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 just got back from a week in Hawaii and if anyone knows of founders hiring there, let me know and I’ll apply right away 🙂 — has anyone else thought “why can’t I just live here?” when you visit Hawaii?

Okay, on a serious note I’m feeling refreshed and excited to be back in the swing of startup fundraising. September is one of the busiest months when it comes to VC activity, and I can feel it first-hand from the number of founders who are fundraising and DMs from VCs.

In today’s newsletter, I’ll give a 1min take on taking money from family & friends, share the past two week’s Tier 1 VC deals, give my recommended VC essays & podcasts, and pen a deep dive on the all-important VC list.

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!

Friends & family can be an important source of angel capital for your startup. And what better group to invest in you than those who most believe in you and who want to see the upside alongside you.

But buyer beware.

I often come across later-stage or multi-time founders who have strained relationships with friends & family who invested in them. At the root of many of these issues was a misunderstanding of what investing in the startup would mean.

The friends & family were expecting a relatively sure-fire bet of a decent return, and instead they got a ticket to board a rocketship and barely heard from the founder in the two years since they purchased the ticket.

If you are going to take money from friends & family, I recommend two things:

Do these two things and you’ll have a much better experience taking investment from friends & family.

Creating a list of 100+ VCs is one of the most important things you can do for your fundraise.

But most founders screw this up.

I was catching up with a Series A founder who told me their Seed fundraise took 6 months. Whereas their Series A process only took 3 months.

One of the primary contributing factors was they lacked a robust VC list in their Seed fundraise — but for their Series A, they were working off of a well-oiled investor list.

The first issue I see is having too small of a VC list. Let’s say the average fundraise requires 50 to 100 conversations with VCs. In that case, you’ll almost certainly need a list of 100+ VCs you’re working off of.

Instead, many founders have a VC list of only 20-50 VCs. The problem is that not all of these intros convert and so there’s not enough volume of VC conversations to really drive towards a term sheet.

What ends up happening is the founder often strikes out with a couple dozen VCs, and then needs to keep adding onesies and twosies until they get more VC conversations. And this can take months, as opposed to working off of a larger VC list in one fell swoop.

Another problem is founders will have a long VC list, but when you look under the hood, it’s primarily VCs who don’t lead rounds. And so there might be 80 or so VCs on the list, but only 20 can lead.

Well, while this founder might have a lot of VC conversations from this list, pretty much every VC will say “come back to us when you have a lead” and the founder leaves with still no investment.

It can also be tempting to use someone else’s VC list and copy it as your own. While there are no plagiarism rules with this, the problem is that their VC list was applicable to their tastes, startup, and the time when they created the list.

If you’re using a list you received from someone else, it’s a bit like using a rental car to drive an F1 race. While it might get you to the final destination, it’s not going to be tuned or have the engine for your liking.

So what do I recommend? Using what I call the tentacle approach to create your VC list. What I mean by tentacle is having lots of different tentacles to build out your VC list.

Typically where I see the building of VC lists go wrong is a founder will rely too much on just one source. Whether it’s Crunchbase, Claude, or Google, putting all your eggs into one basket with creating your VC list is a great way to miss tons of VCs who could be a good fit for you.

For your tentacles, here are some of my favorite recommendations I give to founders:

Then what you do is go to as many of these sources as you want, and then pull in as many lead VCs that may be relevant to you. Once you have a big list, you can then research that further by going to each VC’s website to ensure fit (this step will often remove many VCs).

Once you use this tentacle approach, you can end up with a VC list you are much happier with and that can help you run a thorough VC fundraising process.

p.s. what are your favorite sources to build out a VC list?

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