The snow was coming down sideways in New York while Dylan Zhang dialed in from a San Francisco hotel room he had not yet decided to call home. I was staring out my right shoulder at white chaos wrapping around buildings like it had a personal vendetta, and on my screen was a founder who had just raised $7.5 million and was talking about it like he had signed up for jury duty. That contrast set the tone.
This was Tavern Community’s first fully virtual event. Benji Schwartz opened with that. Applications for the AI cohort were rolling in from international founders, and while Tavern has built its identity as an in person New York ecosystem, the demand was widening the aperture. So we tested something new. Same intimacy. Same signal. Different medium.
The title was straightforward. How I Raised My Seed Round. I moderated the session. Dylan Zhang, Founder and CEO of Pond, was the headliner. On paper, the story was loud. $7.5 million seed round. Led by Archetype. Participation from Cyber Fund, Delphi Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, and Anagram. Over 30 angel investors, including Illia Polosukhin, co author of the Transformer architecture and one of the minds behind the T in GPT. Pond has worked with Eleven Labs, Lovable, the Ethereum Foundation, and Google Cloud. That is a cap table that turns heads.
Dylan Zhang opened by saying he was not proud of the raise. You could feel the room recalibrate. Most founders frame fundraising as validation. Dylan Zhang framed it as liability. Before capital, he was responsible for himself and maybe one or two others. After closing the round, he was responsible for a team of fourteen. Salaries. Families. Real lives that depend on execution. The money did not feel like applause. It felt like weight. Capital is trust. Trust is responsibility. Responsibility is pressure. That is not a slide in a pitch deck. That is a mindset shift.
We dug into his journey. He grew up in Asia, studied in London, worked across Africa and China, and eventually came to the United States to build. He was the first employee at Spanning Labs, working alongside a founding team with MIT and SpaceX credentials. That company raised $2 million pre seed in a week without a pitch deck. The timing helped. The backgrounds helped. There was engineered urgency. Investors competing to get in. It was a reminder that narrative, scarcity, and perception are part of the game whether we like it or not.
Then Dylan Zhang said something that I knew would hit the founders in the room sideways. Do not go to venture capitalists. Let them come to you. He was not being theatrical. He was being practical. Building is easier now. AI tools compress the distance between idea and execution. That means investors are flooded with decks. The bar is higher. His advice was simple and brutal. Ship. Post demo videos publicly. Launch. Iterate. Launch again. Use open platforms with real distribution. Let the market respond. If something resonates, if traction shows up in the wild, investors will notice.
In Pond’s seed round, that is exactly what happened. Venture firms reached out after seeing announcements and partnerships gain attention. By the time meetings happened, the context already existed. The pitch was not a cold start. It was a continuation of momentum that had been building in public.
When founders asked about product market fit, he reduced it to a clean equation. Product market fit is the one. Everything else is zeros. If you do not have that, the rest is theater.
We moved into the mechanics. Cap table complexity. Shareholder management. The reality of having to get dozens of signatures when making changes. Preparing for a Series A while coordinating with a large base of investors. It is not glamorous. It is administrative gravity. Once you take capital, you are not operating solo. You are operating with permission. Legal permission. Strategic permission. The wrong investor is not neutral. They are friction for years.
Dylan Zhang broke down incentives with precision. Venture firms answer to limited partners. Some funds are purely optimizing for financial return. Some are strategic arms of larger institutions looking for access to innovation. Some care deeply about not missing the next breakout company. The money has a personality. Founders need to understand who they are marrying before they sign.
When he shared his screen and walked through Pond, the philosophy connected to product. Pond is positioning itself as infrastructure for early stage applications. The analogy he used was Amazon. As launching ecommerce vendors became easier decades ago, Amazon became the distribution and infrastructure layer. Today, building apps is easier. Distribution and early traction are still hard.
Through bounties, startups can acquire early users, generate user feedback, create user generated content, and even experiment with hiring by letting contributors compete and rewarding the best outcomes. Instead of spending months trying to coax your first hundred power users out of online forums without getting banned, you post a bounty and let competition surface quality. Pond sees roughly fifty thousand users daily interacting with bounties and exploring products. Future features include a markets layer designed to help verified startups raise through SAFE and token warrant structures, with options for equity or token mechanics depending on the company’s strategy.
The questions from founders were real. One founder had $150,000 committed toward a $1.5 million target and was wrestling with finding a lead investor and setting valuation benchmarks. Dylan Zhang did not offer shortcuts. Four weeks into fundraising is early. Three to six months is normal. Angels alone rarely close a round of that size. You need a lead who can anchor the rest of the raise. And if you cannot create urgency, you create proof. More traction. Stronger retention. Clearer metrics. Do more. Keep shipping.
What struck me most was not the tactics. It was the posture. Dylan Zhang talked openly about struggling. About flying from London to San Francisco on short notice early in his journey to pitch through jet lag. About not knowing how hard it would be when he started. About being used to struggle now. That is the part no one puts in the headline. Fundraising is not the win. It is the weight.
Moderating that conversation, watching founders ask sharp questions while snow piled up outside my window, I was reminded of something simple. Titles do not build companies. Capital does not build companies. Shipping builds companies. Product market fit builds companies. Everything else is a derivative of that.
If you are raising right now, the market does not owe you speed. Investors do not owe you attention. The only lever you fully control is output. The more undeniable your proof becomes, the less you have to convince anyone of anything.
The storm eventually passed. The Zoom room emptied. The work did not.
