One of the best parts of this, illustrated by the use of red squares, is that "sit and do nothing" isn't part of fundraising.<p>Common YC advice for fundraising is "optimize for speed" (with valuation, amount, brand names, etc, coming second). Don't get trapped in long diligence cycles, waiting for a lead, or other road blocks.
Relatedly: write one of these for your sales process (certainly for enterprise sales, but very useful for low-touch/medium-touch as well). It will save your sanity.
A note to anybody having problems loading the flowchart image: some combination of HTTPS Everywhere and other privacy-related extensions causes the image to fail to load with an Amazon S3 or CloudFront-like error from Edgecast CDN.<p>The broken image URL: <a href="https://gs1.wac.edgecastcdn.net/8019B6/data.tumblr.com/d92e89be88474faafb5122dc60a6e450/tumblr_nlowhamlb31r7m6x8o1_r1_1280.png" rel="nofollow">https://gs1.wac.edgecastcdn.net/8019B6/data.tumblr.com/d92e8...</a><p>The correct image URL: <a href="http://40.media.tumblr.com/d92e89be88474faafb5122dc60a6e450/tumblr_nlowhamlb31r7m6x8o1_r1_1280.png" rel="nofollow">http://40.media.tumblr.com/d92e89be88474faafb5122dc60a6e450/...</a> (https also works)
Interesting that there's no step in the flowchart for an investor to exit the flow after a verbal yes. A 100% close rate may be normal for a YC company but in my experience it's not typical. You want to get a "No" as fast as possible, which I've seen happen at every stage of the pipeline, including after signed docs (although rarely).