You closed the round. Now what?
The wire hits your account and suddenly you have money. More money than you've ever had in a business bank account. The instinct is to start spending. Resist it — at least for a week or two.
The period right after closing is when a lot of founders make mistakes they spend the next 18 months fixing. Here's what we tell every founder we work with once the round is done.
Set up your reporting before you hire anyone
Your investors now expect updates. Monthly or quarterly — agree on a cadence and stick to it. The format doesn't have to be fancy. Revenue, burn, runway, key hires, biggest risk, one thing you need help with. That's enough. Founders who go quiet after raising lose trust fast, and trust is what gets you bridge funding or introductions when you need them.
Hire slower than you want to
Every founder comes out of a raise with a hiring plan. Six engineers, a head of sales, a marketing lead. Then reality hits: good people take months to find, onboarding takes longer than expected, and your burn rate jumps before any of those hires produce results.
We usually recommend hiring in waves. Start with the two or three most critical roles. Get them productive. Then hire the next batch. It keeps your burn rate predictable and gives you time to learn what you actually need versus what you thought you needed.
Revisit your financial model
The model you used to raise was a story for investors. Now you need an operating model — something you actually run the business against. Update your assumptions with real numbers. Set quarterly targets. Build in a buffer for things going wrong, because they will.
Don't change your pricing yet
Founders with fresh capital sometimes get ambitious about pricing — either raising prices too fast or offering big discounts to accelerate growth. Both can backfire. If you're going to adjust pricing, do it based on data from the next 2-3 months, not based on optimism from having money in the bank.
Talk to your co-founder about money
This is the conversation nobody wants to have. Are you adjusting salaries? Taking any founder-friendly distributions? How are you thinking about personal financial risk now that the company has runway? These conversations are easier to have when things are good. Have them now.
Remember why you raised
Pull up the deck you pitched. Look at the "use of funds" slide. That's what you told investors you'd do with their money. You don't have to follow it to the letter, but if you're drifting significantly within the first six months, check yourself. The best founders treat investor capital like it's their own money — because in a real sense, it is.
