My co-founder and I ran a startup before this, which was also VC-backed, so we had around 6+ years of networking built up from that. You meet hundreds of VCs along the way. So it was never an issue of finding investment for this new venture. It was finding the right investors.

We raised our pre-seed round in 2020 without anything, just a pitch deck, and fully remote. We didn't meet our investors in person until several months after closing on the round.

We raised our Seed this June based on having roughly 100 companies using our product, a good percentage paying us. So while I wouldn't say we raised our Seed round with PMF, we were (and are) showing signs of PMF.

So yeah, our product is a bit past the MVP stage, but not by much. We still have bugs that come up almost every day, and we fix them as fast as we can. However, the product has matured greatly in the last six months.

you have to look like money in the environment you are raising capital in, in which case the networking is more fruitful and your company can be more flimsy.

if you have a different physical look or unfamiliar background, the metrics for your existing company are way more important and the bar is much much higher and the multiples investors accept are way way lower.

or just do a crypto version, which is much more inclusive, global, faster, and leapfrogs this rodeo.

Not the original poster, but economies work in cycles... so eventually money won't be free, and funding won't be so easy.

When that happens, lots of VC-fueled companies will shut down.

In other words, I think it ends with a return to a funding climate similar to 2015-2016 where money was available, but money also wasn't free. And financing rounds were smaller.

Aren't we close to an abundance of energy and thus a huge expansion of the economy?

There will be much more resources that can be bought with money, so money will be worth more, compensating for any bubble that is created right now.