You'll notice a common theme in this (excellent) piece: it's for startups that have some reason to believe they can actually raise a bunch of money. Startups wh

You'll notice a common theme in this (excellent) piece: it's for startups that have some reason to believe they can actually raise a bunch of money. Startups who have either sufficient demonstrable talent behind them, are growing in some interesting way, or some other form of validation. If you can't find some confidence that you're in that group, find a way to delay fundraising: keep your job, do consulting, work on alternate revenue streams, whatever, because fundraising when you're no in the group the bulk of this article applies to - trying to fundraise is hell. Not just hell like "it's really, really hard and frustrating" but hell like you could actually lose yourself in it, like you could actually get destroyed by it.