Julia Yu

Hot take from NFX Venture Fund: fundraising is broken because of... Endless forms.
Not because you don't know the right people.
Not because you lack warm intros.
Just. The. Forms.
Here's how they put it themselves:
"Fundraising is broken. Endless forms, vague timelines, ghosted follow-ups." (This I got in my mailbox.)
Great. So they built the antidote.
You can apply if you're a Harvard, MIT, Berkeley, or Stanford student.
Or a woman in HealthTech.
No more broken fundraising! The short form is now available...
to a very specific group of people.
If you think the real bottleneck is something else, you are not alone...
What do you think actually breaks fundraising in 2026?

Drop your take below

Last year in Unicorns Journal we published an interview with Sergey Bakaev, where we unpacked first-time fundraising strategy expectations vs reality, common mistakes, and what founders often underestimate when raising capital for the first time.

It turned into a very honest conversation.

The old sequence looks like this:

Profile Paywall Lost in a Catalog Investor List Cold Outreach

It s a storefront, not a strategy.

Platforms like Fundable has no personalized matching,