Fun Raising

-4 dias

Matt Logan | Earthshot Ventures

Matt Logan is a GP at Earthshot Ventures, a climate fund spun out of the nonprofit Elemental. What separates him from a default climate investor is that he doesn't lead with decarbonization. He looks for companies that win because they are cheaper, better, or faster, with the climate benefit as a byproduct of the core value prop rather than the pitch itself. His thesis, the clean intelligence stack, runs the length of the AI supply chain, from critical minerals up through data center energy, compute efficiency, AI-native applications, and physical AI, which is where he expects most of the next decade's power-law outcomes to sit. The most useful thing for a founder is his honesty about sourcing. Of seventeen investments in fund one, nine came from his own cold outbound and eight from his network. None came from a founder's cold email. His takeaway is not that founders should stop trying, but that the leverage is in becoming someone worth reaching out to: early traction, a strong team, and small checks from smart angels in your market who can refer you (he'll take a meeting off a $1K check from someone sharp). He also frames access as "legibility." The less legible you are to capital, the more you should target firms that specialize in your exact stage and sector instead of chasing multistage brand names. In meetings he weights founder intensity, clarity on business model, and unit economics above a deep technology walkthrough, and he would rather a founder name a weak unit economic openly than leave it as the elephant in the room. Two closing tips stand out. First, diligence the investor by talking not only to the references they hand you but to the founders of their portfolio companies that went under, because that is where you learn how a VC behaves when things go badly. Second, keep terms clean (standard YC SAFE docs), optimize for complementary skill sets over valuation, and remember that stated numbers are often flexible once a VC has gotten to yes. And if you are struggling to raise, his advice is blunt: go back and build, because traction relative to your resources, the inflection rather than the absolute number, is what unlocks a round. Product market fit, as he puts it, covers over almost any other sin.

-6 dias

Sarah Kunst | Cleo Capital

Sarah Kunst is a sole GP who has been on both sides of the table: operator roles at companies like Chanel, Red Bull, and Apple, a founder whose own startup wound down, and a Sequoia scout before raising a roughly $3M first fund in 2018. That combination shows up in how she sources. She invests pre-seed through Series B, and unusually says she prefers the two ends (pre-seed and Series B) over seed and A, because seed and A often mean paying a markup for someone else's de-risking, and "you can only lose your money once." She also frames her sector interests as a map of her own anxieties: consumer cybersecurity, next-gen fertilizer, and next-gen energy. Her most useful contrarian take is on access. Most guests tell founders to chase warm intros; Kunst says that at the earliest stage that hunt is "so silly," because no third party can move her to write a million-dollar check. She treats sourcing as a shots-on-goal, top-of-funnel game, and backs it up with volume: she claims to have read every YC and Techstars deck since roughly 2020 and over 10,000 inbound pitches through her site, which she reads personally on weekends. The counterintuitive part is what that inbound feeds into. She takes almost no meetings, and says her meeting-to-investment conversion is high precisely because she meets so rarely. In a typical week she'll read 300 pitches and take zero meetings. So the leverage for a founder is in the written materials, not in landing time on her calendar: a teaser deck (she points to Guy Kawasaki's 10-slide format), a clear path from a multi-billion-dollar market to real revenue, relevant comps, and enough narrative control that she doesn't wander off and form her own wrong opinion. On judgment calls, she is specific. Optimizing for the highest valuation over the best terms is a vanity move, and clean, standard docs (Cooley GO, YC boilerplate) protect you no matter who ends up holding the paper after you sign. On the cap table, redundancy beats prestige: ten Silicon Valley CTOs who all know each other give you one network, not ten, so trade some of them for a differentiated skill set or geography. On founders themselves, she is wary of the "MBA in search of a problem" and weighs three kinds of relevant experience (lived, educational, work). Her recurring red flag is rigidity: founders who can't talk through a plan B when a dependency breaks, what she calls the "airport problem." And her blunt filter for whether someone should start at all: if the goal is just money, the odds are better in prediction markets, so you have to actually love the process.

