive on How to Fundraise Like a Pro: phantom intros
Two founders I worked with recently had roughly the same number of intros to VCs lined up, but ended up with a dramatically different number of actual VC meetings.
Founder A had ~70 intros to VCs lined up and ended up with 50 VC meetings
Whereas Founder B had ~70 intros to VCs lined up but ended up with only 10 VC meetings.
What happened? It turns out Founder B’s list of intros to VCs was full of “phantom intros.”
Where do phantom intros come from?
I call it a “phantom intro” when you have an introducer listed next to a VC firm on your list, but that introducer never asks the VC if they want to meet with you.
There are usually two ways phantom intros come about:
Someone gives a half promise to introduce you to a VC and you mark it down as confirmed. For example, a fellow founder might say “oh yeah, I know someone at Bessemer” and you jot down that they can intro you. But this person hasn’t really promised an intro.
It becomes clear an intro isn’t going to happen and you refuse to cut bait. If it’s been a couple weeks and the introducer has had many chances to intro you, it likely won’t happen. At some point, you need to switch approaches and find someone else.
Don’t forget, making an intro only takes about two seconds. So yes, you should nudge your introducers once or twice, but beyond that, you probably need a new path.
Phantom intros can lead you to mis-diagnose your raise
One of the worst implications of a phantom intro is that you may mis-diagnose what’s happening with your raise.
For example, let’s return to the founder I knew who had ~70 intros lined up and only got 10 VC meetings. A couple weeks into her fundraise, she was real negative on her prospects of being able to raise, because she thought “almost no VC wants to meet with me.”
The problem was, of the 70 intros that were “lined up,” likely only 20-30 of her forwardable emails got sent out the door to VCs. So her hit rate with scoring meetings was much better than it appeared on the surface; the real problem was that intros just weren’t happening.
Once she realized this, she started finding new intro paths and thinking through ways to confirm the forwardable blurbs had actually gotten sent to the VCs (more on that below).
Figuring out if an intro has become “phantom”
One of the issues with phantom intros is that founders often don’t have visibility into if the intro requests actually took place. There’s no perfect solution for this, but there are a couple ideas which can help you out:
Use a tracked deck link like DocSend. If you include a link to your deck, and require investors to input their emails, that can be a great way to check which VCs have had your forwardable email sent to them.
Ask introducers to BCC you. One approach that works well is to ask introducers to BCC you when sharing your forwardable email with VCs. That way you can confirm it got sent out and update your CRM accordingly.
Ensure the intro is promised, and give your introducers an off-ramp
How do you combat phantom intros in the first place? Well you should confirm that the introducer really has agreed to make the intro and knows the other party. Don’t be shy about confirming - this is all about making sure you don’t get misled and waste your time. And as I’ve talked about in previous newsletter editions, the best chance you have at scoring an intro is by having a clear blurb, exciting story, and showing momentum.
But what if you’ve already kicked off your fundraise, and it’s clear an intro has become a phantom one? In that case, make sure you give your introducers an off-ramp and the opportunity to say they won’t be able to make the intro. Shoot them a note and end it with “If you can’t make these intros, let me know, because then I’ll find another intro path.” That’s not only the kind thing to do for them, but also the kind thing to do for yourself.
Make sure your intros convert
Back to the two founders I mentioned at the beginning. Try to be like Founder A, and ensure your 70 introductions turn into 50 meetings. Don’t let phantom intros get the best of you.
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