I need to vent about something.
Every week I talk to founders who are failing to raise, and at least half of them are failing because they followed advice that sounds smart but is catastrophically wrong. The advice comes from blog posts, from Twitter, from well-meaning angel investors who raised their last round in 2019, and from accelerator partners who have never actually sat on the investor side of the table.
I am going to name the worst offenders. Some of these will be controversial. I do not care.
”Never Name a Price First”
This one comes from negotiation theory. The idea is that whoever anchors first loses leverage.
In fundraising, this advice produces a specific failure mode. The investor asks “what are you looking for?” The founder, coached to never name a number, says something evasive: “We are focused on finding the right partner” or “We are flexible on terms.” The investor hears this and mentally checks a box: this founder does not know what their company is worth.
Here is what actually happens when you dodge the valuation question. The investor assumes you either have not done the work to understand your market value, or you are afraid the number you want is too high and you know it. Neither interpretation helps you.
The founders who raise efficiently have a clear, specific answer. “We are targeting a $30M pre at $6M. Here is why that is reasonable based on comparable rounds in our space.” That answer does three things. It shows you have done the work. It anchors at a number you can defend. And it saves everyone 30 minutes of awkward dancing.
Name your price. Defend it. Move on.
”Raise As Much As You Can”
This was great advice in 2021. It is terrible advice now and it was probably never as good as people thought.
The logic sounds clean: more capital means more runway, more hiring, more room for error. What the logic ignores is that every dollar you raise comes with a valuation, and that valuation is a promise about the future. Raise $12M at a $60M pre and you have just committed to building a company worth $200M or more within three to four years. Can you do that? Because if you cannot, you have created a situation where your next round is either a down round or does not happen at all.
I watched a founder last year raise $10M when she needed $5M. She did it because her seed investors told her to “fill up the tank.” Eighteen months later, she had burned through most of it on hiring she did not need, her ARR had grown but not at the pace the valuation demanded, and she was staring down a Series B conversation where every fund did the math and flinched.
Raise what you need to hit the next clear milestone with six months of cushion. Not a dollar more.
”Do Not Raise Until Your Metrics Are Perfect”
I have written about this before, but it keeps coming up because the advice is everywhere.
The problem is the word “perfect.” There is no such thing as perfect metrics for a Series A. There are benchmarks, and benchmarks are medians, and medians mean half of funded companies were below them. The founder who waits for every number to be above the 75th percentile is a founder who waits too long and raises with less runway, more stress, and a team that has been watching the bank account shrink for months.
The other problem is that waiting to raise is not free. Your runway decreases. Your competitors raise. Your best engineer gets poached. The market shifts. By the time your metrics are “perfect,” five other things have degraded.
I talked to a founder in February who had been waiting to raise for seven months because his NRR was 108% and he wanted it above 120%. By the time he got to 118%, his runway was at four months and he entered the market from a position of panic rather than strength. His metrics were better but his negotiating position was dramatically worse.
There is a window. Your metrics do not need to be perfect for the window to be open. They need to be defensible.
”Focus On Tier 1 VCs”
This advice kills more raises than almost any other because it sounds aspirational and strategic. In reality, it is a recipe for burning your best shots early.
Tier 1 firms are the hardest to close. They see the most deal flow. They have the highest bar. They have the longest decision processes. Starting your raise with Sequoia and a16z is like warming up for a marathon by sprinting the first mile.
The founders who navigate this well do the opposite. They start with Tier 2 and Tier 3 firms where they have the strongest relationships or the clearest thesis fit. They use those early meetings to calibrate. They learn which parts of the pitch land, which objections come up, and which questions they cannot answer well yet. They get sharper. Then they go to Tier 1.
Two additional things the “focus on Tier 1” advice misses. First, the best investor for your company is often not the most prestigious one. It is the one with the most relevant portfolio, the most aligned thesis, and the partner who will actually work with you. I have seen founders turn down term sheets from excellent mid-tier funds to keep chasing a brand name that was never going to materialize. Second, Tier 1 VCs talk to each other. If you pitch three of them in your first week and all three pass, that signal travels. You have poisoned the well before your raise even started.
”Your Pitch Deck Should Be 10 Slides”
Where did this number come from? I genuinely do not know, but it has calcified into gospel.
