How to Raise Money

<img src="http://www.virtumundo.com/images/spacer.gif" height=15 width=1> Want to start a startup?

<img src="http://www.virtumundo.com/images/spacer.gif" height=15 width=1> 想要创业吗？

Get funded by Y Combinator .

获得 Y Combinator 的资助。

</td > September 2013 Most startups that raise money do it more than once.

</td> 2013 年 9 月 大多数筹集资金的初创公司都会不止一次进行融资。

A typical trajectory might be (1) to get started with a few tens of thousands from something like Y Combinator or individual angels, then (2) raise a few hundred thousand to a few million to build the company,

典型的轨迹可能是（1）从 Y Combinator 或个人天使投资人那里筹集数万美元开始，然后（2）筹集几十万到几百万来建立公司，

and then (3) once the company is clearly succeeding, raise one or more later rounds to accelerate growth.

然后 (3) 一旦公司明显取得成功，就进行一轮或多轮后续融资以加速增长。

Reality can be messier.

现实可能更混乱。

Some companies raise money twice in phase 2.

一些公司在第二阶段筹集了两次资金。

Others skip phase 1 and go straight to phase 2.

其他人则跳过第 1 阶段，直接进入第 2 阶段。

And at Y Combinator we get an increasing number of companies that have already raised amounts in the hundreds of thousands.

在 Y Combinator，我们看到越来越多的公司已经筹集了数十万美元的资金。

But the three phase path is at least the one about which individual startups' paths

但三阶段路径至少是单个初创公司的路径

oscillate.

振荡。

This essay focuses on phase 2 fundraising.

本文重点关注第二阶段筹款。

That's the type the startups we fund are doing on Demo Day, and this essay is the advice we give them.

这就是我们资助的初创公司在演示日所做的事情，这篇文章就是我们给他们的建议。

Forces Fundraising is hard in both senses: hard like lifting a heavy weight, and hard like solving a puzzle.

强制筹款在两个意义上都是困难的：困难就像举起重物，困难就像解决难题。

It's hard like lifting a weight because it's intrinsically hard to convince people to part with large sums of money.

这就像举重一样困难，因为本质上很难说服人们放弃大笔金钱。

That problem is irreducible; it should be

这个问题是无法简化的；应该是

hard.

很难。

But much of the other kind of difficulty can be eliminated.

但许多其他类型的困难是可以消除的。

Fundraising only seems a puzzle because it's an alien world to most founders, and I hope to fix that by supplying a map through it.

筹款看起来只是一个难题，因为对大多数创始人来说这是一个陌生的世界，我希望通过提供一张地图来解决这个问题。

To founders, the behavior of investors is often opaque — partly because their motivations are obscure, but partly because they deliberately mislead you.

对于创始人来说，投资者的行为往往是不透明的——部分是因为他们的动机不明确，部分是因为他们故意误导你。

And the misleading ways of investors combine horribly with the wishful thinking of inexperienced founders.

投资者的误导性方式与缺乏经验的创始人的一厢情愿的想法可怕地结合在一起。

At YC we're always warning founders about this danger, and investors are probably more circumspect with YC startups than with other companies they talk to, and even so we witness a constant series of explosions as these two volatile components combine.

在 YC，我们总是警告创始人注意这种危险，而且投资者对 YC 初创公司可能比对他们交谈的其他公司更加谨慎，即便如此，当这两个不稳定因素结合在一起时，我们仍然目睹了一系列持续的爆炸。

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