Fundraising starts before you send the deck
Most founders think fundraising starts when they send the deck.
It doesn’t.
It starts earlier: when someone hears your name for the first time, sees you on LinkedIn, gets forwarded one of your updates, or asks around to see if anyone knows you. By the time you actually start raising, people have often already formed a view.
That view matters more than most founders realize.
Investors are always looking for shortcuts. They want to know: Is this person sharp? Do they follow through? Do people respect them? Have they built trust anywhere before asking for money? A lot of that gets decided before the first pitch meeting ever happens.
This doesn’t mean you need to turn yourself into a brand. It just means you shouldn’t be invisible. Share what you’re learning. Talk about what customers are saying. Let people see how you think. Give them a sense that you’re in motion.
And don’t confuse polish with reputation. A nice deck helps. A clean LinkedIn helps. But neither one does the real work. Reputation comes from being thoughtful, prepared, responsive, and consistent over time. It comes from people being able to say, “Yes, I know her - she’s impressive.”
The strongest fundraising processes usually don’t begin with strangers. They begin with a few people already in your corner.
By the time you ask investors to believe in the company, they’re already deciding whether they believe in you.
THE BOTTOM LINE
By the time you start fundraising, investors have already started forming an opinion, so make sure it’s working for you, not against you.
→ This week: Narrative Lock Sprint: 90 minutes to fix your story.
THE ROUND I'D HAVE BACKED
Arinna - $4M Seed | Space - Ultrathin, flexible solar cells built specifically for spacecraft
This one got funded because they didn’t try to compete on better solar panels.
They went after a broken constraint.
Space power isn’t just about efficiency. It’s about weight, flexibility, and survivability. Every extra kilogram costs thousands to launch. Every rigid panel limits how you design the spacecraft. And once it’s up there, failure isn’t an option.
Most solar innovation focuses on terrestrial use: rooftops, farms, grid-scale. Different constraints, different tradeoffs.
Arinna seems to have started with a simple insight: space has its own physics and economics — so it needs its own solution.
“Better solar cells” wouldn’t get this funded. “Spacecraft are being designed around outdated, heavy, rigid power systems” might.
The wedge here is strong. Satellites are getting smaller, more numerous, and more specialized. Constellations are scaling. Missions are becoming more ambitious. Power becomes a bottleneck fast; not just how much you generate, but how you integrate it.
An ultrathin, flexible material doesn’t just improve performance. It changes how spacecraft can be built.
The likely pitch wasn’t about marginal efficiency gains. It was about unlocking new design possibilities for space systems.
That’s how you make a materials company feel like a systems-level breakthrough.
And that’s how you raise a seed round in a category most investors don’t fully understand.
-Vicki / DeckToVC