Your deck should be as many slides as it takes to make the investment case clearly. For some companies, that is 8 slides. For others, it is 22. A complex enterprise infrastructure company with a multi-layered go-to-market strategy needs more slides than a consumer app with a single viral loop. Forcing both into 10 slides produces either a deck that is too shallow to be convincing or a deck with slides so dense they are unreadable.
What actually matters is not the slide count. It is whether the investor can understand your business, your market, your traction, and your plan within 20 minutes. I have seen 25-slide decks that achieve this because each slide makes a single clear point and moves briskly. I have seen 10-slide decks that fail because each slide tries to do three things and accomplishes none of them.
Build the deck the story requires. Stop counting slides.
”Do Not Show Weakness”
This might be the most damaging advice on the list.
Founders are coached to project confidence at all times. Never admit uncertainty. Never acknowledge risk. Never say “I do not know.” Present the strongest possible version of everything.
Investors see through this instantly. They have heard thousands of pitches. They know what manufactured confidence sounds like. And when they sense it, they start probing harder, looking for the thing you are hiding. The meeting becomes adversarial because you turned it into a performance rather than a conversation.
The most fundable founders I work with are disarmingly honest about what they do not know. They say things like: “Our churn in the SMB segment is higher than I want. Here is what we are doing about it, and here is what I do not yet know about why it is happening.” That sentence builds more trust than a hundred slides of upward-trending graphs.
Investors are not looking for companies without problems. They are looking for founders who see problems clearly and respond to them intelligently. Hiding your weaknesses does not make you look strong. It makes you look either naive or dishonest, and investors cannot distinguish between the two.
”Fundraising Is a Numbers Game”
Take more meetings. Cast a wider net. Increase the top of funnel. Play the odds.
This advice treats fundraising like outbound sales, and it is wrong for the same reason that blasting a thousand cold emails is wrong for enterprise sales. Volume without targeting produces noise, burns reputation, and exhausts the seller.
I worked with a founder who took 60 meetings. Sixty. She was diligent and organized and ran a professional process. She also heard “no” 58 times, which took her five months and left her so depleted that the two investors who were actually interested saw a person running on fumes rather than conviction.
Her mistake was not a lack of effort. It was targeting. About 40 of those 60 meetings were with funds that did not invest in her stage, her vertical, or her geography. She took them because she was told that more meetings equals more chances. It does not. More targeted meetings equals more chances. More untargeted meetings equals more rejection, faster reputation damage, and a longer timeline that degrades every other variable in the raise.
Twenty meetings with the right investors will outperform 60 meetings with whoever will take the call. Every time.
Where Bad Advice Comes From
Most fundraising advice is written by people who are not currently raising. They are investors writing about what they wish founders would do, which is not the same as what actually works. Or they are founders writing about what worked for them, at a different time, in a different market, with a different company.
The shelf life of fundraising advice is about 18 months. The market shifts. Investor behavior changes. Benchmarks move. The tactics that closed rounds in 2024 do not close rounds in 2026. But the blog posts stay up. The Twitter threads get reshared. The accelerator curriculum does not get updated.
Be skeptical of any fundraising advice that does not come with a date stamp and a specific context. Including mine. I try to be explicit about what I am seeing right now, in this market, at this stage. If you are reading this in 2028, some of it will be wrong. That is how advice works. It has a half-life, and the people who treat it as permanent truth are the ones who get hurt.
Before following any fundraising advice, ask: who said this, when did they say it, and what were they selling? If you cannot answer all three, the advice is not information. It is noise.
The best fundraising advice I can give is also the least satisfying: there are very few universal rules. Almost everything is context-dependent. Your stage, your market, your metrics, your team, your geography, your timing, your specific investor pipeline. Anyone who gives you a rule that applies to all raises in all markets at all times is either simplifying for content or does not know enough to know they are wrong.
Do the work of understanding your specific situation. Build the pitch that your specific company requires. Target the specific investors whose thesis aligns with what you are building. And be deeply suspicious of anyone who tells you there is a formula.
There is no formula. There is only clarity about what you have, honesty about what you lack, and the judgment to know which investors will see the difference between the two.