How Big Should Your Round Be?

0:00 The Funding Table: GoldCapital Consulting podcast

[Cold open - highlights from the episode.]

0:41 Can I raise funding before I have a product?

Max: Hey everyone, and welcome back to The Funding Table, episode two. For those that are new here, this is a show where we discuss all things venture capital, startups, and raising money, with the hope that you avoid some of the costly mistakes we made on our journey. We have a doozy of an episode for you today. Last time we went a little long, so here's a sneak peek of what's coming. First, the rise of the mega Series A round - unicorns at Series A - and what that means for you as a founder raising a Series A or even earlier. Then we'll get into the VC mindset: how they determine how much money you should be raising, and what that means for your dilution, your runway, and all sorts of inside game from the mind of our resident VC, Sam Poon. And finally, we'll answer some of the most commonly asked questions we get, whether from folks considering becoming clients or from our active clients. With that, let's go around the table for brief intros. As the host, I'll go first. My name is Max Goldberg. I'm a two-time exited startup founder, Techstars alum, and former investment banker, and currently the founder and managing partner of GoldCapital Consulting, where we help early-stage startups raise capital. Turning it over to you, Mike - welcome back.

Mike: Thank you for having me. Multi-time founder myself. I run a firm called First Time Founder Capital, where we work with early-stage founders, helping them get to the point where they're both investable and investor-ready.

Max: Welcome back - and we'll be talking all about getting investor-ready today. Over to you again, Sam. Second episode, how are you feeling?

Sam: Feeling great, happy to be here. A little bit about me: Sam Poon. I was on the venture capital side - the good guys, right? I sourced companies, ran diligence, and sat in the investment committee meetings where we decided whether a startup actually got funded. I worked with GPs who were among the earliest and largest investors in the Facebooks, Venmo, Uber, Beyond Meat - and one who actually came out of NASA.

Max: Amazing, welcome back. And last but not least, once again - Cameron Owen.

Cam: Appreciate you having me back on. I'm Cam. I'm an exited founder, but I bootstrapped - I've never raised a single dollar of venture capital or any investment dollars. So, sympathizing with you all, I'm the one who talks to most of the early-stage startup founders, and what I do is bring their burning questions to the funding table.

Max: Before we get into it, because I forgot to share this last time: if you have any feedback, topics you'd like us to cover next episode, or questions for us, drop them in the comments. Hit the like button and subscribe - it really helps us share this content for free. With that, our first topic: a quick gut-answer round check, tight answers from each of us. If you're a founder raising money right now, pre-seed, and you're pre-product or your product's in an early beta - how much money should you actually be raising? Mike, start us out.

Mike: 18 to 20 months of runway. The actual number? It's really dependent on the startup, but I'd say anywhere from one to two and a half million.

Cam: I'd dare maybe slightly more than that. My thought process: if you can get two and a half, you can probably get three. So I'll go one to three - I'll bump it up just a tad.

Max: Sam, you've heard a lot of these pitches lately. If you're completely pre-product as a founder, how much should you actually be looking to raise?

Sam: I'll actually give you a number. My gut answer is $2 million, at most. Honestly, the bar is so high nowadays - and sometimes it's even less, because you can do so much more with less money, and the expectation is higher because of it. It's enough to find out if you're wrong - and that's the riskiest, most uncertain moment there is for an investor. I echo what Mike said about 18 to 24 months of runway, and on team: three people, max. More money past that might buy you more time to iterate on your product - or it might buy you more time to be wrong, if you don't have that urgency. So it depends - but I said $2 million and I'm sticking with it.

Max: The reason I ask it that way: a lot of folks who inquire about working with us ask exactly this - how much money should I be raising? - and a lot of them are pre-product. What you're hearing is a range: one, two, three million. No crazy moonshot answers. The right answer is really a function of what that capital gets you, and how fast it accelerates you to product-market fit. It's not an easy answer.

Cam: Max, let me flip the question. What I'd ask immediately is: if you're not hardware, why are you pre-product? The leverage is so high. If you are a former dishwasher at an IHOP, you can hop onto Lovable right now and make a prototype that works. So if you're coming into a call with an investor - or even talking to us - and you have absolutely nothing, you're probably not in a position to be raising money right now. And frankly, it suggests your resourcefulness might not be that great. I'd say having no product is completely unacceptable in 2026 and beyond.

