[lpolovets]

> "If you’re a good company, you’re either going to raise your Series A - or Series B - in the next 12 months or have significant revenue such that you won’t need more capital. If you’re doing badly, why would you want to keep working on this for 24 or 36 months? That’s a waste of your time."

I'm a big fan of Aaron and his posts, but strongly and respectfully disagree with this line of thinking. As a VC, I've worked with companies that raised after 12 or 15 months, but most require a lot more time. I'm guessing median time from seed to A these days is something like 20 months, and I've seen as high as 35-40 months (including for YC co's I've worked with). Some companies just take longer to figure things out because they need a few small pivots first, or they're creating a new category and need time to figure out how to message their product, or etc.

We've backed several companies at seed that are now worth $100m+ but took years to get from seed to A.

Anecdotally when I ask founders about their seed rounds, almost no one regrets raising too much, but a lot of people regret raising too little.

[zeckalpha]

Those delays seem correlated with the OP’s point: those earlier rounds are too large. If the rounds were smaller, they wouldn’t wait 40 months between rounds.