This is a great post. I think one way to look at it is that the process of fundraising kind of sucks, and that it could be more efficient. I agree with this.

This is a great post. I think one way to look at it is that the process of fundraising kind of sucks, and that it could be more efficient. I agree with this. Another way to look at it is that fundraising is one of the easiest parts of building a multi-billion dollar company (and if you're aiming to raise from VCs like A16Z, Sequoia, Greylock, then you need to be building a multi-billion dollar company). The "100% responsibility" mindset for fundraising would involve "owning" all of this difficulty. E.g. getting a deep understanding of the business of fundraising by talking to other founders who have raised recently (much more accessible than VCs, in general), accepting that it's a sales process, accepting that it's hard and that it'll suck, but that there'll be many much harder things. I guess I just react with some concern that readers of this post will take the wrong things away from a post like this. So I wanted to emphasize this perspective: It is hard. Like you note, it should be hard to convince strangers to give you a few million dollars. It would certainly be great if it was purely merit based. But for many (not all) companies, sales is a critical part of success of the business, and fundraising is another sales process - so it's a good approximation. And yes, that's not true of all businesses and it would be better if it was perfectly merit based. I think the most helpful takeaway for readers is that fundraising is hard, and that it should be approached with a mindset of "it's really hard so I'm going to figure out why people succeed and fail at fundraising so that I maximize my chances of success." If readers take away a victim mindset with respect to the difficulty, then they'll find it much harder to succeed in fundraising. I know this isn't really what people want to hear, but fundraising is hard, building a company is harder, you don't have to choose to start a startup.