Mike: On the software side, yeah - though there are a couple of caveats. If you're building in AI infrastructure - we'll talk about this shortly - or in biotech, or some physical AI robotics company, you don't necessarily need to ride in on the back of a robot you built while bootstrapping. But if you're not in market, if you don't have the prototype or the product, you'd better have some proof of interest from the market - or it's going to be exceptionally difficult to get any investor dollars.

Cam: I'll make it easier for you, too: if you don't have the time to build your product to the level where you can get in front of somebody, you definitely don't have time to go talk to investors right now. You're going to get told no a whole bunch of times and they'll say "come back later." Let me save you all that time.

Max: And Mike, we both know we've dealt with a client who had a robotics company, and investors expected that individual to have a robot. Whether you make it in your garage or it's tin foil and sprockets - you're going to need something. That's generally the case in 2026 and beyond.

7:53 Why are Series A rounds so huge in 2026?

Max: Transitioning here - a very new trend has emerged, and it's accelerated over the past six to eight months: the dawn of the mega Series A round. The data shows it's harder than ever to get to Series A - the traditional Series A investors aren't really there for a lot of companies struggling through the traditional seed-to-A progression. And this week, a basically no-name company - I'd never heard of it, and I don't think many people had - raised at a billion-dollar valuation at Series A. Mike, dive into the headline, what happened, and the implications for everyone earlier-stage listening today.

Mike: First, let me go around the horn: have you guys heard of this little thing called AI compute? Heard anyone talking about that for the last six months, non-stop? There are always going to be these hot trends - specific niche aspects of a hot industry that garner the most investor interest - and that's where we see monster rounds like this $150 million one. The company started in 2024. They're an AI infrastructure company focused on compute: effectively they let their customers dynamically adjust consumption at data centers instead of always being on - working with the grid so we don't run into a Texas-in-winter situation where the grid completely fails. Everyone's been saying "we don't want data centers in our backyard - too much water, too much energy, what about the climate." A company coming in to fix that, which already has five deployments, is going to garner immense interest. They raised $150 million at a $1.05 billion valuation. They're two years old. Insane. They'd raised about $70 million prior, including a roughly $25 million strategic round in March of '26 - a very quick turnaround. And they now have massive names on the cap table and as strategic advisors: Samsung, Nvidia, John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins, even John Kerry - remember An Inconvenient Truth? These investors are talking about compute constantly; it's what they're worried about for the next 24 months. If they can invest in a company, get the upside, and fix that problem for themselves - it's a no-brainer. The $150 million was oversubscribed, led by DCVC and Energize - big names in hardware and deep tech.

Sam: What does that $150 million actually buy them? What does it unlock for that company - what does the definition of success look like? It's a huge amount of money to deploy.

Mike: It's massive - and I see them 4x-ing that raise in the next 16 months, maybe less. That's my prediction. They've already tested this, seen it work, deployed it, de-risked it to an extent. They're raising the $150 million to capture as much market share as they can - they're going global, that's effectively what they've said. And AI infra is not cheap. What some consider an enormous amount of money that could last the average company 15 years is likely going into global deployment in the next three to six months.

Max: Is that a Series A, though? Correct me if I'm wrong, Sam - you've seen Series Bs and Cs that resemble this, in both capital raised and valuation. Go back a couple more years and this looks like a Series D. A billion-dollar valuation in two years. Is this really a Series A, or a redefinition of what Series A actually is?

12:51 What do VCs expect at Series A?

Sam: Is it a Series A or a new definition? Kind of like how Robin Thicke sang it - I hate these blurred lines. That's exactly what it is. A Series A nowadays is less of a stage; I think of it as a price point, and the expectations that come with it. You can find the statistics online, and Mike alluded to it: if you're an AI infrastructure company or a foundational model, your A round is in the hundreds of millions. If you're a non-AI company, you're raising sub-100. Same stage, different planet. So if you're a founder reading this headline, figure out which planet you're operating on. If you're a foundational model or working on infrastructure, that's the market expectation right now. If AI is just a component - read the headlines, then come back down to earth a little.

