Stop Building Relationships with Investors Before You Raise

When I raised for the first time, I followed the number one piece of advice every first-time founder gets: build relationships with investors many months before you actually go out to raise. Get on their radar. Warm up the room.

I spent months doing it. I took every coffee meeting I could get. I followed up. I stayed in touch.

I've since learned two things: the advice is BS, and only investors give it.

Investors don't need more than three weeks to decide whether to invest in you. They can do it in a few days. That's true for any raise from pre-seed to Series C — from $500K to $50M. I know that's the opposite of what you've been told. Ask your own investors if you don't believe me.

Worse, building those relationships early can actively hurt your raise.

Two ways premature relationship-building damages you

It wastes your most valuable resource. You don't need relationships to fundraise. You need a great story and a solid process. That's it. If you don't need to invest hundreds of hours in relationship-building, don't. That time goes back to building your company — which is the only thing that actually makes your story worth telling.

It lowers your valuation. Your fundraising story should only be told when it's ready. At each stage of growth, getting the story right takes at least 200 hours of work. Tell it before it's ready and you give investors the wrong first impression. That matters more than most founders realize — because VCs talk to each other, and first impressions are sticky. In the early stages especially, when your story changes constantly, telling it too early means the version investors remember is worse than the version you'll have when you're actually ready to raise.

So why does everyone tell you to do it?

If early relationship-building hurts founders, why do investors keep recommending it? Two reasons — neither of which are in your interest.

They get more information. There's an inherent information asymmetry in venture investing. Nobody knows your company like you do. The more time investors spend with you before you're raising, the more data they collect to evaluate whether to invest — at your expense in time and story quality.

It's their job to fill their calendars. Investors make only a handful of investments per year. In between, their productivity is measured by how many companies they're seeing. Meeting founders — even ones who aren't raising — is how they stay active. What's good for their pipeline is not good for yours.

This is one of the few places in the startup world where the incentives of investors and founders point in completely opposite directions. They're not giving you bad advice maliciously. They're giving you advice that happens to be good for them.

Don't follow it.

Build your company. Perfect your story. Then run a tight three-week fundraising process and close your round.

That's it.