As a founder, my observation of seed stage fundraising is that there's a high degree of randomness, or at least most of the factors involved are outside of your

As a founder, my observation of seed stage fundraising is that there's a high degree of randomness, or at least most of the factors involved are outside of your immediate or near-term control. Decisions are mostly based on the excitement investors have for the team and idea. Since excitement is emotional, this can really vary. Decisions can be made based on how the investor's day has gone so far. You would think that success is mostly about your pitch, and if you have great slides, meaningful graphs, and nail the delivery then you get money. It's not like this at all. VC fundraising is not Shark Tank. It's market timing, it's people, it's emotions. There's a saying that seed funding is easy and the money grows on trees, and things don't get hard until the Series A. I think the more nuanced explanation is that when seed funding is successful it is usually easy (the stars aligned!), otherwise it's impossible. This leads to successful founders telling stories about easy seed rounds, but there are probably fifty times as many founders who have failed to raise that just don't talk about it. Here's what Aaron Harris of YC said this year: "Unfortunately, fundraising takes up a lot more time and thought than it should, because it seems like something that should be systematic but is actually chaos, which really confuses people, especially people who are logically brained." (source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZXU84_sGXo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZXU84_sGXo ) Not terribly actionable information, but good for founders to know.