Going Founder Mode on Fundraising in Climate

Lessons from Enduring Planet & Friends’ February 2026 Community Event

In 2021, fundraising was about speed. In 2026, it’s about sequencing.

At our latest Enduring Planet & Friends session, “Going Founder Mode on Fundraising,” Dimitry Gershenson moderated the discussion with Lisa Dyson, Hannah Friedman and Tim Thomson, on what it actually looks like to run a raise well. 

We structured the conversation around three phases: mindset → mechanics → momentum and supplemented with war-stories & personal advice from speakers who have each raised north of $100M in climate. 

This event was sponsored by Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati!

1. Mindset: Who “owns” the raise, especially in today’s market?

“Founder mode” or founder-led fundraising is not bravado. It also doesn’t require you to be a charismatic one-(wo)man show.

It means you drive strategy, pacing, investor selection, and narrative — not your banker, not your deck, and not the market mood. In practice, it looks like a full court press, with the CEO internally and externally in the driver’s seat. 

The two-week blitz is over. Don’t slap AI on your deck and expect that your raise will be easy. The “banana stand / free money / ZIRP” era of compressed cycles and inflated pricing is largely gone. In today’s market, relationship equity compounds over quarters, not days. Founders who only surface when they need capital start from zero every time and dramatically reduce their probability of success. “Always be fundraising.”

Valuation discipline creates optionality. Insisting on yesterday’s price can quietly shrink your funnel of potential investors to zero. Several panelists discussed using valuation “ranges” to test demand and maintain flexibility. Ego kills rounds faster than anything else. 

Storytelling is not technical explanation. For deep tech and climate founders especially, the temptation is to over-explain. But investors are underwriting market pull and how well you solve painful problems for paying customers. As Lisa noted, the pitch has to anchor on the value proposition to customers and demand before it descends into chemistry or hardware.

CEO-led is an important signal. Role clarity protects (co-)founder bandwidth. At companies like Charm Industrial, the CEO owns investor relationships and narrative. The CEO is the “hook” to get investors bought into the idea and that it might work. From there, the CFO maintains the model, structures the data room, manages diligence and comes in to “pinch hit” closing investors.

Delegating investor outreach or conversations too early dilutes conviction. Do not have your Chief of Staff doing investor outreach, unless they have pre-existing relationships with funders. Inversely, bringing executives into outreach prematurely can signal that the founder/CEO isn’t fully in command. Most investors want to underwrite a founder/CEO who can fundraise; if they lack the storytelling and supercommunicator skills to do that, how effective are they going to be, really, at hiring and selling customers? 

2. Mechanics: Running a Tight Process

Mindset without execution is expensive optimism. The panel got concrete about how to prevent fundraising from becoming inefficient or swallowing precious executives’ time:

Time blocking is non-negotiable. Treat fundraising like a proper internal project, with a scope, timeline, plan A & B, and appropriate time allocation. Lisa described carving out defined windows for fundraising while keeping operational oversight tight. If the business stalls during the raise, investors notice. Growth is leverage, and it can be helpful to plan out which milestones you’ll achieve during the fundraising process in order to share “wins” with investors at various stages of their diligence (but especially if they’ve stalled). 

Build a tiered, deliberate investor list. Going broad feels productive but has diminishing marginal returns. A focused list — sometimes 300–400 deeply researched targets — allows founders to:

• Pressure-test the message with Tier 2 investors.
  • If one steps up with a Term Sheet, even better.
• Refine positioning before approaching Tier 1 investors
  • These folks are your dream team and can lead the round. 
• Cultivate Tier 3 investors who are likely to follow along / fill in the round. 

There are many, many lists of investors available online. Leverage your networks and relationships to winnow the list. Historically, the broader you start, the more prep time you’ll need for desk research to winnow the list to on-target (sector), on-stage, on-geography investors. In today’s day and age, use AI to cull these lists and surface an actionable starting point. 

Approach matters. While opinions differ, some believe cold outreach can be viable, but only when personalized and sharp. Warm intros from portfolio founders, co-investors and your Board members remain way more powerful.

Regardless, the key is intentional sequencing — not volume. Speed of your responsiveness to investors is also a meaningful signal that you’re on top of your process - and that they might miss out if they don’t move as fast as you do. 

Tools reduce friction, but not risk. CRMs, DocSend, structured data rooms, milestone updates — all useful. None replace clarity of thought and streamlining everything in one place as a “single source of truth.” One recurring mistake: gating decks too aggressively and adding friction early. If the goal is to project confidence and meaningful progress, make it easy to engage.

3. Momentum: Manufacturing Urgency

Many founders unintentionally destroy organic urgency working in their favor, and often, founders don’t know how to deploy the art of manufacturing urgency without coming across as “pushy” or “desperate.” 

Sequencing matters. Most investor intro meetings and qualifications happen before you’re ever “actively” raising. When you do “open” a formal round, cluster conversations to progress multiple folks in diligence at the same time. Set clear timeline expectations, but have a backup plan. Maintain responsiveness throughout, even if investors lag arbitrarily.

