I think this is generally decent advice about the mechanics of fundraising if you aren't an "in-demand" startup. However, this does gloss over the major fact that this is a bad situation to find yourself in, and you are much better off spending energy getting yourself into a good situation than you are swimming upstream in a bad one. And while I'm sure being in YC does help with fundraising (extra social proof), you certainly don't need to be in YC to raise money successfully.<p>If you don't think you will be good at fundraising (because you don't know a lot of rich people, you are a first-timer, you aren't good at pitching, etc), then you should be operating your business in a way where you don't need to fundraise. Be incredibly incredibly lean, generate revenue from day 1, figure out how to incrementally achieve ambitious goals, etc. There are a lot more ways to run a successful business than there are to run a successful fundraising --- investors are all looking for the same thing, and they could all be wrong. But if you grow fast enough or make enough money they'll come around.<p>There isn't too much reason to get into more details because pg wrote the canonical piece on fundraising, which certainly applies to non-YC companies as well: <a href="http://paulgraham.com/fr.html" rel="nofollow">http://paulgraham.com/fr.html</a><p>But generally, the premise of this whole article is flawed. Most startups fail. If you want to successfully raise money, you should be in the 1% (or 5% or 10%, but some suitably small number) of top startups. And if you aren't, then you should be spending your time getting there instead of raising money.