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)

Hope everyone is enjoying fall - for me, the weather can’t seem to make up its mind between summer and fall, though I’m happy for it to stay summer justttt a little longer.

In today’s newsletter, I’ll give you a 1min take on fundraising in a kingmade space, share last week’s Tier 1 funding rounds, give you my recommended VC podcasts & newsletters, and do a deep dive on how you can avoid being too corporate for 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!

I was grabbing lunch with a couple seed-stage VCs last week in SF and asked both about “kingmade” spaces. Both told me that it was a real concern for each of their funds.

What does kingmade mean?

It’s the idea that one startup has been anointed the winner of a specific space, typically because it’s raised huge amounts from multi-stage funds. A classic example is DoorDash, which was able to raise way more money than any other food delivery company in the US.

But whereas in the DoorDash era kingmade rounds happened a year apart, in the AI era you're seeing them happen within 1-2 months of each other.

For example, Instinct (the personal assistant startup - try it if you haven’t!) went from a Seed at a $50M valuation to a Series C at a $10B valuation within five months.

Because of this compression of rounds, seed-stage (and heck, even Series A) VCs don't want to "get in the way" by funding a competitor if a multi-stage VC is going to pour hundreds of millions into the kingmade startup.

I’m not sure it’s good for the ecosystem, but it’s a real issue that early-stage founders & VCs are grappling with.

“If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck” - a VC looking at an overly corporate founder

There’s a type of founder that tries to migrate from the corporate world to startup land, tries to fundraise, and then completely fails.

What if I told you this phenomenon was both completely predictable and also entirely avoidable?

The story goes like this: some mid-level executive has been working in an industry for 10-20 years and now wants to try their hand at a startup. They want to bring all the tremendous learnings, experience, and connections from their corporate world to building a startup.

So they create the startup, find some cofounders, and get started on their journey.

But along the way, they are copy-pasting the way they operated in corporate to how they run their startup. And it’s completely failing them. Not only this, but they realize that no VC wants to fund them.

In today’s essay, I want to talk through some of the biggest “copy-paste” mistakes I see founders make when they’re transitioning from the corporate world.*

* I want to note upfront: there are many, many founders hailing from corporate who don’t make these mistakes. And they’re able to build & fundraise successfully. But I think learning about these mistakes helps you avoid them in the first place.

01/ Too much process, too early: process may have worked well at a 5,000-person company (or a 100,000+ person one), but it often becomes the death of an early-stage startup. Corporate founders often struggle with acting in a scrappy and nimble way early on.

02/ Obsessed with the exact plan and roadmap: in a large company, it can be worth it to lay out exact product roadmaps, lots of milestones, set out five year revenue targets, etc. And once you set the year’s budget, you don’t vary from your plan. Unfortunately, that often backfires in a startup.

03/ Go-To-Market built for what it looks like at scale: as my friend Rob Snyder says, early on in a startup you need to find “pull” and do things that don’t scale. Corporate founders often set up their GTM motions for what they should look like at Series D instead of at pre-seed.

04/ Hiring corporate-shaped roles early: if you’re under 20 employees and already have a chief of staff, multiple exec assistants, a president of this or GM of that, VCs will likely run for the hills. Corporate-sounding roles just don’t make sense early on.

05/ Not rolling up their sleeves: if you had a cushy or semi-cushy work-life balance at your corporate job, you almost certainly won’t be able to keep that when building a startup. This is not to say you can’t keep a personal life — you can — but don’t expect to log off every day at 5pm.

06/ Won’t leave their corporate job without certainty: beginning a startup is a risk, and VCs want to know that you believe in it fully and are taking the risk. Yet many corporate founders want full certainty (that they’ve received funding, that they’ll get revenue) before they’re willing to take the plunge.

07/ No network of other startup founders: knowing other VC-backed founders can be a game-changer in running a startup, yet many corporate founders know either zero or just a couple. If you’re not in that world, you won’t know the startup language, what works in a startup, or get intros to VCs.

08/ Overly numbers-based persuasion: in a corporate setting, you can often prove your investment case with numbers — and corporate founders take on that belief when pitching VCs. But pitching is about story & team & vision far more than how strong your spreadsheet looks.

09/ The team slide is framed for a corporate audience: when you present the team to VCs, you need to come across as a scrappy team that can lead in uncertain startup environments. Yet many team slides highlight corporate skills that are less relevant.

10/ Having your hired CFO lead the pitch: the VC wants the CEO/co-founder to pitch them, and not a hired CFO at the earliest stages of a startup. Yet many corporate founders will hand off fundraising, and this only backfires.

11/ Under-selling the vision and size of the opportunity: to get funded by a VC, you almost certainly need to be going after a $10B+ market — and you need to paint a vision of how you can become a wildly successful company. Yet so many corporate founders are focused on telling VCs about the more immediate opportunity they see in the next 1-2 years.

Let me end with hope — there are so many successful founders out there who came from corporate environments. And there are many skills you learn in the corporate world that are invaluable and give you an edge when building a startup.

BUT too often corporate founders don’t realize just how different startup land is from the corporate world. The first step is to recognize and learn about the difference (you can do this by reading & talking to founders). The next step is to see what you need to change to become a successful startup founder.

Take from corporate what will serve you as a founder and leave behind the rest of your corporate baggage. You won’t miss it :)

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