THE MAXXING GUIDE TO FUNDRAISING

A non-linear, anti-consensus, balls-to-the-wall playbook for raising your first $1M–$5M in the Bay Area

"Fundraising is a game of chicken. Practice your poker face. The deal you don't need is the deal you get." — Guillaume Roux-Romestaing

"Most VCs are full of BS and they promise all this help that never materializes. Angels are the opposite." — Manny Medina (Outreach)

0. FIRST PRINCIPLES (read this before you do anything)

• VCs are the hardest to raise from as a first-timer. They pattern-match on YC, second-time founders, "hot company" alumni, traction, revenue. If you are none of those, VCs are not for you — yet.
• Angels fall in love with you first, then the idea. This is the opposite of how institutional capital behaves. Lean into the human game.
• Raising is a pipeline, not a pitch. Treat it like outbound sales: measure reps, conversion, velocity. Get better every week.
• Warm intros convert at ~80%. Cold emails convert at ~1%. So the highest-leverage move is always converting a cold relationship into a warm one before the ask.
• Manufactured momentum is real momentum. Three angels committed signals to the fourth. Four signals to the VC. Social proof compounds.
• Status > capital. Many of the best angels don't need the return. They're playing for bragging rights, curiosity, and paying it forward. Sell them a story they can retell at dinner.

1. STAGE MAP — who to talk to, when

Rule of thumb: Start one stage below where you think you are. Angels decide in days, VCs decide in months. Angel commitments de-risk you in the VC's mind.

2. THE SHORTLIST — Angels + Seed funds every founder should want on their cap table

Aggregated and deduped from Ben Lang's public shortlists (LinkedIn + X) and Stanford's Ilya Strebulaev unicorn-angel research. Priority: operators who write checks, not suit-and-tie VCs.

The "If You Can Only Get One" tier (operators-turned-angels with absurd track records)

• David Morin — 23 unicorns (Stanford study #1)
• Peter Thiel — 21 unicorns, Founders Fund
• Lee Linden — 21 unicorns, Quiet Capital
• David Sacks — 20 unicorns, Craft Ventures
• Marc Benioff — 19 unicorns
• Elad Gil — prolific solo capitalist, pattern-matches better than most VCs
• Naval Ravikant — AngelList
• Keith Rabois — Khosla Ventures

Non-linear insight from Strebulaev's work: The top-50 angels overlap heavily. Thiel / Sacks / Levchin all came out of PayPal and back the same companies (Facebook, Airbnb, Palantir, SpaceX). Getting one of them is often getting several. Super-connectors are a cheat code.

The Ben Lang "Shortlist" — operator-angels every pre-seed founder should chase

Early Figma / Notion / Stripe / Linear / Vercel / Brex operators. This list is the canonical "if you're building in SF, these people move the needle":

• Terrence Rohan — Otherwise Fund (early Figma, Notion)
• Lenny Rachitsky — Lenny's newsletter (distribution = his value-add)
• Cyan Banister — Long Journey
• Kyle Parrish — early Figma, Dropbox
• Vivek Sodera — Supercharge
• Danielle Strachman — 1517 Fund
• alana goyal — basecase
• Ed Sim — Boldstart Ventures
• Darian Shirazi / Andrew Brackin — Gradient VC
• Ross Fubini — XYZ
• Sarah Drinkwater — Common Magic
• Camille Ricketts — early Notion marketing
• Cristina Cordova — early Linear, Notion, Stripe
• Guillermo Rauch — Vercel founder
• Hadar Dor — PM Instagram, Shopify
• Logan Kilpatrick — DeepMind
• Art Levy — Brex
• Scott Belsky — Adobe, A24
• Romain Huet — OpenAI, ex-Stripe
• Charles Hudson — Precursor Ventures
• Eric Bahn — Hustle Fund
• Mike Maples Jr / Ann Miura-Ko — Floodgate
• Jordan Singer — lil fund
• Jack McClelland — Afore VC
• Rex Woodbury — Daybreak
• Nikunj Kothari — FPV Ventures
• Ashley Mayer — Coalition VC
• Meka Asonye — First Round Capital
• Masha Drokova — DayOne VC
• Yoni Rechtman / Sam Lessin — Slow Ventures
• Akshay Kothari — Notion co-founder
• Andreas Klinger — Prototype Capital
• Astasia Myers — Felicis
• Bryce Roberts — Indie VC
• Mark Ghermezian — MXV Capital
• Vedika Jain — Weekend Fund (Ryan Hoover's fund)
• Sarah Catanzaro — Amplify
• Hunter Walk — Homebrew
• Katie Stanton — Moxxie Ventures
• Alex Iskold — 2048 Ventures
• Yana Welinder, Varadh Jain, Soleio — classic angel list
• Adam Draper — Boost VC
• Vaibhav Domkundwar — Better Capital
• Jenny Fielding — Everywhere VC
• Carmen Alfonso Rico — Cocoa VC
• Erica Wenger — Park Rangers Capital
• Colin Gardiner — Yonder Ventures
• Sonya Huang — Sequoia (AI thesis)
• Henri Thieblot — Founders, Inc
• Will Manidis / "iwillpat" — Hashgraph VC ($100M new fund,$500K–$2M checks)

