Anatomy of a $1M Seed Round

The meat of the presentation is this graph:

http://brendanbaker.co/anatomy.pdf

Everything about that just makes my skin crawl. Each of those contacts is programs not getting written, customers not getting talked to, A/B tests not getting run, etc etc. I accept that fundraising is necessary for a certain class of companies, but egads, any graph that looks like that needs radical corrective capitalism.

On the plus side, it looks like AngelList is helping out on that score. I rather expect that YC & etc have similar effects.

If anything ever proves just how distracting raising money is, this is it.

Calling potential investors a "waste of time" just because they didn't invest or grant you further connections is a little harsh.

Its just like saying all the girls you hit on that simply weren't attracted to you were all "wasting your time", and you make some fancy graphs on the ones that do sleep with you in big green circles.

It makes you look like a pick up artist trying to find the best way to score a girl and make everyone else look bad.

Dup: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2490745

This is an amazingly detailed preso with great insights. The only thing is that the conclusions could be more clear cut.

omg, dunno but before investing so much time and effort into raising money you are probably better off with just building out your product.

Basically for a small team this means you cant work on your project for weeks if not months.