How to Get Five Term Sheets in Three Weeks

March 1, 2018. I was about to board my plane back to Toronto after three weeks in the Bay Area when my phone rang.

"We want to present you a term sheet to lead your A round."

I tried to stay calm. I wasn't calm. I was ecstatic — because I had made myself a promise before leaving: I wasn't getting on that plane without a term sheet. We ended up with five, including one from Gradient Ventures, Google's AI fund. Three weeks, five term sheets.

When people hear that, they want to know how.

The honest answer: we did the exact opposite of what we did for our seed round.

First, some context on how bad the seed round was

Raising our seed was the hardest thing I'd done professionally. First time raising money. No professional network — I'd just moved to Canada from Israel. I read every blog post, talked to VCs and founders, and followed their advice.

I did everything wrong.

I took every meeting I could get. I didn't have our story nailed down. I ran no process. Nine months of fundraising. One term sheet.

When it was time for the A, I knew it had to be different. We were lucky to have great seed-stage investors, so I asked for their advice. Two questions: How long did it take your best portfolio companies to raise their A? And how did they do it? The answer: they ran a process, and when done well, it takes a few weeks — not months.

Here's that process.

Step 1: Don't talk to any VCs until you're ready

The biggest misconception in fundraising is that you need to spend months building relationships with investors before you go out to raise. That's what I believed during our seed round, and it's why it took nine months.

The reality: up to a Series C, VCs don't need more than three weeks to decide whether to invest. I know that's the opposite of what you've been told. Ask your own investors — they'll confirm it.

When VCs tell you they want to get to know you better before investing, there are two reasons. One, it's their job to meet companies. Two, it lets them collect more information and de-risk the decision — on your time.

Meeting investors before you're ready to raise is a mistake for two reasons. First, it's a massive time sink — not just the meetings but the follow-up questions, the follow-up meetings, the general orbit. Second, and more importantly: if you're not raising right now, your story isn't ready. And telling a half-baked story has three consequences, all bad:

It creates the wrong first impression. VCs find the holes in your narrative. When you come back with the polished version, they'll probably use those gaps to either not take a meeting or, worse, drag you into a long maybe.

Things change fast at the early stage. The story you tell before you're raising will probably look completely different from the story you tell when you are. You'll look unfocused.

VCs talk. A bad impression in one room travels to the next.

Step 2: Get your act together — really

No VC wants to spend an hour listening to a bad story. They want you to be one of the one to three companies they invest in that year. For that to happen, they need to be genuinely excited. That requires work — real work.

In my experience, building a fundable deck takes around two months and 200 to 300 hours of focused effort. Here's what "ready" looks like:

A deck you've actually stress-tested. Before you talk to a single investor, run your pitch by other founders and friendly VCs. A solid deck at the pre-seed, seed, or A stage covers: problem, solution, why now, product and technology, go-to-market, validation, momentum, competition, TAM, team, financials, and the ask. In that order.

A business data room. Most founders stop at the deck. That's a mistake. VCs will be skeptical of everything you told them — they're supposed to be. They need to validate your story, and they're evaluating multiple companies simultaneously. The easier you make it for them to believe you, the better your odds. Build a shared folder (Google Drive, Dropbox, whatever) and include: the full deck with appendix, every data source and report you referenced, team profiles, cap table, financial projections, 18–24 month budget, customer reviews and feedback from industry leaders, LOIs and contracts with customers if you have them, and user growth projections.

References who are prepped and ready. Every VC will want to talk to your customers before investing. Get their approval before you start the process — and make sure they understand the stakes. Have three to five ready to go. One tactical note: you'll be meeting around 30 VCs, and you can't send all of them to the same references without burning those relationships. Tell investors you're happy to connect them with three customers — but only once you enter due diligence. I never got pushback on this.

The reason I called this step "get your act together" comes from the best compliment I received during our fundraising process. One of the VCs we pitched said: "You guys really have your shit together." That's the bar.

Step 3: Run a process — VCs do, and you should too

Once you're ready, the goal is to create a market for your round. Competition creates urgency. Urgency produces better terms, better pricing, and faster decisions.

Start by building a target list of 30 to 40 VCs. The data point I got from our investors: based on portfolio companies who raised their A rounds by following this exact process, the ratio of meetings to term sheets is 10:1. You want multiple term sheets to have leverage, so the math is clear — you need volume.

Before I walk through the process, here's how VC decisions actually work at almost every North American firm:

First meeting with a partner. Always get to partner level — anything below just adds more stages. If they're interested, you'll hear back within 48 hours. No response in 48 hours means they're not interested. Move on.

Second meeting, usually with a second partner. Same rule — 48 hours or move on.

Partnership meeting. This happens on Mondays and is the most important meeting you'll have. You're presenting to the full partnership. Expect a longer session and harder questions. You'll hear the same day whether they want to proceed to due diligence.

Due diligence. If the partnership meeting goes well, the VC will talk to your customers, meet your leadership team, and go deep on your model. This takes no more than ten days.

Term sheet. If due diligence produces no surprises, you receive a term sheet within ten days of the partnership meeting.

The whole process — first meeting to term sheet — takes three weeks. The only way to create competition is to run your meetings in parallel, not sequentially.

Here's exactly what I did for our Series A:

Used our seed investors to get partner-level introductions at each target fund, reaching out four to five weeks before I wanted to start meeting.

Compressed all first meetings into 14 days — about five meetings a day. I scheduled the firms I was less excited about at the beginning, when my pitch was still rough, and saved the ones I cared most about for when I'd gotten sharper.

Set up all follow-up meetings within the same three-week window.

Stacked the two Monday partnership meetings on back-to-back weeks — five partner meetings each Monday.

Five term sheets. The process works.

Step 4: Close fast

Once you sign a term sheet, the situation can only get worse — not better. That's my personal bias toward urgency, and I believe it completely.

When you sign, you agree on price and terms. You also agree to stop talking to other VCs. If the deal falls apart after that, you've burned runway and you go back to market with a cloud over your head — other investors will wonder what the first VC found out.

I had two close calls. The first: the partner leading our deal left the fund to start his own company just weeks after we closed. The second: we closed our Series B days before COVID-19 hit. In both cases, urgency saved us. We've since heard of multiple rounds that fell apart under those exact conditions — situations you can't predict or control.

Three things that close rounds faster:

Set a closing date upfront with your lawyer and the VC, and hold everyone to it.

Touch base with your lawyer every day. You'd be amazed how many days — sometimes weeks — can disappear in the back-and-forth between counsel on issues that don't actually matter.

Prepare your legal due diligence package before you receive a term sheet. The legal DD process — where lawyers review all your contracts, IP, and corporate documents — is what makes closings take six to eight weeks. Getting your materials together takes about three weeks, and most founders don't start until they have a term sheet in hand. Start before. You'll cut three weeks off your close.

This process works. Most first time founders don't believe it as it is different from everything they know. The reason, what the know comes from investors.