30/07

Jason Gray | Pioneer Fund

Jason is an operator before he was an investor. He ran a division at SunEdison up to roughly $250M in revenue, went through YC in 2015 as a founder, and built Pioneer Fund out of the alumni network he kept gravitating back to. The structural difference from a default seed fund is the 500 YC alumni who serve as venture partners and LPs. When Pioneer takes an investment call, Jason pulls in three or four of them who are operators in that exact space, so diligence on "is this team actually moving fast" comes from people calibrated to that domain rather than from a generalist partner. He frames the whole firm as the process he wished he'd had as a founder. The most actionable material is about running the process, not selling the story. Pioneer commits to a decision within 48 hours, usually 24, tells founders upfront who will be on the call and when they'll hear back, and treats a second meeting as evidence its own process failed. Jason is openly anti-deck: the deck's only job is to win the meeting, and once you're in the room he wants it put away so you can actually talk. On outreach, he cites the YC line that conciseness correlates with how well you understand your own business, and prefers a tight email with the unique insight and traction over a half-memo. On constructing the round, he lays out three buckets (strategic angels, smaller or emerging funds, and big funds) and makes the case that small "base hit" checks of $50K to $200K compound into the momentum that forces fence-sitters to move. The counterintuitive takes are where founders should lean in. He warns hard against manufacturing fake FOMO, because his side has run the pattern hundreds of times and the founder's dataset is a single fundraise. When you do have options, he says carve out a day or two, decide, and execute, because flailing costs you allocation when handshakes elsewhere expire. He tells founders to back-channel the specific partner, not just the firm, especially with mega-funds where pre-seed and seed attention is thin. And on why companies die, he puts co-founder misalignment and treating raised capital like revenue well ahead of competition. None of this is generic "build a great product" advice; it's a working investor describing his own mechanics.

28/07

Ellen Chisa | boldstart

Chisa comes to investing from the founder side. She co-founded Darklang, a programming language, and boldstart had backed that company before she joined the firm. That background shapes a specific lens: she evaluates founders less on market math and more on how they think about product and engineering. boldstart also does only one thing, which she treats as a feature rather than a limitation. They invest at inception, meaning pre-product and often pre-company, with no fixed check size. She's explicit that "average check size" is a misleading question for them, because a first round might be $500K for someone just exploring or $10 to $15 million for a team that needs to move at scale on day one. The tactical advice is where founders should pay attention. On sourcing, she suggests skipping the cold internet research and instead going through the cap tables of non-competing companies you admire, then reaching out to those investors, since they already have some reason to care about your space. On cold email, her bar has shifted with AI: if the first three sentences read like a model wrote them, she doesn't reply, and the fix is not a "better" email but a real reason for the outreach. Inside the pitch, she doesn't do the TAM math (a market is either obviously large or it isn't), and she's skeptical of team slides padded with advisors, which she says raise more questions than they answer. The first meeting should be a conversation the founder drives, with the deck up as an anchor, and she advises against bringing the full founding team to that first call. Two things reveal how she actually operates. First, if she knows she's a no, she says so, sometimes twenty minutes into a meeting, then offers the remaining time as free advice. Arguing back, she notes, doesn't change the decision. Second, she names the FOMO games founders play as unforced errors: the fake "we're deciding Friday" deadline that collapses the moment she declines to move that fast. She also flags a common misread, where founders treat a polite intro conversation with a potential customer as validation, when "that's an interesting idea" and "can I buy that" are worlds apart. On why early companies die, her answer is deliberately unglamorous: sometimes the market hypothesis was simply wrong, and separately, founders get distracted "playing startup" and hiring too fast. Her rule of thumb there is blunt: if you're managing the first five people on an early team, something is already wrong.

