पाठशाला Pathshala · धन Dhan, Money · Lesson 06 · Start

The fundraising process: six weeks, not six months

A raise that drags is a raise that is failing slowly and taking the company with it. Run it as a project: a list, a narrative, every conversation in parallel, and a date that forces decisions.

Pathshala, The Founder Library · 11 October 2026 · 9 min read

Ask a founder how the raise is going and the answer is usually a list of conversations. Ask when it will end and there is a pause. That pause is the problem. A raise without an end date is not a process; it is a condition, and a company in that condition is run by one founder while the other spends eight months learning what investors do not want.

This lesson treats a seed round as a project with a calendar. It explains why raises drag and what that costs, what has to exist before the first email goes out, how to run every conversation in parallel, how a deadline is created honestly, and what the Indian close involves once a term sheet is signed. The calendar in the middle is the whole method as a list you can tick. Six weeks is the time from first email to signed term sheet when the company is ready and the process is run properly. It is not the time to money in the bank, and the difference matters.

Why raises drag, and what it costs

Paul Graham’s first rule in How to Raise Money is that a startup should either be in fundraising mode or not. The half-state, in which a founder takes investor meetings as they come while trying to run the company, produces the worst of both: investors sense there is no round to miss and feel no need to decide, and the company loses a founder’s attention for months without the money to show for it. Graham’s observation is that fundraising usually takes off fast for the startups that are most successful at it, and that when it is not working the options run out in the same way for everyone. Stop fundraising when it stops working, he writes; do not keep sucking on the straw if you are just getting air.

The costs of a slow raise compound. The obvious one is cash: a raise that takes eight months instead of two has consumed six months of runway, which is why the [runway lesson](/library/runway-how-many-months-you-really-have) says to begin with six months in the bank. The less obvious one is signal. Investors talk, and a company that has been raising since the spring is a company that others have passed on. The valuation falls with the calendar, and so does the quality of the investor willing to come in last.

DocSend’s research with Harvard Business School, published in 2015, found that companies which closed a round took a little over twelve weeks to do it and needed about forty investor meetings. Its 2020 seed report found that founders who closed in 2019 contacted an average of 77 investors and still held about 40 meetings. Those are the honest scale of the work. The six-week calendar does not reduce it; it compresses it, by doing the forty meetings in a fortnight rather than a quarter.

Before day one: the list, the narrative, the room

The raise is won or lost in the two weeks before it begins. Four things have to exist. The list. Sixty to eighty investors who invest at your stage, in your sector, in companies of your shape, with the name of the person who will introduce you to each. Tier them: the ten you most want, the thirty who would be fine, the rest as practice. A list of fifteen names is not a list; it is a hope. The narrative. One paragraph that says what the company does, for whom, what has happened so far in numbers, and what the money is for. It is what your introducer forwards, so it has to be forwardable. The deck. Twelve slides built around traction and insight; the [deck lesson](/library/pitch-deck-twelve-slides-and-one-that-matters) is the companion to this one. The data room. A shared folder with the incorporation documents, the cap table, the financials, a metrics sheet that reconciles to the deck, the customer contracts and the DPIIT certificate, ready before anyone asks, because every document assembled after it is requested adds a day to the close.

Two decisions belong here too. Which founder runs the raise, because Graham’s advice to pick one so the others can keep working on the company is the difference between a company that comes out of the raise intact and one that comes out with a round and no customers. And how much, with a floor: the amount that reaches the next milestone with margin, which Y Combinator’s guide to seed fundraising frames as enough to get to the next stage with room to spare, in practice twelve to eighteen months of operation, and the lowest number you would still take. The floor is written down now because in week five it will be tested.

Parallel, not serial

The single change that turns six months into six weeks is to hold every first meeting in the same fortnight. Graham’s instruction is that your method should be breadth-first search weighted by expected value: talk to everyone at once, then spend your time in proportion to each investor’s probability of saying yes multiplied by what they would invest. The practical form is twenty to thirty first meetings in weeks one and two, taken in tier order with the practice tier first, because the pitch improves every time it is given and the rough versions should be spent on the investors you would least mind losing.

Three habits keep parallel conversations honest. Send the deck after the meeting rather than before, so that it reminds rather than replaces. End every meeting by asking what the investor needs to see to decide and by when, and write the answer down; an investor who cannot name the thing is a no that has not been said yet, and Graham’s rule is to treat them as declining until they unequivocally say yes. And every Friday send one short update to every open conversation: a new customer, a number that moved, who else has come in. Momentum is the only signal an investor can read from a company they cannot yet measure, and a weekly update is how momentum is made visible without being invented.

