Ean Mullins

I never saw a deck from half of our portfolio. Two of them are now unicorns. The worst time to fundraise is when you’re actually fundraising. The strongest founders raise when they don’t need to. They build relationships long before there’s a pitch. When it’s time, they compress everything into a tight window, create urgency, and stay in control. This is how deal heat is created. Not a 3 month process. A 10 day sprint. Partner meetings → term sheets. Especially in AI and gaming. In fast moving markets, you don’t wait for perfect conditions. Great founders create their own timing. 70% of our portfolio raises in the past two years happened without a formal fundraising process. When they did raise, it wasn’t a process. It was a moment.

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Stop Chasing Logos. Start Backing Grit. I see angels piling into seed rounds because a16z or Sequoia [you get the idea] is leading. "If they're in, it must be good." No. It means they made a bet. Same as you. Here's what matters: nobody knows which founders will find product-market fit. Not the smartest VCs. Not serial entrepreneurs. Nobody. PMF is part skill, part luck, part refusing to quit when every metric says you should. Even the best pattern matchers can't predict it at seed stage. Late stage? Different story. Series B+ companies already crossed the chasm. They proved they can scale. Unit economics work. Growth is real. That's when following smart money makes sense. The hard part is done. But at seed? I don't invest because of who else is in the round. I invest because I see a founder who won't quit. Who stays coachable when things break. Who builds where others aren't looking. Some of my best bets? Deals that "smart money" passed on. Not because they were wrong. Because they optimize for different things. I optimize for resilience. For founders who execute under pressure. For people who refuse to let the story end. The pattern: Seed = bet on the founder's grit, not the syndicate's reputation Late stage = proven winners, smart money follows data Don't let FOMO make you pay for someone else's pattern recognition. Build your own. What are you backing—logos or resilience?

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If you don’t believe small funds can compete with mega funds, you probably shouldn’t work in startups. The core premise of our industry is that small, focused, founder-led teams can outmaneuver much larger, better-resourced incumbents.

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40%+ of Seed and Series A funding in 2026 is flowing into $100M+ rounds, as Zachary DeWitt recently highlighted. The market is making a big bet on mega rounds. I'm taking the under on their performance--I'd bet heavily on an index of regular-sized seeds vs the megas.   Here's what I think is happening. Ambitious founders surrounded by AI hype see Anthropic's and OpenAI's returns and think they need to do something similar. In their minds, this means raising huge rounds to fund NBA-level salaries for the most legible AI talent at Meta, Google, other AI labs, etc.   The problem is that this approach is fundamentally derivative. This is not how Anthropic, OpenAI, or any of the other most disruptive AI companies started. Disruption requires doing something that experts dismiss. If a startup requires raising mountains of cash to hire legions of expensive experts, it might have some degree of success, but it will not be disruptive.   Look, this is tricky. Anthropic raised giant early rounds and seems very mission-oriented, so I don't want to paint with too broad a brush here. That said, Anthropic's $124m Series A in 2021 was actually very unconventional in many respects, even in the context of a frothy 2021.   Besides being derivative (and thus not disruptive), this approach also selects for mercenary over missionary culture. And all things being equal, companies with missionary culture outperform. Because if you really care about solving a problem, you're willing to make sacrifices and do non-consensus things—not just copy what worked for the last wave.   So, why does this pattern persist despite these concerns?   The most economically dominant point is that the investors doing the big rounds make a lot of money on management fees. When partners at funds enjoy massive compensation from management fees, investment performance becomes a "nice-to-have."   To be fair, many of these partners are post-economic and are arguably more interested in hiring huge teams and building "platforms." The fees justified by mega rounds align nicely with the expense structure of empire-building. On the other hand, the smaller rounds are done by firms where the principals are making much less on management fees and have much more incentive to see a return on the capital via carry.   The mega firms would surely retort that many of the smaller rounds are done by firms that are here today, gone tomorrow. And there's truth to that. Mega firms with billions of assets are inherently more stable. At the same time, those firms are fundamentally targeting much lower returns. It's trade-offs all the way down.   So when I look at that 40%+ number, I see capital flowing into a pattern that selects for derivative thinking and mercenary culture, with an underlying incentive structure that ensures it keeps happening.   And that's why I'm taking the under on the performance of that 40%.

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Founders often scramble to prep materials *after* a VC shows interest. That’s backward. You should be ready for diligence before your first meeting with a VC. Smart founders: 🗂 Have their data room ready 📊 Can share a clear KPI dashboard if asked 💸 Keep clean, up-to-date financials 📣 Track and communicate metrics Flailing around getting your files in order can erode investor trust. Put in the work ahead of time and it will build confidence in you and your company. #FundraisingAdvice #StartupTips #RSCMFounderFriday

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More than $600B of U.S. venture value now sits in funds that are 5+ years old. That backlog has grown 170% since 2018. The result? Founders and investors shoulder personal financial strain far longer than the model ever assumed. It’s not because companies are weaker. It’s because liquidity is stalled. This is why secondaries matter. They are a way to get liquidity flowing again so founders can make long-term decisions, not survival-based decisions. Founders deserve a capital environment that adapts alongside them. Read more about what we are building at Revenant VC!

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