21/07

David Goldman | Celesta Capital

David Goldman came to venture from the other side of the table. He started as a semiconductor investment banker, then worked at a multifamily office that was an LP in Celesta, evaluating co-investments alongside the firm before joining it about six years ago. That vantage point shapes his advice: he thinks about funds as institutions with incentives and internal politics, not as monoliths that either say yes or no. Celesta is an early stage deep tech fund (seed to Series B, first checks of $3M to $12M) investing in semiconductors, intelligent systems, infrastructure software, AI, and what the firm calls bioconvergence. His most useful advice is mechanical rather than inspirational. He tells founders not to over-index on focus when building a target list, because a firm that already backed a company doing exactly your thing may feel over-allocated to it, so you should map adjacencies instead. On outreach, he says the bar now is simply proving a human wrote the email, and he recommends against any ChatGPT assistance. The sharpest point, and the one Mat flagged as new to him, concerns diligence timing: founders should ask directly whether a firm completes its business diligence before issuing a term sheet. Some firms hand out a term sheet to lock or win a deal and only then decide whether they actually want it, and if they walk, the founder is left with a stigma and unanswered questions. He also dismisses the inflated market slide, arguing that a hundreds-of-billions TAM number is usually not the founder's real market and does more harm than good. For deep tech specifically, he names the single biggest reason companies stall: losing the pulse on what the next round's investors will want. Milestones that were valid two years ago may not clear the bar today, and founders who plan against stale targets can hit every intermediate goal and still find themselves short of what a Series B actually requires. He pairs this with a warning about the individual investor, not just the firm. If your champion leaves and no one else at the firm cares about your category, you can end up stranded, so it's worth asking a prospective partner about their own career plans before you take the check.

16/07

Alexandra Vidyuk | Beyond Earth

Vidyuk is not a generalist software investor applying pattern-matching to hard science. She has a physics degree, three PhDs and a Nobel laureate on her team, and she writes $500K to $2M checks from pre-seed to Series B in fields most funds avoid on principle. That background changes the diligence itself: she spent 18 months studying fusion and concluded the technology is roughly 20 months from working, not the 20 years the consensus assumes, then made an unannounced investment on that call. The takeaway for founders is that a technical investor is running a different playbook, and the way to reach one is with substance, not polish. Her most useful advice reframes signals founders usually get backwards. Traction in deep tech is not revenue, it is evidence of hustle: sign 20 LOIs and she assumes 19 die, but she also knows you talked to 200 customers to get them, which she treats as the best available predictor of future sales. On positioning, she is blunt that VCs track you in PitchBook, Crunchbase, and Specter before you ever pitch, so she tells founders to audit their own database presence and check whether they would survive a sector filter. She also flags "zombie VCs" between funds and tells founders to check a firm's last investment date before spending time on a meeting. The through-line is that she wants to be the investor she needed as a founder. She describes the ideal founder as someone with a 20-year vision and three concrete tasks for next week, and she asks founders not to pitch the product first but to explain what will keep them going when the company gets hard. On closing, her guidance is patient and specific: never take the first term sheet, assemble a combination of leads by role rather than chasing the highest valuation, and reference-check investors by calling three of their portfolio companies to ask, directly, whether the investor was helpful or toxic.

