Fun Raising

Welcome to Fun Raising, the podcast where the best early-stage investors pull back the curtain on the fundraising process, one founder question at a time. If you're a pre-seed or seed-stage founder trying to figure out how to get your first check, navigate a term sheet, or just understand what VCs are actually thinking when you walk out of the room — this is the show for you. Every episode, we sit down with top early-stage investors and put them on the spot with real questions from real founders. No fluff, no recycled advice, just honest, tactical conversations about what it actually takes to raise in today's market. From crafting your pitch to closing the round, we cover the moments that make or break a fundraise. We put the "fun" in fundraising. Because someone has to.

Fun Raising is a business podcast hosted by Mat Vogels, with 49 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

Mat Vogels hosts Fun Raising, a business show with 49 episodes published.

Our AI reads these to draft pitches. Use them as grounding for a pitch that cites a real guest and a specific topic.

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  Fun Raising

  Arkady Kulik | Arkane

  Aug 13, 202640 min

  Arkady is a scientist and repeat founder who moved into venture specifically to solve a translation problem he kept watching play out: deeply technical founders who can't tell their story, meeting VCs who can't tell whether the science is real or "Theranos 2.0." That background shapes a fund that behaves differently from a default seed check. He leads first rounds, wants to be the first VC on the cap table, and screens on two questions only when he opens a deck: what have these founders understood that nobody else has, and what problem space are they in. Everything else is secondary. The tactical advice is where the episode earns its time. On outreach, he wants founders to build three or four tiers and start with a "tier zero" of friendly VCs they don't even need, purely to rehearse the pitch and burn through the rough reps before approaching the firms they actually want. On decks, he argues the competition slide is close to useless at pre-seed, because any static two-by-two is a snapshot of a moving target, and early companies die from execution, not from competitors. On process, he time-boxes hard: a non-fit founder is out inside 30 minutes, and even a serious diligence path costs no more than three and a half hours of the founder's time, run through a questionnaire, a scientific partner, and a business partner before a final call. He treats a slow, ambiguous process from other VCs as usually a soft no, not a maybe. His most contrarian material is about the money itself. He ranks capital plainly: revenue first, debt second, equity last, and calls equity the worst money a founder can raise because it loads on the most liability and the most outside expectations. He refuses to celebrate a close, and warns against "suicide rounds," raising too much at too high a valuation too early, then spending like the cash will never run out. His fix is unglamorous: park it in treasuries and behave as if you never raised. He's equally direct that manufactured FOMO is an instant pass, since reputation in this market dies in hours, and that most failures trace back to execution and founder psychology rather than the balance sheet.

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  Fun Raising

  Matt Logan | Earthshot Ventures

  Aug 6, 202643 min

  Matt Logan is a GP at Earthshot Ventures, a climate fund spun out of the nonprofit Elemental. What separates him from a default climate investor is that he doesn't lead with decarbonization. He looks for companies that win because they are cheaper, better, or faster, with the climate benefit as a byproduct of the core value prop rather than the pitch itself. His thesis, the clean intelligence stack, runs the length of the AI supply chain, from critical minerals up through data center energy, compute efficiency, AI-native applications, and physical AI, which is where he expects most of the next decade's power-law outcomes to sit. The most useful thing for a founder is his honesty about sourcing. Of seventeen investments in fund one, nine came from his own cold outbound and eight from his network. None came from a founder's cold email. His takeaway is not that founders should stop trying, but that the leverage is in becoming someone worth reaching out to: early traction, a strong team, and small checks from smart angels in your market who can refer you (he'll take a meeting off a $1K check from someone sharp). He also frames access as "legibility." The less legible you are to capital, the more you should target firms that specialize in your exact stage and sector instead of chasing multistage brand names. In meetings he weights founder intensity, clarity on business model, and unit economics above a deep technology walkthrough, and he would rather a founder name a weak unit economic openly than leave it as the elephant in the room. Two closing tips stand out. First, diligence the investor by talking not only to the references they hand you but to the founders of their portfolio companies that went under, because that is where you learn how a VC behaves when things go badly. Second, keep terms clean (standard YC SAFE docs), optimize for complementary skill sets over valuation, and remember that stated numbers are often flexible once a VC has gotten to yes. And if you are struggling to raise, his advice is blunt: go back and build, because traction relative to your resources, the inflection rather than the absolute number, is what unlocks a round. Product market fit, as he puts it, covers over almost any other sin.

