There's an important difference between a fundraise actually taking 6 months, and a fundraise that you started several months before you were ready (ie, before your company has a "market-clearing" offer).

If, in parallel to fundraising, you are spending months demonstrating traction, preparing decks, modelling out potential outcomes, launching a product, or whatever, the problem isn't "fundraising takes longer than it looks on tv", but rather, "fundraising requires clearing higher standards that it seems to on tv".

Good point. I see a lot of entrepreneurs start with a bad pitch. A few weeks in they will stop to regroup. They will refine the pitch, and start again.

In parallel, they may get more aggressive about coordinating all the meetings into a short window of time / pushing people to meet sooner.

Elad, I agree with you on this point. Question being, should entrepreneurs get more agressive about co-ordinating meetings into a short window of time? How do investors react to that?

It is probably because I'm not in the valley, but I would have loved to have been finished in 3 months. We closed our seed round 6 months after pitching our first angel group. Granted, we had a few bridge notes to get us through and we were pretty picky about the money we took, but still. Fund raising takes forever.

I have to admit I found myself wanting to tell the author that his article about the unrealistic expectations about the time it takes to raise funding had some very unrealistic expectations around the time it takes to raise money!

All good points. I would just add that I'd double the time here. Secondly, time is to some extent on the investors side. A lot of folks burn out quickly so seeing you still dedicated and (mostly) telling the same story 3 to 6 months later is important.

Ha ha. Yes, it can take even longer. But I think even 3 months is much longer then most people expect. :)

Couldn't agree more! I constantly see startups underestimate the amount of time it will take to raise and then make suboptimal decisions because they are in a rush

It's also a bummer when startups don't factor the time it takes to fundraise into their calculations when figuring out how much cash they need.

Live and learn, I guess.

David Lee had a good recent post on this: http://daslee.me/6-months

3 Months would be great. Raising angel money in Canada is a little slow. (I'm being kind)