The three best organic momentum pushes, listed in descending order:

• Someone else is issuing / has issued you a Term Sheet
  • “You need to move now or you might miss the boat.” Good ‘ole FOMO.
• There’s a clear customer or commercial milestone creating an inflection point
  • “Now that X signature or Y approval happened, we really need the money to go execute on a lot of commercial progress that’s good for the business and good to accelerate us to the next valuation step up (aka good markup for you, investor).”
• Business as usual continues to go well
  • “We’re hitting or surpassing projections on track to prior milestones. Let’s get this round done efficiently for sake of everyone’s time.”

Three silent momentum killers came from a few hard truths surfaced:

• Raising with three (or six, even) months of runway remaining is not strategy; it’s gambling.
• Over-rotating on every piece of investor feedback fragments your story.
• Sometimes it’s a pricing issue if you accidentally anchored their expectations too high.

When meetings go quiet mid-raise, the right move is diagnosis, not panic:

• Is it about business fundamentals or genuine market concerns?
• Did we approach the right investor at the right time? Is this investor simply not structurally able to lead?
• Is pushback about round dynamics like amount raised and valuation?

Jumpstarting momentum mid-raise requires serious introspection. Sometimes the answer is tightening the story if you feel that - after diligence - investors’ concerns could be better addressed. Lisa cautioned about acting on all advice; be serious about contextualizing feedback within your understanding of the technology and market. Frequency of the same type of feedback can also be a helpful indicator. 

Sometimes it’s about resetting and doing another push of outreach. Perhaps you didn’t hit the right investors first or perhaps you weren’t comprehensive enough. 

Sometimes the answer is restructuring terms. Treat investors as a partner: Ask what terms or price could make them more comfortable and do not optimize for dilution if no other leads are materializing. 

Close with humility and reset with a forward-look to the next round. Tim described fundraising as much like operating a company: everything happens on a sine curve. Good follows bad follows good, hopefully for a net result that’s up and to the right. Importantly, at the crest, don’t get greedy. Closing decisively preserves business momentum and psychological energy. Chasing marginal improvements at the top can erode both.

Another advanced insight: each round should compound credibility. If every raise feels like starting from zero, something about communication or investor selection is broken. When fundraising, it often helps to speak to investors both up and down the capital stack. When you’re not in an “active” raise, that’s still a good time to be meeting and qualifying investors. Again, “always be fundraising.”

Personal Advice and Advanced Strategy

Leverage is built before you need it. Leverage comes from:

• Demonstrable operational velocity.
• Multiple capital pathways (venture, strategic, grants, family offices, debt).
• Proactive investor qualification, not assessing fit on the fly.
• Enough runway to negotiate without fear.

Leverage disappears when timelines compress and optionality narrows. If you’re negotiating from a place of desperation, you don’t have leverage — you have hope.

Every round is different: Adapt that way. Even seasoned founders have to adapt round after round. As Lisa put it: “Don’t expect the next round to be like the last round.”

Later-stage fundraising introduces complexity that many underestimate:

• Corporate venture arms or strategic capital with layered agendas.
• More sophisticated data room expectations and cross-functional synchronization.
• Deeper legal diligence and sharper economic terms.
• More intricate Board-level negotiation dynamics.

More traction does not necessarily make fundraising easier. It often makes it more complex.

Negotiate early, not emotionally. If you want a term codified, ask for it explicitly in the Term Sheet. Handshake assumptions rarely survive legal drafting, and waiting until full-form documents to raise structural concerns creates unnecessary friction.

Experienced founders learn to surface issues and gaps early and "super-communicate". Communicating risks (and having an understanding about their orders of magnitude and priority) adds credibility. In its best form, an investor goes in eyes wide open as a true partner to help you shoulder the burden of those risks. 

Qualify investors as much as they qualify you. Not every check is helpful. The wrong investor can cost more than dilution. Investor selection is a critical part of fundraising strategy but can too often become and after-thought or seen as a “luxury.”

As companies mature, founder psychology sometimes shifts from an “ask” to an “invitation.” Instead of “Can I get capital from you?”, advanced rounds start to position it as “I’d like to invite you to be a part of this journey. What can you add to our next phase of growth?”

Fundraising is a CEO test. Build the muscle of mental resilience. Fundraising is rejection-dense and emotionally charged. Perhaps the most under-discussed reality: The raise that nearly breaks you often teaches you the most about your business — and about yourself.

Can you hold conviction without becoming rigid? Can you absorb rejection without spiraling? Can you distinguish structural “no’s” from feedback that actually requires change?

The speakers highlighted their experiences needing to shield their teams from volatility.  Investors notice the steadiness of leadership under pressure. So do employees.

“Founder mode” in fundraising isn’t about intensity or charisma. The founders who are most successful don’t treat fundraising as an interruption to the business; they treat it as an extension of how they run the company.

Capital is rarely the scarcest element in a fundraise. Clarity, sequencing, and discipline usually are.