Raising a seed round of financing from a venture capitalist can be a challenging process for early-stage founders. Early stage venture capital is often subjective and irrational, making it difficult to understand without clear-cut answers.

This is why learning from others can be so helpful.To help you avoid some common mistakes, here are some of the things to keep in mind:

• Optimizing for valuation or unrealistically valuation expectations
• Pitching to growth investors for seed capital, or seed capital from growth investors
• Hiring the right resumes, wrong people
• Trying to make everything look perfect and hiding risks.
• Signing a term sheet before reviewing with a lawyer
• Don’t forget to do reference checks on board members
• Picking the right fund, but not the right partner
• Underestimating the amount of time it takes to fundraise
• Not optimizing for FOMO
• Being underprepared for due diligence
• Don’t fundraising when the business is not ready (if you can avoid it)
• Being secretive to the point that you lose trust
• Financials projections don’t exist, don’t match your story, are too optimistic or not optimistic enough.