Jason Yeh

1) Great founders with great fundraising skills 2) Bad founders with great fundraising skills 3) Great founders with bad fundraising skills 1's and 2's get funded. 3's do not, and it hurts to see. That's the problem i'm trying to solve.

RSVP Here -> luma.com/fundraisingema…

i'm excited about my mini lecture on The Art of Fundraising Emails that i'm giving before office hours on Wed join, learn, then ask questions during Office Hours btw here's one of my slides which was inspired by @dsettle's inbox

@Bfaviero @dhaber exactly my thought.

@jayyeh @dhaber The harness is the product!

Have to say, Claude Design is very underrated. Would love access to it via CLI (so I can give my agents access via tool use).

@debgotwired traction can't be averaged out across all types of companies unfortunately. for the most part, product built and with customers are broad definitions of traction... but deeptech is different, biotech is different... consumer vs. b2b different

@jayyeh in all the pre-seed deals you see, what's their average traction?

there are only two modes in fundraising: fully in. or not fundraising at all. no in between. if you're in the process: meetings lined up. back to back. calendar density. all of it. if you're not ready: stop saying you're fundraising. be interesting. build the relationship. activate it later. founders who blur these two modes come across as desperate without urgency. raising without a process. asking without leverage. worst of both worlds. pick a mode. execute it completely.

@dhaber i'd love to know the underlying system prompt that gets it there!

@jayyeh For whatever reason - it seems to generate better quality design via Claude Design vs in Claude Code itself.

@nicomoel it's amazing how many things you can fit into a thesis like "future of work" "american dynamism" "fundamental industries"

They’re mostly just socially acceptable ways to say “we are currently biased toward these three narratives because two companies in that category raised huge rounds recently.” A lot more venture decision-making is emotional, narrative-driven, and momentum-based than people want to admit.

the thesis on a VC's website isn't a roadmap. it's a rejection filter founders spend hours reverse engineering it like it means something. it doesn't what drives a VC's interest is recency bias. what they just saw. what made them lean forward last week. stop fitting yourself into their thesis. start understanding what's actually driving their decisions.

@its_wandering_p this. so much this. good job embracing this

@jayyeh I think a core reason that I am not in a hurry raising money is that there is nothing to show. My personal take is that if there isn't enough information to convince others, the highest ROI thing that one can do is to do actual work instead of raising.

Full episode 🎧 Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/13sNRr… Apple: messenger.com/e2ee/t/8239301… YouTube: youtube.com/watch?v=f3k0sm…

most fundraising prep is wasted effort. your sales narrative is your pitch deck. your recruiter convos are warm intros. your bd calls are investor touchpoints. you're already doing the work.

@ByblosRadar you can be available but you're still not raising ....until you'r eraising

@jayyeh only edge case: staying available while building (not grinding) seems to work fine if you have real leverage

@AlfredoMorenoSS my preferenc e is don't use it until it's pulled out of you

@jayyeh Use VC or not that is the question Everything built Marketing done We need the connection and network effect

@calvinluvsrice bummer!

@jayyeh Nooo. I have plans at 8am that Friday in NYC😭

2 Fridays from now i'm in NYC... join me. running the same deal i always do... buy someone else a coffee and i'll review your quick pitch! RSVP below

Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/3Wv6YJ… Apple: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tbc… YouTube: youtube.com/watch?v=FdJpIu…

fake warmth in a cold email doesn't make it warmer. it makes the ask worse. "i saw you were in japan btw can you intro me to this investor" everyone sees through it. connect or ask. not both in the same email.

@MatthewChang @JoshuaLisec it's a great feeling to know your work has impacted someone. great stuff man

When you pour out your principles into a book, this happens in your DM’s.

@LisaManns6 that's great... now you can distill what they know and use that to help onboard investors that don't have that background so they better understand the full pitch

@jayyeh My ideal investor is also a parent or has been an educator in the last 2 decades. They have felt the pain point.

before you build your investor list, do this first: describe your ideal investor. not by check size. by profile. what did they live through that makes them get it without any background? the right investor doesn't need to be convinced. they already believe it. you just have to find them.

organizing a great networking dinner is weirdly good practice for fundraising. it's one of my fav projects to assign to founders lotsa similarities and the same trap too: everyone wants to chase the 1-2 “perfect” names instead of building a real target list and running a process don't go elephant hunting. run a process