14/07

Paige Finn Doherty | Behind Genius Ventures

Paige Doherty is a former engineer (Northrop Grumman, working on unmanned autonomous systems) who got into venture after writing a children's book about VC, and that background shapes a thesis most generalist seed investors don't share. She backs what she calls "technical storytellers," founders with deep domain expertise who can also communicate, and she writes $250K to $500K checks into overlooked markets with a path to billion-dollar scale. Notably, she co-invests rather than leading, but says she takes pride in having independent conviction, meaning she won't sit in a holding pattern waiting for a lead to validate a deal. For founders, that's a reminder that "we'll do it once you have a lead" is a choice some investors make and others don't, and it's worth asking early. Her most actionable material is on market sizing and outreach. She studied the last hundred-plus billion-dollar exits and found most companies were IPOing at $300M to $500M in revenue, and she expects that bar to keep rising, so she underwrites whether a founder can capture a meaningful share of a genuinely large market. Her tell: she likes when "1% of this market" is already a large dollar figure, because it shows margin of error on execution. On outreach, she's blunt that obvious AI-generated emails are a "beige flag," since communication quality is itself a signal of how the founder will handle customers and investors later. She wants brevity, a specific customer seeing ROI, and one sentence on why this founder is uniquely suited to the problem, the kind of detail "you can never AI away." The closing-phase advice is the most quotable. She frames a raise like a race: when the starting gun goes off, every conversation should start at roughly the same time so decisions cluster and momentum compounds through back-channeling. She's also specific on etiquette (BCC the person who introduced you so they drop off the thread, and send fast, well-written forwardable intros, pointing to Roy Bahat's post on the format). One honest moment worth noting: asked what mistakes founders make right after closing, she declined to give a pat answer, saying it's too early to tell that soon and easier to judge in hindsight. That refusal to manufacture a tidy lesson is itself a useful signal for founders sorting real pattern recognition from投 generic advice.

9/07

Aaron Stachel | FirstMile Ventures

Aaron isn't a default VC. He spent ten years as an Army helicopter pilot and a West Point grad before an MBA pulled him into startups, and in 2015 he co-founded FirstMile with Bill Miller to be the first check for founders building in non-coastal markets. He writes $400K to $800K into rounds generally below $2M and leads roughly a third to a half of them, which he frames as deliberate: a check that size lets him anchor a round without crowding out other investors, so he stays an ally rather than a bully for allocation. That geographic and structural position shapes everything he looks for. His most useful contrarian point is that team is not his first filter. The industry default is "we invest in people," and Aaron agrees team matters, but he evaluates the team only in light of whether the problem is big and urgent enough to justify a company. He goes further on where to hunt: obvious, hot problems (agentic guardrails, prompt injection) attract $50M seed rounds and teams spun out of the big labs, so a pre-seed founder is walking into a knife fight. He is drawn instead to offbeat, overlooked markets where a uniquely positioned founder teaches him something he'd never thought about, like an old industry still running on spreadsheets and WhatsApp. The red flag that mirrors this: founders who oversell, wave off competitors, and try to get him excited rather than taking his concerns two or three levels deep. He wants to be made comfortable with a risk, not talked out of caring about it. On process, the tactical advice is specific and worth the listen. Qualify VCs the way you qualify sales leads, and after two or three calls ask directly what's left in their process; a vague answer means they don't know what would get them to yes, and you should push or move on. Real FOMO comes from more demand than room in the round, not from fake caps or "closing Friday" deadlines that other VCs quietly fact-check with each other. And after the round closes, stop managing investors like prospects: your update should be a screenshot of the dashboard you already run the business on, shared honestly, bad news included. The weaker stretch is the "getting in the room" section, where the advice (warm intros beat cold outreach, target aligned investors) is fairly standard. Aaron's fresh wrinkle is that AI has flooded inboxes with polished cold emails, which has made warm intros and real-world relationships matter more than they did two years ago.

Fun Raising

Matt Logan | Earthshot Ventures

Sarah Kunst | Cleo Capital

Jason Gray | Pioneer Fund

Ellen Chisa | boldstart

David Goldman | Celesta Capital

Alexandra Vidyuk | Beyond Earth

Paige Finn Doherty | Behind Genius Ventures

Aaron Stachel | FirstMile Ventures

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Fun Raising

Episódios

Matt Logan | Earthshot Ventures

Sarah Kunst | Cleo Capital

Jason Gray | Pioneer Fund

Ellen Chisa | boldstart

David Goldman | Celesta Capital

Alexandra Vidyuk | Beyond Earth

Paige Finn Doherty | Behind Genius Ventures

Aaron Stachel | FirstMile Ventures

Sobre

Informação

Talvez também goste