Essay examples --

Most startups that raise bullion do it more than once. A typical trajectory might be (1) to cling started with a few tens of thousands from something standardised Y Combinator or someone angels, then (2) raise a few hundred thousand to a few million to build the company, and then (3) once the company is all the way succeeding, raise one or more later rounds to accelerate growth. pragmatism washstand be messier. Some companies raise money twice in variety 2. Others skip conformation 1 and go straight to phase 2. And at Y Combinator we get an increasing number of companies that come already raised amounts in the hundreds of thousands. But the three phase path is at least the one about which individual startups paths oscillate.This canvas focuses on phase 2 fundraising. Thats the type the startups we fund be doing on Demo Day, and this es set up is the advice we give them.ForcesFundraising is hard in both senses hard like lifting a heavy weight, and hard like solving a moth er. Its hard like lifting a weight because its intrinsically hard to convince people to incite with large sums of money. That problem is irreducible it should be hard. But much of the separate kind of difficulty can be eliminated. Fundraising only seems a puzzle because its an alien world to most founders, and I hope to fix that by supplying a map through it.To founders, the behavior of investors is often turbidpartly because their motivations are obscure, but partly because they deliberately mislead you. And the lead astray ways of investors combine horribly with the wishful thinking of inexperienced founders. At YC were always warning founders about this danger, and investors are probably more careful with YC startups than with other companies they talk to, and even so we witness a... ... the way their sites are organized that they dont really want startups to approach them directly.Intros vary greatly in effectiveness. The vanquish type of intro is from a well-known invest or who has just invested in you. So when you get an investor to commit, ask them to introduce you to other investors they respect. 7 The next best type of intro is from a founder of a company theyve funded. You can also get intros from other people in the startup community, like lawyers and reporters.There are now sites like AngelList, FundersClub, and WeFunder that can introduce you to investors. We advise startups treat them as auxiliary sources of money. Raise money first from leads you get yourself. Those will on average be better investors. Plus youll have an easier time raising money on these sites once you can say youve already raised some from well-known investors.