Why sequential meetings kill your round, how to compress the whole thing, and the ask that gets you in the room.

Thalia Pillay had both Orca Fraud’s rounds oversubscribed, and pushed back when it was put down to luck. Her line was that you do have to increase your surface area for luck. But she was equally blunt about the advice everyone gives:

“Everyone kept saying run a fundraising process, then you Google it and Google doesn’t tell you what to do.”

Her own summary of what worked is three things: drive hype, create FOMO, and ask people for advice instead of money. Here’s what that looks like in practice.

Fundraising looks like sales and behaves differently in one crucial way: there’s no latent demand for your round. Nobody wakes up needing to invest in your company, and you can’t argue someone into it. The entire job of a process is to generate demand where there was none, and that only happens when several investors are considering you at the same time.

You cannot build top-of-funnel interest and run live fundraising conversations at the same time; one always starves the other. So the groundwork happens well ahead, ideally nine to twelve months out, in low-stakes conversations where you’re not asking for anything. That’s the window where increasing your surface area for luck actually happens, because the intro that lands your lead investor usually starts long before the round does.

This is Thalia’s move and it works for a structural reason. Asking for money forces a binary decision from someone who barely knows you, and the safe answer is no. Asking for advice gets you into the room with no decision on the table, lets an investor demonstrate expertise, and quietly turns them into someone invested in your thinking before they’re invested in your company. It’s also how you learn which objections are coming before the meetings that count.

This is the mechanic that creates FOMO, and it’s the one founders most often get wrong. Taking calls one at a time as intros trickle in means no investor ever feels competitive pressure, and the round drags for months. Compress all your first meetings into a two-to-three week window instead, so multiple funds move through diligence simultaneously and each one senses the others. For a seed round, roughly 20 to 40 first meetings drawn from a target list of 60 to 80 funds is the working range; run far more than that and the urgency dilutes rather than builds.

Before you start, decide when you’re closing and tell investors. A stated target date turns an open-ended conversation into something with a clock on it, and it lets you solicit term sheets simultaneously rather than one after another. That’s the difference between comparing offers and accepting the only one in front of you. It has to be a real deadline you’ll honour, because inventing urgency and then quietly extending it is obvious and expensive.

A compressed process only survives if nothing stalls it. Your data room, financial model, cap table and customer references should exist before meeting one, because a fund that has to wait a week for documents cools while the others move. Line up a handful of customers willing to take a reference call, and save them for the funds that reach late-stage diligence rather than burning them early.

A structured process closes faster, on better terms, and hands you the choice of who to work with rather than gratitude toward whoever said yes. It also gets you back to building sooner, which for most founders is the bigger prize.

Thalia’s full talk from Founder Collab Live is available to members inside the Founder Collab, where she goes further than we could cover here:

You’ll also get access to 40+ masterclasses from SA founders and operators on sales, fundraising, UX, paid media and more inside The Founder Collab.

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