I help founders raise and reflect on meeting people. dms are open!
byblos.digital
Joined July 2026
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Founders are forced to raise blind — guessing what funds are looking for.
Byblos surfaces the VC intel in one place: what every investor is saying, what they'll fund, and who's active and ready to deploy.
A founder's job is to build. Leave the VC research to Byblos.
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I think the startup world has made fundraising way too much of a full-time job.
Founders spend six months pitching 100 VCs, tweaking decks, chasing introductions, and answering the same questions over and over.
Then they finally raise $5M, celebrate for a week, and start preparing for the next round.
At some point, when do you actually build the company?
I’ve seen founders who are incredible at raising money but surprisingly average at running a business.
Fundraising is an important skill, but it’s not the business.
Your job isn’t to convince investors you’re building something valuable.
It’s to actually build something valuable.
The best fundraising strategy is having a business investors can’t ignore.
lina from Byblos retweeted
I think the startup world has made fundraising way too much of a full-time job.
Founders spend six months pitching 100 VCs, tweaking decks, chasing introductions, and answering the same questions over and over.
Then they finally raise $5M, celebrate for a week, and start preparing for the next round.
At some point, when do you actually build the company?
I’ve seen founders who are incredible at raising money but surprisingly average at running a business.
Fundraising is an important skill, but it’s not the business.
Your job isn’t to convince investors you’re building something valuable.
It’s to actually build something valuable.
The best fundraising strategy is having a business investors can’t ignore.
my hobby is checking the speculation in fundraising space. I love data-heavy or experience studies that @murphcapital or @ben_botes do but most of other posts are complete spam.
it's very hard to generalize and analyze the sentiment and patterns in VCs.
don't let random conclusions that no one invests in your niche kill your vibe.
fundraising is humbling.
i get that it's extremely humbling and embarassing because no one wants to raise for years without getting any responses or being rejected after the first call.
you can do all the targeting right (right timing, right angle, right fund) and still get ghosted or rejected.
maybe they already did a similar deal, or are saving money for follow-ons, or didn't like your outfit.
what i say is: what you can control is not wasting time on the ones that were never going to reply.
my favourite part of investor research is telling a founder "don't pitch this fund" because I can actually explain why.
fundraising tip:
- check the investor's records of past rounds for patterns
(do they write your check size? has their sentiment shifted?)
- consider their co-investors (maybe they are your match too?)
for example, this is Byblos's records of 20VC, its recent rounds and co-investors. does anyone see patterns?
wake up
check new VC deals
tell a founder fundraising is a strategy
prepare a team for a pitch
go to sleep
repeat
one of the VC newsletters I read started selling memberships for you to invest in pre-IPO deals alongside people who, as they put it, were early in OpenAI and Airbnb.
more and more platforms like this start popping up. this makes sense people companies stay private for longer.
but it’s so funny reading this the same week I am talking to pre-seed founders who are just trying to get one fund to reply.
top and bottom of venture feel like different worlds fr.
yes, you can get an investor list from everywhere.
usually from an ai tool, sometimes 200+ names long.
I took a look at one of them from a founder I knew, and the first two pages were all VCs, though he asked for family offices.
the problem isn't that the lists are wrong. they are just soooo generalistic. they tell you who invests in SaaS when you are building a CRM for private schools.
if you are willing to pay for investor lists, make sure you know the methods and the quality of those lists.
this is like buying a Rolex on the street, guys. there is a reason it's on the street.
early no-AI founders should not believe the venture investment stats.
US venture investment hit a record so far in 2026. 83% of it went to AI.
this doesn’t mean the market is back nor that there is nothing left for you. that number lowkey says nothing about your chances.
most money went into very big rounds, and was never going to land in a 500k pre-seed.
market stats tell you about the market. if you want to know your case, focus on 20-30 specific investors and know them all over.
builders teach me things.
I am about to start working with a guy who skipped building a frontend for his data product, and just plugged it into chat and claude.
5 min later our founder was like "we should do this".
yes, I saw platforms integrating with AI via MCP. but the more you talk about, the more you see it work, the more motivation I got going to create something too.
this is why I love working with tech non tech alternative underground solo first-gen people.
the universe made me message this person today.
I reached out because the startup seemed cool, he replied that he'd just come back from vacation, his team had just decided to raise, and my message showed up at that exact moment.
he said it's a sign, I would say it's pure luck. but the lesson is timing in outreach matters more than polished messages sometimes.