Fundraising Rounds Are Not Milestones
While I completely agree that fundraising itself isn&#x27;t a milestone, it is often a signal of an internal milestone successfully met. And since startups rarely tell us what is really going on inside, people following along outside report this indicator so that other interested parties can follow along.<p>One of the unusual ways that playing the card game Bridge is like startup news is that bidding in bridge is saying something which is related to what you have in your hand but not explicitly what is in your hand. And bidding conventions allow the other players to also follow along and guess what you have. So it is with startups and funding. You get a seed round there is enough interest to give you some money, then there is a pause and then either you get a series A and everyone &quot;knows&quot; your basic idea has at least some legs, or you don&#x27;t and people start to wonder if you&#x27;re going to flame out. Then if you continue hiring without another funding round everyone gets really excited, but if you did raise the series A people put a pin in the board to check in again with you in a year to 18 months. At which point you&#x27;re either growing without doing a round, or your out trying to raise a series B. Depending on who you talk to, some folks think series B is the point where you&#x27;ve got a product you have de-risked it to the point where you can get to 1.0. Others think it is the round where you start bringing your vision to market to convince the larger world you&#x27;re for real. Series C was the &quot;big one&quot; back in the day, that one took you into production and made you a going concern, if you did a series D at that point it was to get ready for your IPO. Series after D were typically &quot;bad&quot; signs of encroaching zombieness or desperation. Not self sufficient, but not clearly established enough that the general public would believe you were going to make it.<p>So I agree that funding rounds aren&#x27;t milestones, but they can certainly be interpreted as a count down.