YCombinator had its Demo Day this week. There were 100+ startups with an unprecedented breadth. I particularly liked the health informatics/tech-in-bio startups, an area I’ve talked about before.
And with every Demo Day, we at SV Angel and many other investors try to meet and evaluate many of the startups. We try to give advice and help, and one topic we discuss is fundraising.
Advice on fundraising is hard to generalize. For some startups and founders, raising more money is the right thing to do; for others, raising less can be the right thing. It’s all fact-specific and situational. So when you try to give advice that applies to all startups, it starts to sound like a fortune cookie message.
Startup Jackson has the crispest recent advice I’ve seen recently on this topic. Here’s an email I wrote to a startup we funded in 2013 when it was raising its seed round. The founder wanted...