>Speed is one of the most underemphasized traits of a great VC for founders.

Definitely. Well that, and writing checks.

If you're printing money, live in the United States, and have an IQ of 120 (a bit over 1 std deviation above mean) from a high-tech startup, it should take less than an hour to raise $100,000 seed round on standard terms. Okay, call it a week, even a few weeks or months.

Instead, for 90% of founders who match that description, 1 year of full-time work trying to raise the mentioned seed round would not be sufficient to do so (about 2,000 hours of work). In fact "impossible" may be a good description of the possibility for them to do so.

Without reference to sources, take a guess: how many first financings for startups will have happened in 2018? Let's work through this together, I'll give you some data, you can use it to work on your guess, then I'll reveal the answer.

A good place to start your thinking is that if we take a single academic cohort, say, people graduating college this year, there will be about 2.03 million bachelor's degrees conferred[1]. If we then look at every single year (you can try to raise money any year from when you're 18 to 80), and if we add people who dropped out without an undergraduate degree -- this is true for Bill Gates and Steve Jobs for example -- we might expect, say, around 200,000 seed-stage financings nationally at the very, very lowest-end. On the high end, I'd be pretty shocked if there were 2 million, since that would be 1 out of every 162 people living in the United States receiving seed funding this year (or 0.6%) and not that many people are starting companies every year. As mentioned, that's the number of undergraduates graduating annually. Some more data for you: the number of businesses in the United States less than a year old is around 650,000[2].

Okay, ready? Here is the actual number of startup first financings that will have occurred in 2018: 1,750 [3]

That is less than half of the number of undergraduates who are just right now enrolled at just MIT. [4] Would you fund one of them who just started printing money? How about someone who graduated from there (or dropped out) 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, or 10 years ago? Or from Stanford? Or Harvard? Or UC Berkeley? Or indeed anywhere else where they learned to program and start printing money.

If you're a VC the answer is "No, you wouldn't".

Do these numbers make sense to you?

At the moment I can't raise < $150K with paper millionaire cofounders. I can't get a term sheet even at an 80% discount (discount I offered on a safe note). (Okay a VC offered me <$20K for effectively 51% on non-standard terms.).

But I shouldn't be doing that - trying to raise money, I mean. I should be selling cereal: because Airbnb, a technical company that was renting apartments over the Internet, found it easier to sell cereal profitably on national television than to get first financing.[5]

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[1] https://www.quora.com/How-many-students-graduate-college-in-...

[2] https://www.bls.gov/bdm/entrepreneurship/entrepreneurship.ht...

[3] https://imgur.com/a/HZIIY0h (I just counted pixels, the precision is shown by comparing 2007). Reuploaded from: https://www.economist.com/business/2018/06/02/american-tech-...

[4] http://web.mit.edu/facts/faqs.html

[5] http://www.businessinsider.com/how-a-box-of-cereal-and-being...