Mike: For these so-called mega rounds, this is more marketing. For companies like this, "Series A" just means the first major institutional round - historically it was called Series A. It's like OpenAI's ex-CTO raising a billion-dollar seed. That's not seed money - that's just a label. For everyday founders, the ones not building AI infrastructure alongside Nvidia, see this as a marketing ploy: they want to come in splashy, with big names, and call it Series A because they're going for a monstrous Series B - which will be another marketing ploy. Bringing it back down to earth: Series A has changed over the last year and a half. Three years ago, you could go into a Series A with a million in ARR and feel fairly confident you were at the front of the pack. I'd say three and a half times that is the base expectation these days. Which is why, on the question you asked at the beginning, I answered in months - because of this additional ARR requirement, it's often taking startups closer to 20 months to get from seed to Series A, versus the 12 to 16 that was typical two and a half years ago.

Max: It's funny you say that - I remember being in Techstars with a managing director at a whiteboard showing that, historically, $10,000 in ARR could get a pre-seed done, and $100K got you a seed. The numbers were so small. It's a little scary. We're not building venture-backable startups right now ourselves, so we sometimes don't realize how hard this would be if we were raising - we work with clients, but we can never feel the pain, or the fear, as much as the founder does. We have a real respect for that. And there are stories out there - I just read a piece about a founder with a billion-dollar company, already a unicorn, growing 30% year-over-year at nine-figure ARR, who's miserable because he's not growing at the 10x rate that's expected now. So help me get my bearings: is this growth anomalous, or is it the new normal you have to live up to - or is it a sign of the frothiness we're seeing?

Mike: It's tricky. I'd say it's not the new normal - a small number of companies are growing at that rate. The tricky piece is: will investors pay attention to something that isn't seeing that growth? You can be a really strong, healthy company building something exceptional at 40% year-over-year growth and be doing all right - but it begs the question of whether investors will scoff at 40%, even though it's generally healthy.

Cam: I'll jump in quickly. My thought is: who is that the new normal for? Founders, especially when I talk with them, often compare themselves to companies they're not even close to being anything like - and then they feel that's the new normal for them. This goes back to the question we answered last week about how much to lean into AI and whether you're really an AI company. Who actually needs to think "I should be growing at all costs," versus people who can say "I don't need to claim those metrics - I can still raise a serious round where I'm at right now"? Sam - any sectors in particular that should be wary of these mega-round headlines?

Sam: An investor knows the market goes through ebbs and flows. Mike asked whether investors will pay attention - well, you don't hear much about down rounds recently, and I'm starting to think that's a cause for concern, because everyone is exuberant and thinks everything just goes up. To answer your question, Cam: I'm skeptical for founders who read into the headlines too much. Either way, you're still selling on average 20% of the company. The rounds and valuations might get larger, but that just means you're giving the same dilution to your investors while the promise and the expectation go up. So for the non-AI-infrastructure, non-foundational-model startups: pay attention, be wary, look internally at your goals. Don't compare yourself - and don't over-index and say "that's what my round's going to be," because that bar is only getting higher.

Max: Use it as fuel. Don't use it as a reason to be upset waking up every morning not seeing that growth. There's always going to be someone richer than you, someone with the new thing, someone with the greater valuation. Unless you're Elon - he's probably the one case where he can't think that way. That must be depressing.

20:04 How do VCs actually value my startup?

Max: Sam, I want to dive deeper. You worked at a venture fund for years, with various general partners. If a founder comes and asks for $2 million, how does the fund actually determine whether that's a sensible amount to raise? I mean the technical side - target ownership percentages, dilution, how it maps out. Go a bit deep.

Sam: How does a venture capitalist really think about a founder's ask? That's a loaded question. There's a whole thing about VCs bragging about themselves, but it's true - I was diligent about this my entire venture career, and it's something I teach now. Here's the thing most founders don't know: the fund doesn't start with your number. They start with theirs. Before they've even read your deck, they know what they need in terms of ownership - say 15 to 20% of that round - and whether they lead or not is another aspect. They do that because of how their fund math works. If they're not leading, they might participate with some flexibility, but at the end of the day, a founder's ask is sometimes a formality. Then we get to the fun part: the stress test. Investors stress-test everything - your story, your sector, where you actually are versus where you say you are, your goals. We model it internally against the average round size for your stage, look at what our ownership would be, whether we'd participate in future rounds, roughly estimate where the company lands and what the return looks like. The whole model runs before anyone's even fallen in love with your company.