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  Fun Raising

  Sarah Kunst | Cleo Capital

  Aug 4, 202649 min

  Sarah Kunst is a sole GP who has been on both sides of the table: operator roles at companies like Chanel, Red Bull, and Apple, a founder whose own startup wound down, and a Sequoia scout before raising a roughly $3M first fund in 2018. That combination shows up in how she sources. She invests pre-seed through Series B, and unusually says she prefers the two ends (pre-seed and Series B) over seed and A, because seed and A often mean paying a markup for someone else's de-risking, and "you can only lose your money once." She also frames her sector interests as a map of her own anxieties: consumer cybersecurity, next-gen fertilizer, and next-gen energy. Her most useful contrarian take is on access. Most guests tell founders to chase warm intros; Kunst says that at the earliest stage that hunt is "so silly," because no third party can move her to write a million-dollar check. She treats sourcing as a shots-on-goal, top-of-funnel game, and backs it up with volume: she claims to have read every YC and Techstars deck since roughly 2020 and over 10,000 inbound pitches through her site, which she reads personally on weekends. The counterintuitive part is what that inbound feeds into. She takes almost no meetings, and says her meeting-to-investment conversion is high precisely because she meets so rarely. In a typical week she'll read 300 pitches and take zero meetings. So the leverage for a founder is in the written materials, not in landing time on her calendar: a teaser deck (she points to Guy Kawasaki's 10-slide format), a clear path from a multi-billion-dollar market to real revenue, relevant comps, and enough narrative control that she doesn't wander off and form her own wrong opinion. On judgment calls, she is specific. Optimizing for the highest valuation over the best terms is a vanity move, and clean, standard docs (Cooley GO, YC boilerplate) protect you no matter who ends up holding the paper after you sign. On the cap table, redundancy beats prestige: ten Silicon Valley CTOs who all know each other give you one network, not ten, so trade some of them for a differentiated skill set or geography. On founders themselves, she is wary of the "MBA in search of a problem" and weighs three kinds of relevant experience (lived, educational, work). Her recurring red flag is rigidity: founders who can't talk through a plan B when a dependency breaks, what she calls the "airport problem." And her blunt filter for whether someone should start at all: if the goal is just money, the odds are better in prediction markets, so you have to actually love the process.

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  Fun Raising

  Jason Gray | Pioneer Fund

  Jul 30, 202647 min

  Jason is an operator before he was an investor. He ran a division at SunEdison up to roughly $250M in revenue, went through YC in 2015 as a founder, and built Pioneer Fund out of the alumni network he kept gravitating back to. The structural difference from a default seed fund is the 500 YC alumni who serve as venture partners and LPs. When Pioneer takes an investment call, Jason pulls in three or four of them who are operators in that exact space, so diligence on "is this team actually moving fast" comes from people calibrated to that domain rather than from a generalist partner. He frames the whole firm as the process he wished he'd had as a founder. The most actionable material is about running the process, not selling the story. Pioneer commits to a decision within 48 hours, usually 24, tells founders upfront who will be on the call and when they'll hear back, and treats a second meeting as evidence its own process failed. Jason is openly anti-deck: the deck's only job is to win the meeting, and once you're in the room he wants it put away so you can actually talk. On outreach, he cites the YC line that conciseness correlates with how well you understand your own business, and prefers a tight email with the unique insight and traction over a half-memo. On constructing the round, he lays out three buckets (strategic angels, smaller or emerging funds, and big funds) and makes the case that small "base hit" checks of $50K to $200K compound into the momentum that forces fence-sitters to move. The counterintuitive takes are where founders should lean in. He warns hard against manufacturing fake FOMO, because his side has run the pattern hundreds of times and the founder's dataset is a single fundraise. When you do have options, he says carve out a day or two, decide, and execute, because flailing costs you allocation when handshakes elsewhere expire. He tells founders to back-channel the specific partner, not just the firm, especially with mega-funds where pre-seed and seed attention is thin. And on why companies die, he puts co-founder misalignment and treating raised capital like revenue well ahead of competition. None of this is generic "build a great product" advice; it's a working investor describing his own mechanics.

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  Fun Raising

  Ellen Chisa | boldstart

  Jul 28, 202645 min

  Chisa comes to investing from the founder side. She co-founded Darklang, a programming language, and boldstart had backed that company before she joined the firm. That background shapes a specific lens: she evaluates founders less on market math and more on how they think about product and engineering. boldstart also does only one thing, which she treats as a feature rather than a limitation. They invest at inception, meaning pre-product and often pre-company, with no fixed check size. She's explicit that "average check size" is a misleading question for them, because a first round might be $500K for someone just exploring or $10 to $15 million for a team that needs to move at scale on day one. The tactical advice is where founders should pay attention. On sourcing, she suggests skipping the cold internet research and instead going through the cap tables of non-competing companies you admire, then reaching out to those investors, since they already have some reason to care about your space. On cold email, her bar has shifted with AI: if the first three sentences read like a model wrote them, she doesn't reply, and the fix is not a "better" email but a real reason for the outreach. Inside the pitch, she doesn't do the TAM math (a market is either obviously large or it isn't), and she's skeptical of team slides padded with advisors, which she says raise more questions than they answer. The first meeting should be a conversation the founder drives, with the deck up as an anchor, and she advises against bringing the full founding team to that first call. Two things reveal how she actually operates. First, if she knows she's a no, she says so, sometimes twenty minutes into a meeting, then offers the remaining time as free advice. Arguing back, she notes, doesn't change the decision. Second, she names the FOMO games founders play as unforced errors: the fake "we're deciding Friday" deadline that collapses the moment she declines to move that fast. She also flags a common misread, where founders treat a polite intro conversation with a potential customer as validation, when "that's an interesting idea" and "can I buy that" are worlds apart. On why early companies die, her answer is deliberately unglamorous: sometimes the market hypothesis was simply wrong, and separately, founders get distracted "playing startup" and hiring too fast. Her rule of thumb there is blunt: if you're managing the first five people on an early team, something is already wrong.

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