The deadline that creates urgency

Investors decide when they must and not before, so a process without a forcing event is a process without decisions. The forcing event is the lead. Graham’s line is that getting the first substantial offer can be half the total difficulty of fundraising, and in weeks three and four the work is to find it: convert the first meetings that went well into partner meetings, open the data room, line up customers who will take a reference call this fortnight, and ask the most engaged investor directly whether they will lead, at what price and by what date. Most leads are asked for. Few arrive unasked.

Once a real offer exists a deadline becomes legitimate. Graham considers a deadline of three working days acceptable for an investor to decide on terms already on the table, and that is the right order of magnitude for everyone else once the lead has signed. The rule that makes deadlines work is never to bluff one: an invented term sheet is discovered in a single phone call between partners and ends the raise. The deadline is a date you can defend because something real happens on it: the lead signs, the allocation is set, the round closes to new names. The day the term sheet is signed, call every other active investor with the terms and the allocation left, and watch a month of maybes resolve in a week.

A raise is a project with a start, a list, a calendar and an end. Everything that makes it feel like a condition is a decision somebody has not made.

From term sheet to money: the Indian close

The term sheet is not the money, and in India the distance between them is longer than the fundraising guides written elsewhere suggest. A seed close of six to ten weeks after the term sheet is normal; four is good. The steps are fixed. Diligence, legal and financial, answered in one batch from the data room. A valuation report, by a registered valuer for the Companies Act, and the pricing certificate the foreign exchange rules require if any investor is outside India. The share subscription and shareholders’ agreements, which decide what happens when things go wrong and deserve a lawyer who has drafted Indian ones. Then the private placement itself under section 42: board and shareholder resolutions, the PAS-4 offer letter, money from each subscriber’s own bank account into a separate account, allotment within sixty days and the PAS-3 return within fifteen days of allotment, before which the money may not be used. If any investor is a non-resident, the Reserve Bank’s reporting through your bankers follows allotment on its own clock. Only then are share certificates issued and the money yours to spend.

Two Indian habits deserve a rule each. Rounds here close in tranches, with angels and smaller funds coming in weeks after the lead; the habit is fine if every tranche has a date, and ruinous if the company is run on commitments in the meantime, because Graham’s rule that it is not a deal till the money is in the bank is truer in a country where a wire can wait on a bank’s compliance desk. And founders here are often asked to keep the round open for one more investor; the answer is a second close date, after which the round is closed, because a round that never closes is a raise that never ends.

A worked calendar

A Bengaluru company selling software to mid-sized manufacturers has ₹4 lakh of monthly revenue growing fifteen per cent a month, ₹60 lakh in the bank and a burn of ₹8 lakh. The founders decide in the first week of January to raise ₹4 crore, with a floor of ₹3 crore, to reach ₹25 lakh of monthly revenue in eighteen months. The CEO takes the raise; the CTO takes the company. By 20 January there is a list of 72 funds and angels, a paragraph, a deck and a data room, and 40 introduction requests go out on the same Monday. Weeks one and two, from 26 January, produce 26 first meetings. Weeks three and four produce nine second meetings, three customer reference calls and a direct question to the fund that asked the most: will you lead? On 2 March they offer ₹2.5 crore at ₹12 crore pre-money. The founders set a decision date of 6 March for everyone else, sign the term sheet on the 9th, and by the 16th have ₹4.2 crore committed from the lead, two angel networks and one platform syndicate; they close the round to new names. Diligence takes eight days, the agreements three weeks, the valuation report runs in parallel, and allotment is on 24 April with PAS-3 filed on 2 May. Introduction requests to money in the bank: fourteen weeks. First meeting to signed term sheet: six.

The weekly ritual, and what to do when week six passes

Every Monday of the raise, thirty minutes with the tracker: who is where, what moves them, what goes out this week, and the honest answer to one question, is this working? The signs that it is are second meetings arriving unprompted and investors asking who else is in. The signs that it is not are first meetings that end warmly and go silent, and a tracker on which nothing has moved to a later stage for ten days. If week six passes without a lead, the calendar has done its job by telling you something true. Stop. Go back to the company, pick the one number that would have made the round easy, and reach it, then run the same six weeks again with that number on the first slide. A raise that fails in six weeks costs six weeks. One that fails in six months can cost the company.

Nothing here is legal, tax or investment advice. The Companies Act timelines and the foreign exchange reporting rules are as checked on the date of writing and change by notification; a company secretary who has closed a private placement is the cheapest part of the process. The sources are below.