The fundraising side of startups is a necessary ingredient / is a lesson that I’ve learned over the last many decades. Only the most accomplished and credentialed technical founders can raise money at a good valuation from good investors without paying homage to the gods of charisma and relationships, and they can only do it for so long until you need a real pitchman in charge.
Ryan Breslow is a master pitchman: he raised a tremendous amount of money for Bolt, a company that is perhaps most famous for its incredible valuation and funding and then its rough path to viability and icky loans to employees. But that doesn’t really matter in the universe of this book: as Ryan states correctly, before you get to a Series A or B round, product-market-fit doesn’t have to matter. Sometimes, if you’re good enough at the fundraising game, you can keep going without PMF even longer than that.
This is a really short book. It’s long enough to benefit from being a book, rather than a very long blog-post, but it’s blog-post-adjacent. And that’s a good thing in this case. It’s an impressively concise and informational book without filler or pretense. It gives useful, applied advice. It’s geniunely informed by experience. It’s a lot less precise than a book like Venture Deals, but for today’s early-stage investing landscape, I think it has almost all of the information you need - the rest is just personality.