"Let's be honest. Early stage venture is the hot girl thing, right? It's all about how do you be the hot girl at school? There's no art. It's more of an art than a science, but you want to make yourself desirable. There's urgency, there's scarcity. So how do you create urgency? You have a lot of people interested in you."

"You say, all right, this firm average check size, two and a half million times point seven. And you do that for every single firm... And whenever you get to 300% of your target fundraise, then you start the fundraise and then you go down to your high conviction list. That 70%, you call them and say, hey, remember that talk we had two months ago? I'm raising, are you in?"

"If you're constantly blowing up a VC asking for followups nearly every day on your application, it looks desperate. What's so interesting and compelling is when you're persistent and you're actually adding value every time you do a follow up."

"Stats should add to your story. They shouldn't be the basis of your story. If you were describing a problem in numbers and things that you can get on Perplexity or Claude, it's really uncompelling. A lot of founders miss the forest for the trees and they don't zoom out at the holistic big picture of like, what's the story? What's the narrative?"

"We've seen so many founders, they raise the money, they get it in the bank, they freak out because they've never had that many millions in a bank account and they still eat ramen, sleep on a cot, and they refuse to hire the best people because they're trying to maintain their cash burn. It's like no, we're doing this to accelerate your business. Use the money."