It's a Game

It's helpful to think of raising money as a game with rules and structure that you can master instead of thinking of it as a crapshoot of random chance.

And you have all the agency in this game in the world. If you cannot get funded - it's very likely YOUR OWN FAULT.

This may sound harsh and not at all what you wanted to hear - but in my +30 years of experience I see these three failure patterns way too often:

• You didn't do the research (or you have an out-of-touch "fantasy" about the market) and the opportunity size of whatever you're doing is never going to be big enough for investors to (be able to) invest
• You were not able to drum up enthusiasm in investors for your thing / your team
• You didn't put in the work required to gather enough interest to build leverage with (aka you did not speak to nearly enough investors, gave up way too early)

So don't be that kind of founder if you want to raise funding. Yes, it's hard work - but hard is table-stakes at the game of creating successful startups (that you have chosen for yourself).

Fundstrapping / Seedstrapping - The exception to the norm

You might have "bought the ticket, and now you're expected to take the ride" - indefinitely until a liquidation event once you've taken the money and closed your first round, but there is a growing (IMO very positive and healthy) trend of "fundstrapping" (sometimes called "seedstrapping") becoming a thing, aka one round and done (with fundraising).

I think this is a great and natural progression (capital need at seed going towards zero) towards more optionality from the get-go and potentially more ownership, and thus control - OWNERSHIP, for the founders. Let the stats and the anecdotal horror stories of investor-control ruining businesses for a quick buck be a guiding light when thinking about your investment strategy and building a future-proof legacy company.

However, this is something you should discuss with your co-founders first and do a plausibility check if it would be at all possible with your intended business model, your burn rate, and the speed needed for execution to succeed.

And it is of course something you should discuss with investors up front, as an important term or expectation for you. The majority of investors (and their investment theses) may not be onboard with this concept.

It most likely would also be a criteria to look for investors by, aka who's already onboard with the "fundstrapping" concept, who's done these deals before?

Also, Business Angels might be more aligned with the concept than VCs.

Watch the first 10 minutes of Travis Kalanick of Uber talk about how he leveraged interest in their funding round:

After the early stages, the funding game changes - and you better have some interesting metrics to show to be able to raise that Series A and beyond