Newer funds worth knowing (2025–2026)

• Primary VC (Jason Shuman) — $625M Fund V, seed-at-scale, hardware + vertical AI
• 2048 VC — Pre-Seed Fast Track: $250K–$750K, 10-day review, AI/deep tech/health
• FPV Ventures — Nikunj Kothari
• Daybreak — Rex Woodbury, consumer
• DayOne VC — Masha Drokova
• Hashgraph VC — iwillpat, crypto/AI

3. ACCELERATORS & PROGRAMS — SF edition, ranked by what they actually give you

Tier S (if you can get in, take it)

• Y Combinator — $500K total ($125K for 7% + $375K uncapped MFN SAFE). 1.5–2$600B+ portfolio.
• South Park Commons (SPC) Founder Fellowship — $400K for 7$600K guaranteed in next round**. Pre-idea to pre-seed. Raising $500M Fund IV in 2026. The SF OpenAI/Meta/Google diaspora lives here.
• Neo — $750K uncapped SAFE, variable 0.75–5% equity based on next round. Invite-only, Ali Rowghani (ex-Twitter/Pixar COO). Smaller cohort, deeper bets.
• HF0 Residency — "Hacker monastery." $1M for 5%. 12 weeks live-in in the Archbishop's Mansion, SF. Repeat founders / exceptional engineers.

Tier A (AI-native)

• a16z Speedrun — $500K–$1M for 10% + follow-on
• AI Grant (Nat Friedman + Daniel Gross) — $250K SAFE, research-friendly, no demo day pressure
• Conviction Embed — $150K SAFE
• Sequoia Arc — $500K–$1M seed
• PearX (Pear VC) — $250K–$2M pre-seed, small cohort (~20), Pear Studio SF

Tier B (still worthwhile)

• Techstars SF — $220K ($20K for 5% + $200K uncapped SAFE)
• 500 Global — $150K for 6%
• Berkeley SkyDeck — $200K for 7.5%, Stanford/Cal deep-tech
• Alchemist Accelerator — B2B focus, $100K
• Founders, Inc — hardware/frontier
• Soma Capital Fellowship — technical founders, low friction
• NFX — $3M standard pre-seed check for network-effects companies

🚩 AVOID

Any "accelerator" charging $15K–$25K upfront fees for "mentorship and investor access." Tell: they make money whether you raise or not. Real programs take equity because they need you to succeed. YC, Techstars, SPC, Neo, HF0, PearX — equity-only. Everything else charging upfront fees is extracting from desperate founders.

4. INVESTOR DATABASES & LIST PROVIDERS

Free (start here — pre-seed doesn't need paid tools)

Paid (only after you've exhausted free)

SF-specific lists worth pulling

• Signal NFX — Top SF Bay Area Investors (8,250 entries, filterable by stage/sector): signal.nfx.com/investor-lists/top-san-francisco-bay-area-investors
• Signal NFX — Top AI Series A SF (1,105 investors): signal.nfx.com/investor-lists/top-ai-series-a-san-francisco-bay-area-investors
• Signal NFX — Top Pre-Seed by vertical: Sales/CRM (197), E-commerce Series A (397), Logistics (143), DTC Seed (42), DefenseTech Pre-Seed (17), Smart Cities (7). Whatever you're building, they have a slice.
• OpenVC "VC list of VC lists" — 53 databases listed: openvc.app/blog/vc-list
• Investormatch.pro (Martin Tobias) — Upload deck, get 20 curated aligned VCs to contact. Caveat: GIGO.

The ArK / Ellen Levy / David Teten lists

• Global VC mapping by ArK Kapital — 50+ countries
• David Teten's "free money" list — US non-dilutive grants, worth checking before diluting
• Odin — 6,000+ European founders, angels, funds

5. THE MANNY MEDINA PLAYBOOK — raise $1M from angels without VCs

Exact playbook from the Outreach founder. Ran this himself. Works.