Max: So for a traditional lead investor - a larger fund, Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst, the names people think are the only investors out there - what are the back-of-the-napkin target ownership percentages? And on the emerging-manager or family-office side, what are they targeting at these early rounds?

Sam: The leads will take anywhere from 30 to 50% of the round, maybe a little higher. The participants can be as low as 5% - sometimes lower - but 5 to 10% of the round would be the range.

Max: So on a round selling roughly 20% of the company, that's about 8 to 12% of the company for the leads, and maybe 3 to 7% for the non-lead investors?

Sam: Yeah - sometimes even as low as two. Your math checks out. One last thing: you have two different mathematical equations going on. A founder looks at it bottoms-up - what do I need for 18 months to reach these milestones? An investor looks at it top-down - what do I need to own? When those don't reconcile, it's already a mismatch. When a founder hears "not a fit" - they hear many things from investors - sometimes it's just arithmetic.

Cam: Can I ask you this, Sam - staying on ownership percentage? I speak to a lot of people from Australia, the UK, Europe - basically outside the US - but the VCs with this risk appetite mostly reside in the US. How are they pricing it, from an ownership percentage or check size perspective, when the company is outside the US? In almost any industry, your business probably has to have some presence in the US, and at least be enticing to US investors. How do they look at that - and does it take more money?

Sam: Great question. The risk tolerance of US investors is very different from the risk appetite of investors outside the US. If you're a non-US founder, or a VC investing in non-US companies, it's pretty much the same math - just a different input. The ownership targets are basically universal. What changes, Cam, as you alluded to, is the price. For non-US companies the pricing is often lower - but the ownership target stays exactly the same.

Mike: Let me follow up on that, because I also have conversations with a lot of founders outside the US. It's a lot more typical for a founder to come to us saying "we're raising 500K at a $6 million post-money," versus a US founder saying "we're raising two at twelve." From a US VC's perspective investing globally - is that already baked into the mindset, or do they see those deals and think "you're raising way too little"? Does it carry an inherent risk that turns US investors off?

Sam: Really good question - whether raising too little makes a US investor push back or just pass. It goes back to market expectations and what we see with rounds: it's the use of funds. 500K could be okay, but for the most part it is not. The use of funds implies a certain number of engineers, you might spend half on marketing, and then you think about founder salaries - and the story doesn't align. You're effectively describing two different companies: your actual company, and the company the raise is for. We're trained to see that misalignment - and when we do, we think: they're throwing out a number; they don't know their business or their sector well enough. That misalignment comes up way more often than you think.

Max: And to quickly lay one to rest - we've had a lot of folks overseas, primarily the UK, wondering: should I raise in US dollars or pounds? If you're talking to investors in your backyard, it's pounds; in the US, it's US dollars - why would a US investor take a hit on the exchange? The broader question is whether you raise from UK investors at all, or position your ask in US dollars. If a million pounds is what unlocks your milestones, convert it - call it 1.2, 1.3 million US - and if you're dealing with American investors, the ask should probably be in US dollars. One caveat: YC is laying the groundwork to fund companies in stablecoins, so there may be a point soon where deals aren't funded in legal tender at all. Imagine what that does to Circle's stock ticker.

29:11 How much money should I raise for my startup?

Max: Pushing along - we've been talking about the questions founders ask us, and Cam is the head honcho on what's on the mind of the people. You hear questions all day. In the last week, I'm sure someone asked you some version of "how big should my round be?" Give us a question a real lead asked while evaluating us, and we'll unpack it.

Cam: It's a bunch of variations of the same thing: how much should I raise? I went back to find an actual line, and the question was basically: "Give me your thought process on how to raise the right funds without giving up too much percentage too early on." They followed up with: "I want to raise the right amount - without being too liquid after I get it in." So: they want the amount to fit in a VC's eyes, they don't want to raise just to let it sit there, and they don't want to give up too much. Ultimately it boils down to: how much should I raise? I'd love to hear your answers - and I have a follow-up after this one.

