Founders

The Pre-Seed Round Defined: How to Succeed as an Early Stage Startup : Docsend studied the fundraising process of 174 startups at the pre-seed stage in 2019 and analyzed data to understand which pre-seed startups were successful in fundraising and why.

How to Raise Money Before Launch : Delian is a Thiel Fellow and VC at Khosla. Not only are there seed decks from Opendoor and other companies KV funded, there is a wealth of knowledge here about storytelling in deck form.

How to Raise Your Seed By Reading the VC’s Mind : Erik Torenberg’s epic tweetstorm is one of the best ways to understand the mindset of investors, and take advantage of it in your pitch process.

30 Legendary Startup Pitch Decks and What You Can Learn From Them : I literally downloaded my favorite decks here and Frankensteined them together to build the template for our first deck at Dwellable.

150 Startup Pitch Decks : Paywalled, but searchable by stage and category, including Uber, Airbnb, Brex, Postmates, and a ton of other great examples.

How to Create an Effective Pitch Deck : Highly actionable, data-driven analysis from Matt Rubright (SVB) and Randall Lucas (Voyager).

10 VC Blogs You Should Read : To be honest, if you have a question about building a startup, from day one through series A and beyond, the answer is almost certainly contained on one of the blogs listed here. For the earliest stages, Brad Feld, Mark Suster, Hunter Walk, and Fred Wilson are all simply outstanding resources.

How to Raise the First $1 Million For Your Startup : Tiffany Dufu, founder of the Cru and on Sheryl Sandberg’s Launch Team for Lean In, drops GEMS in this one. Tbh I was looking for a more diverse set of contributors for this resource section (not exactly short on white men here at Ascend, ahem), and found Tiffany’s Webinar below, then ran into this article which should be on everyone’s pre-seed article GOAT list.