Tactical insights for first-time founders to outsmart the burn, the churn & the breakdown.

Hey Founder,

“Once we raise, we can finally…”
It might be the most expensive sentence in startup land.

Because when everything hinges on after the round, you shift from building for customers to building for investors.

You start solving for what looks fundable, not what’s actually broken.
Suddenly, we start to value “VC-friendly” growth over retention. A fancy title over execution. A pitch deck over a working model.

And just like that, you’re running a business with no engine.

This isn’t an anti-fundraising rant. It’s a reminder:
Funding should multiply clarity, not replace it.

Capital helps you scale a model. Not find one.

This issue is about flipping that script - using capital as the last lever, not first - once the basics already work, instead of the first excuse while they don’t. 

Let’s dig into it.

Beneath all the jargon, startups have one job: Find a business model that is both repeatable and scalable.

In the very early days, capital should buy learning, not prestige. It's there to fund experiments, challenge assumptions, and course-correct quickly, not to pad headcount or mimic the polish of a Series B company before you’ve earned it.

Ironically, that’s when money is most expensive, when you’re trading equity at peak uncertainty, long before there’s proof to anchor your vision.

You should only raise after you have at least:

You can see that pattern play out behind the scenes of the startups everyone idolizes:

🟢 Facebook didn’t raise funding from Thiel until it had already exploded across college campuses. They funded momentum, not a prototype.

🟢Slack started as a failed gaming studio. Its success came from dogfooding its own internal tool. When growth hit escape velocity, DAUs skyrocketed, and investors didn’t hesitate. Funding helped them keep up, not catch up.

🟢 Clearbit raised $2M, used a fraction of it, and hit profitability fast. The rest was optionality. By the time they raised again, they were doing eight figures in revenue.

Now flip the lens.

🔴 Theranos raised hundreds of millions and hit a $9B paper valuation before its core product actually worked.

🔴 Quibi launched with 50 shows, $1.75B in the bank, and no real validation from users. It flamed out in six months.

Same mechanism. Different timing.

When capital follows traction, it accelerates what's working.
When capital leads traction, it just amplifies what's broken.

So why do so many founders still chase the raise before the proof?

Because it’s fast, public, and externally validating.

Building something real - quietly, patiently, through revenue and retention - is harder to broadcast and nearly impossible to fake.

But if you zoom out on every “overnight success,” you’ll see the same wilderness years underneath. Slack, Clearbit, Canva, all of them.

The traction came first.
Then the money.
Then the scale.

When you take venture money, you're not topping up your bank account. You're signing up for a very specific outcome: hyper-growth, massive scale, and an exit big enough to return a fund.

In other words, you’re not just building a business; you’re entering their business model.

For that to make sense, a few things have to be true by design:

And perhaps most importantly: You’re willing to trade control, pace, and optionality for speed.

If any of that feels off, the issue isn’t that VC is “hard”, it’s that it’s misaligned. And that’s not failure. It’s clarity.

Some of the most respected companies in the world were built off the VC path: profitable, niche-dominant, founder-controlled, and compounding steadily on their own terms.

There are a few clear signs it’s too early:

VC should be the last lever, not the first. You pull it once the machine works without it, and extra capital turns a good curve into a great one.

Raise only when the business is working and stuck. That means you're:

In short: You’re not figuring it out. You’re trying to keep up.

And how much?

Don’t model runway. Model proof.

Ask yourself: What needs to be true 18–24 months from now to make profitability or a next raise optional?

Raise just enough to get there, then add a margin for error.

That’s it. Anything more risks funding the fog instead of fueling the signal.

If you’re not ready to raise, do this instead.

Sell manually. Onboard manually. Support manually.

If they won’t pay now, funding won’t fix it. Proof starts at full price.

If you can’t explain growth in one sentence, VC will only accelerate confusion.

If retention tanks or win rates collapse, funding isn’t the solution. Your value prop is.

Clean structure + real traction = better terms and the option to walk away.

One of you asked me:

Not necessarily.

You don’t change the rules because the business is heavy; you change what counts as proof.

If it’s working: VC can help scale what’s already real.

The move: Raise the least distorting money to prove the thing works and someone wants it.

Send it my way, just hit reply.

This week’s top picks:

A video worth your time.

Before you go…

VC isn’t the only path beyond bootstrapping; it’s just the most common.

If your business already works (real revenue, real margins, clear growth), cleaner capital usually wins.

The rule: Use the cheapest capital that removes the next bottleneck.

That’s your real moat.

See you next Thursday,

— Mariya

Hit reply and let me know. I read every single one (for real).

Hey, I’m Mariya, a startup CFO and founder of FounderFirst. After 10 years working alongside founders at early and growth-stage startups, I know how tough it is to make the right calls when resources are tight and the stakes are high. I started this newsletter to share the practical playbook I wish every founder had from day one, packed with lessons I’ve learned (and mistakes I’ve made) helping teams scale.

Mariya Valeva

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