Alex Roetter

Why Raising Venture Capital Feels Like Going on First Dates... I just got off a meeting hosted by Fidelity Private Shares and Metal and moderated by Kristen Craft and Adam Roberts. It was an incredible discussion about the transition from pre-seed to seed, what investors are actually looking for, and the realities founders face during the fundraising process. But while listening to the conversation, something hit me that I’ve been noticing for a while now. Raising venture capital feels a lot like dating. And the parallels are kind of hilarious. When you pitch a VC, it’s essentially a first date. You want to highlight the positives. You want to show confidence. You want to be optimistic about the future. But if you come across too eager, too polished, or too desperate, it’s a turnoff. Sound familiar? On the flip side, if you’re too pessimistic or overshare all the risks too early, you can scare people away before they’ve had a chance to see the bigger vision. Dating advice and fundraising advice suddenly start sounding identical: • Be confident, but not arrogant • Be honest, but not overly self-deprecating • Show ambition, but don’t oversell Then there’s the follow-up game. After a pitch, maybe the VC doesn’t respond immediately. So the founder asks the same question someone asks after a first date: How long do I wait before following up? One day? Three days? A week? And just like dating, double-texting energy is real. Send too many follow-ups with no substance and suddenly you’re the founder version of: “Hey… just checking in 🙂” Which is rarely a good look. The funniest parallel came when the VCs talked about turning founders down. Often they really like the team. They like the vision. But the market isn’t big enough or the timing isn’t right. And instead of giving a clean “no,” founders sometimes hear things like: “We love what you’re building, but the timing isn’t right for us.” or “We just don’t have the capital allocated for this right now.” One of the speakers said something that stuck with me: If a VC really wants to invest, they’ll find a way. Which again sounds exactly like dating advice. When someone is truly interested, the signal is clear. They make time. They follow up. They lean in. When they’re not, the responses start sounding suspiciously like a polite breakup. At the end of the day, fundraising really is a two-way relationship. Founders are looking for partners who believe in the vision. Investors are looking for founders they trust to execute. And just like dating, the goal isn’t to convince everyone. It’s to find the right match. Huge thanks again to Haley Bryant of Hustle Fund and Renny M. of First In for sharing their insights during today’s discussion, it was incredibly valuable. For any founders out there raising right now… Stay confident, keep building, and remember: Sometimes fundraising isn’t about pitching better. It’s just about finding the investor who’s actually ready to say yes. --Lucas

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An important discussion in venture capital these days is the industry's shift towards consensus investing and its fusion with politics and government at scale. We've been thinking / writing about those shifts for years and now the discussion is heating up. In my essay below (link in first comment) I discuss how consensus capital and the “venture industrial complex” funnel money toward incremental sameness—and why heresy still matters. Some core themes are: • Convergence across culture, tech, and policy reduces variance and outliers. • Big Venture coordinates capital, regulation, and narratives; small funds must adapt. • Alpha hides in scarcity bottlenecks (e.g. trust, provenance, energy), unregulated domains, and ideas that spark controversy / disagreement A shout out to my team members Jonatan H. Luther-Bergquist and Alex Patow and Bob Shapiro for the discussions at our offsite this year; Also Cem Sertoglu who asked the right questions at our AGM. Thanks to our colleagues Mike Maples, Jr, Lawrence Lundy-Bryan , Sinéad O'Sullivan and David Peterson for your recent contributions to the discussion, I quoted all of you (even if I disagree with some of your conclusions :).

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Generation Space returns this Thursday — and the first episode sets the tone perfectly. Leah Martin is joined by Seraphim’s Maureen Haverty and one of the leading voices in SpaceTech, Voyager Technologies CEO Dylan Taylor. Together, they unpack the commercial realities of operating in space — and what it really takes to scale viable business models off-world. Timely insights for investors tracking the continued growth of the #SpaceTech sector. 🎙️ Episode live from 12:00 PM BST this Thursday: https://lnkd.in/eeU4dvx9 #VentureCapital #CommercialSpace #NewSpaceEconomy #GenerationSpace

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