What to read before you raise a seed round

Most fundraising advice is written by people selling something. The list below is the exception: investors who write about their own process in enough detail that you can plan against it.

Start with the mechanics

Elizabeth Yin at Hustle Fund is the most concrete writer on pre-seed mechanics working today. What a lead actually commits to, how long a round really takes, why a soft yes isn't a yes. If you read one person before raising, read her.

Charles Hudson at Precursor writes about the fund side: why a small fund can't write the check you're asking for, what a partner has to believe to get you through committee. Understanding the constraints on the other side of the table changes how you pitch.

Hunter Walk at Homebrew covers the awkward parts, including what happens when a round doesn't come together and how investors talk about it afterwards.

Then the storytelling

First Round Review has a deep archive of operator interviews about narrative and positioning. It's slower reading than a Twitter thread and considerably more useful.

NFX's essays on pitch structure are worth an afternoon, particularly if your deck is a product demo pretending to be a story.

And the numbers you'll be asked about

SaaStr for benchmarks on what good looks like at your stage, especially if you're selling software to businesses. Tomasz Tunguz for the metrics investors are actually anchoring on this year, which have moved a lot since 2021.

Clouded Judgement if you want to understand why the multiple conversation keeps coming up. Public comps set the ceiling for private pricing, and knowing where they are makes you harder to lowball.

One thing to skip

Funding announcements. Reading fifty "we raised $4M" posts tells you nothing about how those rounds happened, and it's the fastest way to develop a distorted sense of how easy this is. We exclude them from our digest for the same reason.

If you want this filtered weekly instead of bookmarked and forgotten, that's what we do: one email on Sunday with the best of 800+ venture blogs. The venture and startups topic page collects this kind of writing as it comes in.