A founder showed me their pitch deck recently. Beautiful slides, strong narrative. One problem: they were burning $650K a month with four months of runway.
No investor was going to miss that.
A Series A process can take four to six months from first meeting to wire. They weren’t raising from strength. They were raising from “sign or we die,” and investors can sense that over Zoom.
What I told them
- Cut burn to get to 12+ months of runway before the first pitch.
- A smaller round that closes beats a bigger round that doesn’t.
- A bridge from existing investors is a real option, not a failure.
- Timing is a lever. Use it.
Runway is negotiating power
Fundraising from strength isn’t about how good your deck is. It’s about how many months your bank account buys you. The more time you have, the more you can walk away from bad terms, and investors know it.
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