Fundraising Lessons & Learnings After Raising $500 Million From Top Investors

You know, so you've of course raised over what I believe over $500 million from some pretty awesome investors such as like Tiger and Sequoia. So are there any kind of key lessons or learnings maybe from fundraising that you'd like to share with founders here?

I mean, I think there's a lot, both kind of tactical and strategic, and we can get into that if people are curious. Yeah, I think one meta piece of advice is when you're raising your round, always know what the round after that one is interested in. Because you gotta put yourself in the mindset of these investors. And if it's your seed investors, they're hoping you, hoping it takes you to a Series A or to a pre— to a, you know, pre-A type of round. And so knowing kind of that set of expectations that the next rung of investors has is critical for you to think about your own strategy of like, what do I need to prove to sort of accomplish that. And then it also factors into the story that you pitch the current round and having them hear that you've internalized what it will take to get from here to there, that your plan lines up to de-risking the sort of key considerations and sort of risks that those investors are kind of checking off. I think will increase the odds that you can sort of fundraise successfully because in some sense they're all bridge rounds, right? Like, and so they need to know that, you know, what's on the other side of this bridge, where you're trying to take it. And then through that, that you're going to be successful. So that's one big thing.