Startup Fundraising Lessons For The 99% | Hacker News

I think this is generally decent advice about the mechanics of fundraising if you aren't an "in-demand" startup. However, this does gloss over the major fact that this is a bad situation to find yourself in, and you are much better off spending energy getting yourself into a good situation than you are swimming upstream in a bad one. And while I'm sure being in YC does help with fundraising (extra social proof), you certainly don't need to be in YC to raise money successfully. If you don't think you will be good at fundraising (because you don't know a lot of rich people, you are a first-timer, you aren't good at pitching, etc), then you should be operating your business in a way where you don't need to fundraise. Be incredibly incredibly lean, generate revenue from day 1, figure out how to incrementally achieve ambitious goals, etc. There are a lot more ways to run a successful business than there are to run a successful fundraising --- investors are all looking for the same thing, and they could all be wrong. But if you grow fast enough or make enough money they'll come around. There isn't too much reason to get into more details because pg wrote the canonical piece on fundraising, which certainly applies to non-YC companies as well: http://paulgraham.com/fr.html But generally, the premise of this whole article is flawed. Most startups fail. If you want to successfully raise money, you should be in the 1% (or 5% or 10%, but some suitably small number) of top startups. And if you aren't, then you should be spending your time getting there instead of raising money.