"When I raised $12 million at my last startup, CodeSee.io, I thought I was winning. Fewer than 30 Black women have ever raised that much venture capital. I thought big money meant big validation. And yes, years later, it was validating. CodeSee.io was Cursor before Cursor was cool. But what people forget is that everything had to be perfect. Perfect product, perfect engineering, perfect marketing, perfect sales, perfect timing. You are signing up for perfection with capital that large."
"A mega round is a contract with the future, not a celebration of the present. You are promising you will grow like a weed even while the world is chaos. In AI especially, half the market is noise and the other half is vaporware. You are still finding product-market-something, but your fundraising number tells the world you are already at product-market-fit. Now your job is not to build truth. It is to build momentum."
Founders in AI are chasing increasingly large fundraising rounds that attract attention but create intense pressure. One founder raised $12 million at a previous startup and later an intentionally small, oversubscribed pre-seed for a new company, Empromptu.ai. Mega rounds demand near-perfect execution across product, engineering, marketing, and sales. Large capital amounts behave like a contract with the future, signaling product-market-fit before it exists and forcing momentum-centric decisions. Markets and timing can shift, and oversized funding can prioritize optics over output, shorten runways, accelerate expectations for the next round, and harm team morale when growth falls short.
Read at Fast Company
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