Startup Fundraising

Startup Fundraising

Build a defensible readiness and disclosure system before inviting diligence. Lead with readiness, evidence quality, and the decision that must wait.

Workflow

1. Establish the raise decision, fundraising stage, intended audience, disclosure stage, decision owner, and deadline. Ask at most one blocking question at a time; label missing fields unknown rather than inventing them.
2. Create or reconcile an evidence register for every consequential input: claim | status | actual_or_modelled | source | source_date | as_of | confidence | conflict | owner | refresh_or_expiry. Status is observed, inferred, proposed, stale, or conflicting. A forecast, draft, meeting, or planned milestone is never an actual result.
3. Read readiness-raise-memo.md for readiness diagnosis, a raise memo, instrument and dilution scenarios, runway, use of funds, and milestone logic.
4. Read deck-financials.md when drafting or reviewing a deck, financial snapshot, model, claims ledger, or distributed artifact version.
5. Read data-room-disclosure.md when preparing diligence materials, a data-room manifest, an FAQ, access stages, or disclosure controls.
6. Return the current diagnosis; dated evidence and confidence; missing, stale, and conflicting inputs; the recommended next action; a finished artifact or template; risks and approvals; one owner, deadline, metric, and review date; and the smallest useful handoff.

Decision and disclosure gates

• A consequential claim must be self-falsifiable: state the measure, baseline or comparison, time period, source, as-of date, threshold, and what result would disprove it. Unsupported claims move to an open-gates register or become accurate qualitative language.
• Keep actual results, reconciled financial snapshots, and modelled scenarios visibly separate. A model must name its assumptions, scenario, as-of date, sensitivity, and owner; it cannot be described as performance.
• Do not recommend a valuation, fundraising target, dilution outcome, or instrument from missing, stale, or conflicting cash, burn, revenue, liability, cap-table, financing, or operating assumptions. Stop that decision, name the exact reconciliation required, and assign an owner.
• Preserve exact distributed artifact versions. Record the immutable version identifier, contents or export reference, approver, distribution date, audience, disclosure stage, and superseded version. A mutable working document is not the sent record.
• Grant only the minimum access needed for the current disclosure stage. Do not provide confidential diligence materials to an unqualified recipient or broaden access because of an introduction, meeting, or verbal interest.
• Treat legal, securities, tax, cap-table, instrument, privacy, and jurisdiction-specific disclosure conclusions as open review items until current jurisdiction-specific primary guidance and qualified review are recorded. This skill may prepare facts, questions, and operating controls; it does not provide those conclusions.

Boundaries and handoffs

• startup-fundraising owns readiness, narrative, economics presentation, raise artifacts, diligence preparation, and disclosure-stage design. investor-relations owns investor qualification, relationship records, meetings, outreach, follow-up, sent-artifact logs, and updates.
• Hand off investor-specific targeting, communications, meetings, or follow-ups to investor-relations with the approved artifact version, disclosure stage, permitted claims, evidence dates, and unresolved gates.
• Hand off cash planning, operating priorities, hiring plan ownership, spending decisions, and cadence to founder-operations with reconciled actuals, model assumptions, owner, deadline, metric, review date, and decision gates.
• Obtain explicit authorization before contacting investors, sharing an artifact or data-room access, signing or accepting terms, changing a live record, spending money, or making an external financial, legal, or contractual commitment. Draft and analyze without taking the external action.