Keith Rabois on how to manage interest from multiple investors when fundraising for your startup

Then during the fundraising process, let's say that Founders Fund is really excited. What is kind of the right practice to share with other investors that Founders Fund is interested. You're talking to them. Should you not share who the other investors are? Yeah, I think the first thing is I would never tell another investor that so and so is interested unless they basically at least verbally offered you money. The investor world is very insular and it's a cottage industry. Like almost every single person I compete with for real is a good friend of mine. If it's not true, you're just ruining the chance you raise money from basically anybody. And so that's a bad idea. If it's legit, then there's two ways to play this. I don't actually mind if people tell other investors that we're interested. If it's true, I'm like, you should be choosing me and us because you want us. And so I don't really care if you tell other people. Like, they go crazy, whatever. Other VCs get very frustrated, very alienated, think it's unethical to do that. Personally, I don't care. But you are playing with fire with a lot of VCs. So the way most founders kind of trying it like this is probably they say something like, I've just got an offer from a top tier fund, so they never name us, but they give like some interest that you're on a shock hawk and time is scarce. That is totally acceptable to almost anybody. Like again, I would not lie. If you have a second tier fund, I would not call the top tier fund because again, I may figure out who that is and I'd be like, oh, I don't trust this founder now. And that's a real problem.