Mike: Let me start with "how much should I raise." This is a moving target - the market is different every single day. What isn't moving is the fundamentals of your business. So they're thinking about it correctly: you don't want to raise for raising's sake. You want the money going to the correct allocations, hitting specific milestones where investors see you as a clear-cut winner at the next stage - then add 10-20% working capital on top, because things happen. You don't want to shutter the doors because your compute bill spiked or an engineer went wild on Claude. Reverse-engineer it. Look at the market - you don't want to be raising 500K when the average is 6 million. Look at the right investors and their minimum check sizes: if their target ownership is 15% and they write million-dollar minimums, your 500K raise is not a fit. Architect it with that in mind. At the end of the day: what are your milestones? What revenue, user growth, customer base are you targeting in the next 12 months, and how do you get there? Don't throw numbers at a dartboard with your eyes closed.

Max: This idea of milestones keeps coming up, so let me give some free game - this is the stuff we discuss on deck-work calls with clients. When you raise a round, you're not raising so 10% goes to legal and 80% to a pie chart that tells an investor nothing. You're raising to unlock two, three - three is a great number - or four core objectives. What will the business look like, and why is capital the true bottleneck to those milestones? That's why you raise. A year ago, founders would say "I'm going to hire two full-time engineers" - and payroll used to be an agreed-upon use of capital. Now you not only need fewer technical hires; in some cases you don't even need a traditional CS background - you can self-teach and figure it out. Investors now have a consensus view that you should not be spending their money on payroll alone - you should be cutting payroll and staying lean. The fashions keep changing - token maxing and all these great things, and six months later we've moved on again. Honestly, we do this every day and even I sometimes wonder what investors want to back next. But one milestone has to be revenue, right? If you don't have a revenue target for the next 12 months, that's probably the most important thing missing.

Mike: I'll cut in - not sorry at all: if revenue is not part of your unlock for this specific round over the next 12 months, there had better be a damn good reason why. There are situations where user growth is significantly more important - you capture as much market as possible, then turn on revenue. But if you come in with no idea of how or when revenue turns on, that's a problem.

Cam: How do I paint that picture to an investor, though? Say I'm early, getting users on, and I genuinely don't want to overthink revenue yet - I just want people on the platform. I know 50% of my ask goes to marketing and distribution. But I don't have any of it yet - so how could I possibly predict where that lands me on revenue? I don't want to show investors too little or too much. That's what people are struggling with: yes, I need revenue - but how do I show it when I have no revenue and no clue what the metrics are?

Sam: Let me answer the dilution question quickly first, because these connect. It surprises a lot of people: dilution at seed and Series A hasn't really moved in the past few years. That goes back to valuations and ownership - a bigger valuation just means a bigger check for the same slice of the pie. The way you protect your ownership isn't pushing the cap; it's raising only what the next milestone actually needs - what Mike just said. Think less about the equity you give up and more about the milestones, the expectations, the promises. The slice might get smaller, but the pie gets bigger for everybody - and remember the Airtable example from last episode: that $12 billion came down to a fraction of it. The pie actually has to grow, or you're cooked. Pun fully intended. On your revenue question, Cam: we live in the era of AI - you can create with less, and it's less spray-and-pray, more land-and-expand. Some investors don't fund your idea of a product; they fund whether you can convince customers and whether you actually know your vertical. And if you don't - I wouldn't broadcast that - think about how other businesses make money. Transactions? A marketplace take rate? Usage-based, which a lot of AI companies lean on? Seat-based? The cop-out answer is "we'll have ads." Think about how other sectors monetize and apply it to your business.

Max: I made that exact advertising mistake, so let me give you the rule of thumb to self-select: take advertising out of your deck unless this is true - if you could not one day be a top-10 website or app on the internet by traffic, an ad model will not work for your business. That's the test. It has to be extremely broad social-networking scale, or a problem that applies to literally every human being. Otherwise an ad model is never truly viable at scale.

Sam: When I said marketing, I could see Max's light bulbs going off. It's a cop-out answer unless you're intentional with it - it needs to be super compelling, or an investor thinks, I see this all the time: you don't know what you're doing.

