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You raised your seed round, you built your plan, and you told your investors you'd be ready for Series A in 18 months. You might want to sit down.
According to Carta's latest data, the median time between a seed round and a Series A is now 774 days. That's over two years. In 2021, it was 420 days. The gap has grown by 84% in three years, and it's still trending longer.
If you raised $3 million and you're burning $125K a month, your runway is 24 months. That sounds fine until you realize 24 months barely covers the median timeline. A quarter of funded companies are now waiting three years or more for their Series A. You're planning for the middle of the bell curve and hoping you're not on the wrong side of it.
After 20 years building and scaling product orgs, and now working with seed and Series A founders as a fractional exec, I keep seeing the same mistake. Founders plan their burn rate around a fundraising timeline that hasn't existed for two years.
The Grown-Ups in the Room
I know of a company that learned this the expensive way. Series A company, about 60 employees, heading into their Series B raise. They'd done what every pitch deck says you're supposed to do: they went out and hired VP-level leaders. The grown-ups in the room. People who could professionalize the org and impress investors with a mature leadership bench. Big-league hires from big-league companies.
Problem was, the next round took longer than they planned. The grown-ups were expensive. Eight of them had to go, and most of them had been there less than six months.
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Here's the part nobody warns you about. When you hire a VP and let them go after four and a half months, that VP has VP-level contacts. They have a network. And the startup community is a lot smaller than it looks from the outside.
One of those former VPs posted on LinkedIn. "Five months ago I left Stripe to join a Series A company as VP of Marketing. Monday I was told my position was being eliminated. No performance issues. No warning. Just 'we can't afford this role anymore.'" He ended the post with, "They just weren't ready to be the grown-ups." Another former VP jumped in. She'd left Atlassian for the same company, same outcome.
