Series A investors now expect 7-10 year timelines and want to see scalability, strong teams, and customer love. If you're missing some signals, investors will outline specific milestones to hit in the next few months, sometimes suggesting a bridge round to prove your case before Series B.
For the Series A investors, it's going to be about— it's kind of half like we want to be super enthused about your long-term vision here, because the time horizons have gotten longer. What used to be like a 5-, 6-, 7-year investment is now like a 7-, 8-, 9-, 10-year investment. That's what's happened over the last couple of years, even pre-COVID. So we want to be really excited about the long-term vision. But for us, we're going to be thinking about, can you make enough progress with the cash you're going to get in this round so that the next round is definitely going to happen, right? It's, it's just all the signs are going to be there that this is scalable. You're a great manager of people. You, you know, your, your customers love the product, whatever it is. All the signal will be there and the Series B people will, will love it. That's what we're going to be looking for. Um, you know, it might be that you don't have all of that yet, and we'll tell you these are the 3 things you need to do over the next few months and then come back to us, in which case you might want to just raise a few hundred thousand dollars more and just kind of, you know, do it as a note and keep building, keep getting to those proof points, keep being one of the ones that the Series A investors want to bet on because it's not going to be something that just doesn't— isn't able to raise more money. They get to a place where the business is showing real legs and they can raise more money and then grow the thing.
