Step one: join YC. Step two raise seed.
Seriously, this deck would likely not have flown without the YC backing and implicit stamp of approval, once you are in YC you'd have to do pretty bad not to raise seed funding.
Seriously, this deck would likely not have flown without the YC backing and implicit stamp of approval, once you are in YC you'd have to do pretty bad not to raise seed funding.
It's also with which fund you are raising. There are many funds for sure, but raising with the top tier VCs is definitely not 1/3 or even 1/10 of the batch.
Anyways, hopefully, this article was useful to you :).
Do most top-tier VCs even do seed rounds? Surely some do, but there are many VCs (I think including some that are considered top-tier, at least in certain verticals) that focus on A and later.
VCs spend time looking at the team, the past achievements, the product and most importantly the existing users. They also try to invest in industries that they know about.
In our case the team experience was important. We had solved the problem internally at other companies (and the scars that come with it!).
In one of John's response, he mentioned that we've been talking to many VCs. The reason was that we were looking to talk to the ones who understand deeply the problem and the market we're addressing. No matter how good your product or deck is, if you're pitching a calendar app to a VC who is specialized in deep tech, you probably won't get them on your cap table.
Time will tell if you will succeed, best of luck to you and your team.
But keep in mind that raising money is not success in itself.
Big fan of looking at what YC founders do 1 year out of the program. YC backs companies in large part on founder quality even if the original idea isn't a winner, and I've made quite a few strong bets on YC founders when they needed a reset a bit later. (The good ones keep the original company cap table intact to take care of their pre-reset investors. That's a huge positive signal for me coming in as fresh blood.)
The YC stamp is a door opener, a necessary condition to get funded, but not a sufficient one.
The primary way YC is beneficial for raising VC money is in the way the force founders to focus on the metrics that matter, say user growth etc. Which happen to be also crucial for VCs.