Stop Waiting Until You Need Money to Start Raising It
Emrah · Mark Suster spent years on both sides of the fundraising table, first as a founder, then as a VC. His oldest and most practical advice is also the one most founders ignore: raising money is not an event you schedule, it is a habit you keep running in the background.
The Story
Mark Suster built two companies before he became an investor. He co-founded Koral, sold it to Salesforce, then co-founded BuildOnline. After that he moved to the other side of the table, joining what is now Upfront Ventures. He has been writing about startups and venture capital since 2010, and the blog carries a name that says exactly what he brings to it: Both Sides of the Table.
In an early post, first published in 2012 and later updated, Suster laid out something he had noticed from watching hundreds of raises from both chairs. Founders who treat fundraising as a project that starts the day they open a spreadsheet almost always struggle more than founders who treat it as an ongoing relationship. He gives a useful contrast inside the piece. A company as hot as Fab.com in its early days could get away with a fast, aggressive process, because demand for the deal did the work that trust normally has to do. Most companies are not Fab.com. For everyone else, the slow version works better.
The Idea
Suster calls the slow version Always Be Raising, or ABR. The core habit is simple to describe and harder to keep up. A founder sets aside a few hours a week, even when there is no active round, to build relationships with a short list of target investors. That means meeting them early, well before there is any ask on the table. It means sending short, honest progress updates on a regular schedule, maybe once a month, three or four sentences with real numbers instead of a polished narrative. And it means asking for the occasional 30 minute check in, not to pitch, just to stay visible.
Suster also describes something closer to lobbying. A founder figures out who influences a target investor, whether that is another founder in the portfolio, a co-investor, or someone the partner trusts, and builds a relationship with that person too. None of this is about performing for an audience. It is about making sure that by the time a real ask happens, the investor already has months of evidence sitting in their head.
How Founders Should Read This
The trap most founders fall into is treating fundraising as something you start when you need it. Cash gets tight, someone builds a list of forty investors, and the outreach begins cold. Suster's argument is that this backwards timing is the single biggest reason good companies get slow, lukewarm responses from investors who would have said yes with more context.
The fix is not complicated, but it does require discipline before there is any urgency. Pick a short list, maybe eight to ten investors who would actually make sense for the next round. Send them something real once a month: a number that moved, a hire that mattered, a problem you solved. Keep it short. Suster's own line about this is blunt: time is the enemy of all deals. The longer a founder waits to start this process, the less time there is for trust to build before the money is actually needed.
There is a failure mode on the other side too. Some founders take ABR too literally and start pestering investors with updates that carry no real signal, just noise dressed up as diligence. That does the opposite of what the habit is supposed to do. The goal is not frequency for its own sake. It is a record that an investor can actually watch improve.
How Investors Should Read This
One number changes how an investor reads a founder they just met: zero. Zero prior contact, zero history, zero evidence beyond what fits in a single deck and a single meeting. Suster's essay explains, from the other chair, why that number matters so much.
A venture fund can only place a small number of new bets in a given year, and each one is expensive to get wrong. Fund math forces a kind of rationing: partners have limited time, limited board seats, limited dry powder, so every yes has to be defended later to other partners and eventually to LPs. Under that kind of pressure, a founder who shows up with eight months of consistent, honest updates is simply a lower risk decision than a founder who shows up for the first time on day one of a raise, no matter how good the pitch is.
This is also why investors quietly reward founders who share bad news early. A founder who mentions a missed number in a monthly update, along with what they are doing about it, is giving an investor something a polished pitch never can: a preview of how this person behaves when things do not go according to plan. That preview is worth more to an experienced investor than almost anything said in a single hour long meeting.
Where the Two Views Collide
A founder experiences the ABR habit as relationship building. The frame is personal: I am getting to know these people, and they are getting to know me, so that when the time comes, we are not strangers.
An investor experiences the exact same emails and calls as something closer to due diligence spread out over time. Every update is quietly graded. Did the number the founder promised last month actually show up. Did they mention the miss, or only the win. Is the tone the same in month six as it was in month one, or did it shift the moment things got harder.
Neither side is being dishonest about this. A founder who understands both readings at once gets an advantage that a founder who only sees the relationship framing does not: they write their updates knowing that each one is also evidence, so they make sure the evidence is worth collecting. A founder who thinks only in relationship terms can end up sending updates that are warm and pleasant and completely useless as a signal, all good news, no real numbers, nothing an investor could actually check.
The Takeaway
Fab.com could skip the slow version because the deal itself was the pitch. Almost no other company gets that shortcut, which means almost every other founder needs the months, not the moment.
Pick a number today: how many months before your next raise, and how many investors on your list have heard from you even once this quarter. If that second number is close to zero, the process Suster describes has not started yet, whatever the calendar says about when the round begins.
Source: Mark Suster, "How to Develop Your Fundraising Strategy," Both Sides of the Table, 2012 (updated 2016) — medium.com/both-sides-of-the-table