1. Move to San Francisco. Immediately. In SF every third person at every party is an angel and it's a bragging-rights sport. No other US city is like that. Proximity is the unfair advantage. (If you can't move, this applies ~80% in NYC, ~40% in LA/Austin.)
2. Block two full days a week for fundraising. Same days. Every week. One day research + intro requests. One day meetings + follow-ups. Measure: cold outreaches sent, intros requested, meetings booked, $ closed. Improve the conversion each week.
3. Pitch angels differently than VCs. They don't need a massive exit. This is play money. They invest because they like you, want to help, and want to brag. Sell the story and the person, not the DCF.
4. Find super-connectors. Ask every angel who invests: "Who's your favorite angel investor?" Get that intro. For Manny it was Ellen Levy — once she was in, everything else snapped into place. Sulfikar Ali K P called it right: "getting a super connector on board is a total cheat code."
5. Turn angels into distribution. Once they're in, they're a sales channel. They know your next 20 customers. Mine them. VCs promise help that never materializes; angels give less money and way more help.

Reality check from omid beigi: "Raised my first round almost entirely from angels and customers. VCs passed until we had revenue, then suddenly wanted in." This is the path.

6. TACTICAL PLAYS — seven moves that make VCs desperate to fund you

From Guillaume Roux-Romestaing, condensed:

1. Don't accept term sheets immediately. Say: "It's good enough to consider, not good enough to accept." VCs are herd animals; hinting that you might walk gets SAFE → 2x allocation in 48 hours.
2. Start with angels, not institutions. Angel commitments de-risk you in the VC's mind. Three angels at $25K each looks like "smart money knows something."
3. Lead with acceleration, not snapshots. Not "$50K revenue" — say "$50K revenue, +147% in 3 months, 90% month-6 retention." VCs invest in trajectories.
4. Practice on tier-3 VCs first. Meet firms you're not excited about. Get their term sheets. Use them as social proof at tier-1: "We have three term sheets, but we want to work with you."
5. Mine your angels for warm intros. Cold email to VC ≈ 1% reply. Warm intro from portfolio founder ≈ 80% meeting rate. Your angels know every other investor in SF.
6. Manufacture scarcity. "Closing in two weeks." "One allocation remaining." "Competitor looking at same check." Even slight stretch is fair game — VCs want what other VCs want.
7. Never appear eager. Desperation leaks through tone, email frequency, concession speed. Poker face.

7. THE "MIKE" METHOD — how a founder raised $17M by inverting intros

From Francis Santora. Mike doesn't ask "do you know anyone?" He does all the work:

1. Asks his existing investor: "Send me a list of investors you know."
2. Picks the VCs he thinks are a fit from that list.
3. Drafts the intro email for the investor to forward. Zero effort required from the human with the relationship.
4. Investor just cut-and-pastes and hits send.

The rule: Every bit of friction between your investor and a new intro is a 30% drop in conversion. Remove every inch of friction. Draft the forward. Name the target. Include the one-liner.

Intro email template (what Mike's forward looks like)

Five lines. Problem, demo, traction, ask, CTA. That's it.

8. COLD EMAIL — the Ivan Burazin template (432 sent, raised $2M on uncapped SAFE)

Four parts, strict order, no fluff:

1. Relevance (1 sentence) — mutual connection, prior dev-tools investment, or tweet/article they wrote about the space. Do the homework or don't send.
2. Traction (1 sentence) — Fortune 500 inbound, working demo, commitments secured.
3. Credibility (1 sentence) — why you specifically are the team (operator experience, domain depth).
4. Ask (1 sentence) — "Interested in seeing the deck + a walkthrough?" Do not attach the deck in the first email. Make them ask. This is a qualification mechanism.

Subject lines: short, specific, what + number. "AI agent for SOC analysts — 14 F500 on waitlist" beats "Quick chat?"

9. THE SUN CHOI SCORING FRAMEWORK — what top investors actually grade you on

From Sun Choi @ 2080 Ventures. The eight dimensions top funds pressure-test at pre-seed / seed (HIGH / MEDIUM / LOW / N/A):

Tactical move: Before a meeting, guess which of these the specific fund weighs heaviest. Lead with that. Don't pitch Sequoia on unit economics — pitch them on market + must-solve pain. Don't pitch Benchmark on TAM — pitch on economic engine.

