Operations after a seed or Series A round

Why the quarter after a raise is different

Before the round, most decisions are forced. There is one obvious priority because there is only money for one. Afterwards there are four plausible priorities, three of which would have been good ideas last year, and no established way of choosing between them. Everyone is busier, and decisions take longer than they did the week before the money landed.

That is not a failure of discipline. It is what happens when a company built for speed acquires the means to do several things at once. The first ninety days are when the fix is cheapest, because there is less history to unwind and the whole team already expects things to change.

Decide what the money is actually for

Investors funded a thesis. Writing down, in plain language, what that thesis commits you to over the next four quarters — and, more usefully, what it does not — is the highest-return hour available. A founding team that has agreed what this money is not for can say no quickly and explain the no. Without it, every plausible opportunity gets argued from first principles, and the arguing is what eats the quarter.

What breaks first

Across companies at this stage the same joints come under strain in roughly the same order: decision ownership, because everything routed through the founders when that was quickest; hiring ahead of the system, because a joiner without a defined remit will invent one; and commitments made without a paper trail, which are individually trivial and collectively the thing that surfaces during diligence at the next round. We set all three out in the first 90 days after a seed round.

The spend nobody decided

One quarter after a raise, the vendor bill has typically grown by a third and nobody can point at the decision. Before the round every purchase was felt; afterwards each one is obviously affordable, and "obviously affordable" is the absence of a standard rather than a standard. Bringing that under a named owner early is quick, unglamorous and worth more than it sounds — the detail is in SaaS and vendor spend after a funding round.

Reporting the board will actually use

New investors bring a reporting expectation, and the trap is building a separate quarterly artefact that nobody uses internally. Board reporting should be assembled from the numbers the company already runs on. If the board pack tells the leadership team something it did not already know, the problem is not the pack.

Whether this is the right fit

The first 90 days

This is the same shape as the fractional COO engagement, compressed and pointed at the specific things a raise changes.

Common questions