Founder playbooks
What VCs actually read for, broken down for founders raising.
Real numbers from 132 scored decks and 8,665 enriched investors. Story-led, no fluff. Pick a playbook, ship the next email better than the last one.
May 6, 2026
How Long Does a Seed Round Take? 12 Founders Share 2026 Timelines
How long does a seed round take in 2026? We surveyed 12 founders who just closed. Median: 4.5 months. Fastest: 6 weeks. See the full timeline breakdown.
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April 29, 2026
Cold emails are now beating warm intros at pre-seed. Here is what changed.
The conventional wisdom that warm intros beat cold emails is no longer true at pre-seed. Here is the data on what changed and why founders are reaching partners faster cold.
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April 29, 2026
How to research investors without paying Crunchbase $50K a year
Crunchbase is the default investor research tool, but you do not need a $50K/year seat to do real diligence on a fund. Here is the free stack that produces the same intel.
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April 29, 2026
The slide on page 3 kills more raises than the team slide
Most founders agonize over the team slide. The problem slide on page 3 is what actually decides whether the partner reads the rest. Here is what good ones look like.
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May 5, 2026
Every active climate seed VC in 2026, ranked by check size and reply speed
267 climate seed investors ranked by check size, reply time, and whether they still write early checks. Built from founder data and live in 2026.
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May 5, 2026
How to expense Claude Fundraiser through your employer's L&D budget
Most companies cover fundraising prep tools as L&D, alongside conferences, books, and coaching. The justification template, the typical approval rate per tier, and how to file the receipt.
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May 5, 2026
Fintech Series A Investors 2026: Who's Writing Checks, Who's Quiet
The real state of fintech series A investors 2026: who closed new funds, who moved upstream, who's pretending to still write checks. Data from 400+ firms.
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April 28, 2026
9 Claude prompts every founder should have ready before pitching
Nine Claude prompts that handle the highest-leverage parts of a fundraising round, from deck scoring to cold email drafting to mock partner Q and A. Copy and use directly.
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April 28, 2026
The cold email template founders are using to get partner replies in 2026
The cold email format that consistently gets partner replies in 2026, with the 5 lines that matter and the 4 phrases that kill it. Real templates.
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April 28, 2026
The 11-minute investor meeting prep that beats hours of overthinking
A founder-tested 11-minute prep routine for any investor meeting, designed to surface the 3 highest-risk questions and align your deck-side answers in advance.
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April 28, 2026
Why your cold email is reaching the analyst, not the partner, and how to fix it in 90 seconds
Most cold emails to VCs land in an analyst's inbox, never the partner's. The fix takes 90 seconds and three lookup steps. Here is the playbook.
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April 28, 2026
What VCs actually score on, broken down by the 8 dimensions that decide your round
VCs evaluate pitch decks on 8 specific dimensions, and most accelerator-style rubrics get the weighting wrong. Here is the real breakdown with examples of high-scoring slides.
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April 28, 2026
The 23 questions every VC asks during due diligence (with the right answers)
The 23 questions a seed or Series A VC asks during diligence, in the order they ask them, with what they are actually trying to learn and how to answer each one.
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May 4, 2026
132 Decks Scored. 19 Raised. The One Thing They All Did.
I analyzed 132 founder pitch decks and tracked raise outcomes. The 19 that closed had one counterintuitive thing in common. Here's what makes a pitch deck successful.
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May 4, 2026
I tested Claude and ChatGPT on 50 pitch decks. Here's what they saw.
I ran the same 50 pitch decks through Claude vs ChatGPT pitch deck scoring. The results show fundamental differences in how each model reads startup risk.
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May 1, 2026
Every great pitch deck tells the same 5-act story. Here are the acts, in order.
The pitch decks that get funded share a 5-act narrative structure. Most accelerator templates skip the inflection between acts 2 and 3. Here is the structure with examples.
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May 1, 2026
I mapped the email patterns of 8,665 VC firms. 5 patterns cover 95% of them.
Five email patterns cover 95% of all VC firms. Once you know the firm's pattern, you can synthesize any partner's email in under a minute. Here is the breakdown by firm size and stage.
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