10. NON-LINEAR / ANTI-CONSENSUS PLAYS

Everyone reads the same Paul Graham essays. Everyone emails the same 50 investors. Here's how to do it differently:

a. Skip VCs entirely for your first $1M

Angels + revenue + customer LOIs is a cleaner cap table than 3 micro-VCs. You move faster, retain more, and can still raise a "real" seed 9 months later with actual leverage. omid beigi and Manny Medina both ran this.

b. Recruit your cap table from Twitter replies, not databases

Ben Lang's public shortlist was literally sourced from Twitter replies to his own post asking "who are the pre-seed investors every founder should want?" The operators-who-angel-invest crowd lives on X. Search "angel investing" + "writing checks" + your sector on X. Follow every replier. Engage for 2–3 weeks before DMing.

c. Angel-invest $1K into things you admire — before you raise

The fastest path to meeting David Sacks isn't a cold email. It's syndicating a $1K check into a deal he's leading on AngelList. Now you're "an investor in his deal," and that's an email-openable position. Requires capital but <$5K gets you in the room.

d. Use Signal by NFX's intro-path feature as your primary weapon

Most founders use Signal to find investors. The actual cheat code is connecting your Gmail and having it map every investor you're already 1–2 hops from. This is the highest-value 10 minutes you will spend in your entire fundraise.

e. Build a "newsletter of one" before you raise

Send monthly updates to 20 people for 6 months before you raise. Numbers, wins, asks. When you go to raise, half of them are already pattern-matching on "this team ships." Camille Ricketts / Lenny style, small.

f. Raise on GitHub, not on Notion

For technical products, a public repo with stars + real issues + real commits is a 10x better pitch deck than slides. AI infra founders: ship open-source, let stars do the talking.

g. Manufacture a "closing" dinner

Book a dinner for 8 angels. Tell each of them privately: "I'm inviting the people I most want on the cap table — you're one of six confirmed." FOMO is a force multiplier. Three of the six will commit at the dinner or within 48 hours.

h. Hoover / Sacks pattern: be publicly useful

Ryan Hoover built Product Hunt before Weekend Fund. David Sacks podcasts. Lenny newsletters. A public, useful, free thing compounds trust faster than any pitch deck. Start the blog/podcast/newsletter/tool six months before you raise. You'll raise with inbound.

i. Don't raise in SF's default months

Everyone raises in Sept–Nov and Feb–May. July and December are emptier calendars → your meeting is their day's highlight, not their 14th of the day. Contrarian timing, contrarian mindshare.

j. Find the fund BEFORE it announces

Signal: Jason Shuman's Primary Fund V ($625M) was public a week before most founders knew. Track partner movements on LinkedIn. New funds have deployment pressure in year 1 and are the easiest money in venture.

11. THE BALLS-TO-THE-WALL OUTREACH MACHINE

You asked for 1000 calls + emails, 100 LinkedIn, door-knocking. Here's the math + system:

Weekly targets (4 weeks to complete)

Realistic conversion expectations:

• 800 cold emails → 8–16 first meetings (1–2%)
• 100 warm intros → 60–80 first meetings (60–80%)
• 100 LinkedIn DMs → 5–10 meetings (5–10%)
• 40 door-knocks (SF offices in SOMA) → 8–15 warm conversations (20–40%)

Total: ~100 first meetings → ~20 second meetings → ~5 term sheets. That's a round.

Door-knocking map (SF SOMA/FiDi — where to actually show up)

• 1800 Owens St — Pear VC
• 241 El Camino Real (Menlo Park) — Pear VC
• Hayes Valley coffee shops on Tuesday/Thursday mornings — SPC, a16z partners, and half the AI scene actually work from here
• South Park itself — South Park Commons, literally
• Mission and 3rd-ish — First Round, Benchmark, older stalwarts
• Dogpatch + Mission Bay — newer funds, Primary
• Hayes Valley / Alamo Square — lots of operator-angels live here, run into them at Souvla

Rule: Don't actually cold-walk-in to a fund's office — you'll just annoy the EA. Do show up to every meetup, pitch night, hackathon, demo day, and AI house party in SF. The density is the point. The Manny rule holds: you cannot replicate SF density anywhere else.