Max: And you can't sit there saying "the investors don't get it" while showing up with zero revenue, zero unit economics, and zero tests, like it's "either I raise this money or I jump off a cliff." There's an in-between: take out your credit card and run some ads, at minimum to get a sense of your channels and customer acquisition costs. We've told so many clients this. And don't tell me that's leverage - it's a credit card; you're paying it off in 30-45 days anyway. If you're an app, run a broad test audience on Meta or Instagram or TikTok. If it says $7 to acquire a user, chances are you can cut that at least in half with some skill. At $3 a user - fantastic. At $50 - you know that with iteration you can probably cut it by half or more. At least you now have a starting point to work backward from: if it costs a dollar to get a user and I need a million users to prove out my next round, that literally walks you back to the amount you should be raising. This doesn't need to be hocus-pocus pulled out of thin air. There is a formula - there's a way to do this in a spreadsheet. It's startling how many founders think these numbers are completely random.

Cam: Dive into unit economics for a second - a lot of people don't really understand what that means, or proof of concept. That's exactly why I get this question: "How would I know my revenue if I don't have any revenue and don't know how much I can get?"

Max: Unit economics are the fundamental cost and revenue metrics you can actually do math with. If I have a cookie business, I need to know the cost of my flour per pound, the chocolate chips, and what I can sell one cookie for. Then I can multiply out: what if I sell a thousand cookies, a million cookies - how many pounds do I need? It's the most fundamental accounting of what you have: what can you sell one unit for, and what do all the inputs cost? Then you can run real scenarios in a spreadsheet - push it to the extreme and see how big it can get and how healthy the business is on profitability. It's common sense to an extent - but it also helps to pressure-test with someone who's been in these rooms. Sometimes you're so close to the problem you lose the bigger picture. That's why people work with us - and it ain't cheap, Mike.

Mike: A wind tunnel of your own making, is what I call it. Especially with pitch decks - the number of iterations when it's just you going back and forth with yourself, or with your co-founder. Version 85 before you know it. It can get nutty.

43:54 Should I raise more money than I need?

Cam: A question based on what we've discussed. Say I've got a sense of my unit economics and I land on a number - whatever it is. Do I err on the side of caution and raise slightly less, in case I overjudged? Or go for a little more than I was thinking? The baseline question: is it better to raise too much or too little - to ask for too much or too little?

Max: Too much, for sure. It's called burn for a reason - but you don't have to spend the money. In a frothy cycle like this there's a tendency not to know how much to raise, but also to raise as much as you can, and I subscribe to the idea that you don't have certainty about capital in the future - you may have it today. You'd be kicking yourself if, 18 months from now, you could have raised millions more and really needed it - something's working, the go-to-market clicked, and now the window has shifted and you're in purgatory. There's not a lot you can do in that situation. And what's the yield on a money market or treasuries right now - three and a half percent, almost 400 basis points? You'll actually bring in income off that balance. A couple hundred grand a year on a couple million in the bank ain't too bad.

Cam: Sam, Mike - your thoughts. More or less?

Sam: I could talk about this all day, so I'll keep it short: it's better to raise more, to a degree, because of the promise and the expectation. And here's a word you don't hear often anymore - down rounds. If you get one, you're screwing yourself over in the future.

Cam: Can you quickly explain what that is? Nobody knows what that means.

Sam: A down round: say you raise your Series A at a $100 million valuation, you don't reach your revenue metrics, and investors are no longer as hot on your business - but you need capital to keep going. You go back to existing investors, or to new ones, for your Series B, and you have to raise it at a $70 million valuation. That is a horrible signal for investors - it reads as "they might be dying and on their way out."

Mike: To answer your question, Cam - I hate to be consensus here, but raise more. What happens if you stumble on something in three months that's the magical key to your business, but you don't have the capital to allocate toward it because you raised exactly the right amount to hit a specific number? What happens if you rent an office and have to break the lease? You don't want to put your business on the line because you modeled exactly what it would cost to hit a million users and didn't factor in the oh-no costs.

