Jacob comes at fundraising from an unusually operator-heavy angle. Julian Capital is staffed entirely by ex-growth people (Julian himself ran growth at multiple billion-dollar companies), and they don't just write checks. They embed with portfolio companies on growth, design, branding, and storytelling. On top of that, Jacob runs DeepChecks, which the team describes as the world's largest fundraising platform for deep tech, built to match founders with the specific investors who actually fund their sub-sector and stage. That gives him a rare dual perspective: he sees both the supply side (thousands of founder pitches) and the demand side (the full universe of deep tech VCs) of the market.
The throughline of his advice is that fundraising should look more like a sprint than a marathon. He pushes founders to "measure twice, cut once" by building a full investor list, prioritizing it, getting practice reps with lower-priority funds first, and then running a tightly time-boxed process (2 to 3 weeks if you're experienced, a couple of months max for first-timers). He's blunt about why a six-month raise is a yellow flag, why every email and deck gets unconsciously graded as a proxy for how well you'll run the company, and why "velocity" (speed plus direction) matters more than raw effort. He also reframes the first investor call: by the time you're on the call, the idea has already passed. The investor is now evaluating whether you're the right founder for that idea.
The episode gets especially tactical in the back half. Jacob lays out a concrete tranching strategy where the first million comes in at a lower valuation, the next at a higher one, and so on, rewarding early conviction and avoiding the "land the plane" problem of trying to close everyone at one cap. He's refreshingly direct about why founders over-index on valuation, what to do with the cash the day it lands (pre-plan your hires, use grants and financing for equipment, don't burn equity dollars on things you could rent), and why monthly investor updates with a consistent template often turn into next-round preempts. It's a useful playbook for any deep tech founder thinking about how to prep, run, and survive after a round.