Events calendar to hit every week

• South Park Commons members' events (if you can get in)
• AGI House (Hillsborough / SF)
• Hack Club / Neo / Founders Inc events
• a16z Speedrun demo nights
• Product Hunt meetups (Ryan Hoover world)
• YC local meetups (open to non-YC in some cities)
• Lunchclub + Partiful for the vibes
• Cerebral Valley AI events

12. MATERIALS YOU NEED BEFORE LAUNCHING THE MACHINE

Don't send a single email until these are dialed:

• One-liner — 12 words or less. "We are [X] for [Y], doing [Z metric]."
• 11-slide deck — Problem, Solution, Why Now, Market, Product, Traction, GTM, Competition, Team, Ask, Appendix. (See LivePlan's 2026 framework.)
• Two-pager / memo — investors increasingly prefer text over slides. Write the memo version.
• Financial model — don't need 50 pages. Burn, runway, unit economics, how their money → next milestone. Kirsten Munn's CFO take is correct.
• Data room — Notion or Docsend or Peony. Public metrics, customer quotes, team bios, cap table, previous rounds.
• Pre-drafted forward email — the "Mike method" intro forward, ready to paste.
• Tracker — Notion board or OpenVC CRM. Columns: Investor / Source / Status / Last Touch / Next Action / $ Committed.
• Reference customers — 3 people who will take an investor's call and rave about you.

13. 2026 AI PITCH DECKS WORTH STUDYING

Public decks of companies that actually raised recently:

• Anthropic's 2022 Series A deck — 10 slides, no product, now $380B. Source: thevccorner.com/p/anthropic-2022-pitch-deck-leaked
• 26 pitch decks that raised $400M in 2026 — thevccorner.com/p/26-pitch-decks-raised-400m
• 27 AI startup pitch decks backed by top investors — productmarketfit.tech/p/27-most-promising-ai-startup-pitch
• LivePlan's "11 Slides for 2026" — the current consensus format

Study what they leave out, not just what's on the slide. Most pre-seed decks should have half as many slides as founders think.

14. RED FLAGS & TRAPS

• 🚩 Upfront-fee accelerators — $15K–$25K "programs" that deliver a Slack channel and a 3-person demo day. They make money whether you raise or not. Only take equity-based programs (YC, Techstars, SPC, Neo, HF0, PearX).
• 🚩 "Raise capital fast" platforms that charge you to match with investors. GIGO in, GIGO out.
• 🚩 The "I'll invest if you fill this 40-tab spreadsheet first" investor. They're dealflow-tire-kicking. Walk away.
• 🚩 Strategic investors at pre-seed. They'll slow-walk you, pre-empt your cap table, and scare off future tier-1s. Not worth the $500K.
• 🚩 "Advisors" who want 2% for monthly calls. Advisors earn equity; they don't demand it.
• 🚩 Friends-and-family rounds without SAFEs. Paper everything. Every. Thing.

15. AFTER THE RAISE (the real game begins)

Regan Lei's take holds: how you deploy capital is more revealing than how you raise it. The moment the wire hits:

• Don't hire the week you close. Wait 4–6 weeks. The people who look good when you have cash in hand look different in month 3.
• Update your investors monthly. Numbers, wins, asks. Turn the newsletter on Day 1.
• Start the next raise on Day 60. Not the pitch — the relationships. The best Series A is raised by the angels and seeds already on your cap table making the intros.
• Track burn weekly. Not monthly. Weekly. You will always be more wrong than you think.

16. TL;DR — THE WHOLE GUIDE IN 12 LINES

1. Move to SF.
2. Raise from angels before VCs.
3. Use Signal by NFX to find warm-intro paths to 50 investors you're 1–2 hops from.
4. Build a deck + memo + 5-line forward intro email.
5. Block 2 days/week, every week, only for fundraising.
6. Lead with trajectory, not snapshots. Manufacture scarcity. Never appear eager.
7. Start with 3 angel commits to de-risk the VC conversation.
8. Use the "Mike method" — do all the work for the person making the intro.
9. Quote the Sun Choi framework dimension that the specific fund values most.
10. 800 emails + 100 warm intros + 100 DMs + 40 door-knocks = ~5 term sheets.
11. Avoid pay-to-play accelerators. Only take equity-based programs.
12. The raise isn't the win. Deployment is. Start the next raise the day this one closes.

Compiled from: Manny Medina's angel playbook, Ben Lang's public shortlists (LinkedIn + X, Mar 2026), Ilya Strebulaev's Stanford unicorn-angel study (via Nicole DeTommaso, Feb 2026), Guillaume Roux-Romestaing's "7 moves," Francis Santora's Mike method, Ivan Burazin's cold-email template, Sun Choi's 2080 Ventures scoring framework, Peony.ink's SF accelerator guide (Mar 2026), OpenVC's VC list of VC lists, Signal by NFX, Mercury Investor DB, Ramp Investor DB, and sundry operator-angel commentary. Current as of April 2026.

Go raise.