Max: We've all made the mistake of being too firm with numbers and valuation caps. The reality is this is a market - an equity capital market. You go out and see what the market will meet you at. You can do all the planning in the world, but as soon as you actually go out to raise, that plan is likely shot, and you see what happens. If the market isn't meeting your ask, that's not necessarily discouraging - it might mean the narrative needs to get tighter and cleaner, or you're not speaking to the right investors for your stage. It happens all the time - sometimes you're spending all your time with junior folks at a fund who were never going to get a deal done, or the competition's too steep. There are so many variables, so testing is your best friend - and make sure you're actually learning from the mistakes as they arise. Let me wrap this segment with a macro question. We have crazy amounts of money going into companies at crazy valuations - and as a byproduct, a lot of folks are finding it harder than ever to raise because they don't have the metrics to benefit from the frothiness. On a macro level: is this a positive for the normal founder or not?

Mike: It's a distraction. It's a headline. That company's CEO was part of the Biden administration on the energy side - he has all the connections - and the other co-founder came from an enormous background. There will be these anomalies, these outliers where all the stars align. That doesn't mean you're building a bad business, and it doesn't mean you can't raise at a significantly lower valuation than $1.05 billion after two years. Chasing it is like being five years old and wanting to be in the NBA. Go out and raise at a normal valuation. Understand what your business needs. Don't benchmark yourself against the outliers - you're not Anthropic, you're not Nvidia, you're not OpenAI. And if you go out trying to raise at a huge valuation pre-market, pre-revenue, you'd better have a very specific star aligning to make that happen.

Cam: But doesn't that trim founders' wings, in a sense? I don't think those founders expected to be in that position either. I don't know if the right takeaway is "cut my ambition and don't aspire to build those companies" - you could build that company, and it's more possible to build a hypergrowth business now than ever before. Yes, it's a distraction, and it can mess with your head, because the odds are incredibly unlikely. But we know the game we're playing: when you raise this kind of money, you're trying to build a rocket ship. There's a fine line between knowing it's unlikely and still dreaming you can build it - because if you don't believe, you don't get those outcomes. That's what's held Europe back - people will hate me for that - founders come here because they believe, and occasionally it comes true, and it creates a lot of jobs. I wouldn't want to be buying a house in San Francisco with the 5,000 new millionaires and centimillionaires. It's still possible. You've got to be a visionary - but come to the game with a little pragmatism too.

Mike: Right - and if you have it, go for it. If you're in a position to raise that kind of money and deploy it beneficially, go for it. High beta.

Sam: I liked "distraction," but I'm going to say bad - and not for the reasons people think. It's not that the money isn't real; it's that it's spoken for, by the infrastructure and foundational-model companies with genuinely capital-intensive needs. And the headlines raise everyone's expectations while the actual number of checks goes down. To use another sports analogy after your 5-year-old NBA one: Nadal, my favorite tennis player, said something like - if you're looking at your neighbor's house and his yard is bigger, that's one thing. But if you're trying to ride the tides and the waves and you're ill-equipped, that's not going to go well either. So my answer is: bad.

53:47 Round size advice from GoldCapital Consulting

Max: Gentlemen, this was a really natural extension of the first episode. We've covered how much you should be raising, how much is too much, valuations, and the discrepancies international founders face raising here. Next episode - releasing Wednesday at 6 PM Eastern - we change focus to a very controversial topic: how do I actually get meetings with investors? Secretly, in the back of your mind, that's what most of you are waiting for us to answer - and it's what the people who talk to us are looking for. Fortunately we have Mike, who has essentially obsessed over this exact concept for half a decade. We'll talk about whether you have to go through warm introductions or whether you can go cold. Do cold emails work? Do cold email softwares work? Do brokers who send millions of cold emails work? I'm obviously loading the question. We'll talk about warm intros, why they're essential to the fundraising process and why we've built our consultancies around them - and cold, why it could work in some cases. And how AI is killing, or maybe not killing, the cold email itself, and how to get smart if you're trying to do this on your own. It'll be a little controversial, and we'll probably call some folks out, because that'll be fun.

Cam: A little spicy.

Max: A little spicy. Gentlemen, as always - fantastic conversation. This is The Funding Table, episode two. If you got any value from this, please smash the like button. Right, Mike?

Mike: Smash that like button, baby. Subscribe, and turn on that little bell thingy so you get notified when we release new episodes.

Max: I'm loving these. Thanks for tuning in, guys, and thanks to everyone at home. This was fun. Thanks, team.