The Coffee Break Fallacy of the startup world

In my article “The Fatal Fundraising Mistake Founders Make”, I briefly mentioned what I call the coffee break fallacy. This is the idea that one of the smartest things a founder can do is to “grab a coffee” with VCs long before a fundraise, just to “build the relationship”.

This sounds sophisticated, almost elegant. You’re not begging for money, you’re “networking”. You’re not pitching, you’re “getting to know each other”. It feels like the kind of move insiders make.

In reality, for most founders, most of the time, this is the wrong mental model.

In this article I want to go deeper into why the coffee break is a fallacy:

• the simple math that kills it,

• the social reasons it became such a fashionable piece of advice,

• why VCs are usually bad teachers of the VC game,

• and what you should do instead if you’re serious about fundraising: run the process.

Let’s ignore opinions and start with arithmetic.

Harry Stebbings, during his weekly conversation with Jason Lemkin and Rory O’Driscoll (from 20VC), describe the 20VC typical partnership rhythm: around twenty founder meetings per partner per week. With four investing partners, that means roughly eighty net new companies met every week.

Run that over a year and you’re in the 3,000–3,500 meetings range.

These are not casual chats. These are meetings around active or imminent fundraising processes. The partners are trying to answer a few very specific questions under time pressure: do we take a second meeting? A third one? What homework do we need to do before the next call? How do we move quickly enough that we don’t lose good deals to faster funds?

When a company is raising, speed of decision is a weapon. The faster a VC can say a credible yes or no, the more competitive they are, and the more likely they are to get their term sheet accepted. That means their calendar is optimised for deal flow, not for gentle relationship-building with companies that might raise one day.

Now layer on the reality on the founder side. Most entrepreneurs imagine themselves as a single, isolated case: “Surely this VC has time for one coffee with me.” They rarely imagine that there are tens of thousands of other founders in the same stage, with the same idea, armed with the same advice.

In Europe alone, you have hundreds of thousands of startups that have raised money from business angels. According to Atomico’s latest State of European Tech report, around 27,000 new startups were created in 2025. Many of them are now looking ahead to a VC round, and a significant fraction have been told the same thing: “Start early, grab coffee with VCs, keep them warm.”

If only 20,000 of those founders act on this advice, and each hopes for one or two casual coffee meetings with a VC partner, you quickly get to a completely unmanageable number. There are not enough partner-hours in the week to satisfy that demand on top of the thousands+ high-stakes fundraising meetings that already exist.

You can’t duplicate humans. There is a hard capacity limit. Once you actually do the math, the fantasy that “good founders should just take coffee with VCs long before they raise” falls apart.

So, if the math is so obviously against it, why does the coffee-break advice keep circulating?

A big part of the answer is social and psychological, not rational.

For a certain generation of well-known founders and tech commentators, talking about “coffee with VCs” became a form of status signalling. Being able to say “I grab coffee with Bill Gurley all the time” was a way to broadcast proximity to power. It implied you were on the inside, that you knew people, that you were part of the club.

Some of these people genuinely did have those kinds of meetings. But they had them in a very different market: fewer startups, less competition, fewer funds, less structured deal flow. Their experience was real for them, at that time.

The problem is what came next. Their personal anecdotes hardened into general advice. That advice then started to get repeated by other “big heads” in the ecosystem, by speakers on panels, by people writing books and blog posts who enjoyed sounding like insiders.

Over the years, the phrase “you should grab coffee with VCs before you raise” became part of the background noise of the ecosystem. Everyone kept hearing it. And once you’ve heard something often enough, you stop challenging it. It starts to feel like a law of nature.

But repetition is not proof. In this case, repetition is simply how a bad idea turned into conventional wisdom.

This advice didn’t appear out of nowhere. It has a very specific history.

Back in 2007, Saul Klein launched the OpenCoffee Club in London: weekly meetups in a Starbucks where founders and investors could just drop by, talk, and build relationships in a totally informal setting. The idea was simple and genuinely positive at the time: make VCs less inaccessible, democratise access, and let “immense benefits” emerge from informal contact.

In the early 2010s, a few very influential VCs then turned this into a doctrine. Mark Suster at Upfront Ventures published “Invest in Lines, Not Dots” and later “Why You Need To Take 50 Coffee Meetings”. His message was clear: don’t show up once and pitch; show me a line over time. How? By meeting regularly, often literally over coffee, and showing progress at each touchpoint.

Fred Wilson at USV reinforced the same idea. On his blog he argued for “continuous financing” and compared the founder–VC relationship to a long dating process: have dinners, coffees, ongoing contact, and avoid “shotgun weddings” where a deal is done with someone you barely know.

These people are smart and had good reasons in their specific context. But what started as a contextual, nuanced view slowly turned into a universal rule: “serious founders grab coffee with VCs early and often”. This sounds extremely reasonable. It is also, in practice, wrong for most people.

There’s another layer to the fallacy that’s more intellectual.

Many founders tell themselves that coffee meetings will help them “learn how VCs think”: their psychology, their decision process, their incentives. In other words: “I don’t just want money, I want to understand the VC game. I’ll learn it by meeting investors over coffee.”

This sounds extremely reasonable. It is also, in practice, wrong for most people.

First, investors do not have the time to offer custom, one-on-one education to every founder who is curious about how funds work. Explaining fund structures, ownership targets, reserves strategy, LP pressure, career risk and so on is complex. It does not fit into a 30-minute coffee, and even if it did, very few partners will prioritise doing that repeatedly for free.

Second, and maybe more importantly, most VCs are not natural educators. They are dealmakers. Their energy goes into sourcing, picking, winning and supporting deals. Some of them enjoy mentoring and teaching, but that is not what they are structurally optimised for. Expecting them to patiently unpack the entire VC game for you over a drink is like expecting a surgeon to teach you neurosurgery in a bar.

If you really want to understand the VC game, you will get more out of the right books, structured resources, structured databases like Dealroom, podcasts, and targeted conversations with people who like explaining the system, than from a handful of coffee meetings with busy partners between two board calls.

Coffee is a very inefficient educational medium.

There is another dangerous angle to this topic: founders often take VC advice at face value.

You will regularly hear investors say things like: “Keep us updated”, “Send regular investor updates even before you raise”, or “Let’s do a coffee and stay in touch until the time is right.”

None of this is evil. But you need to understand the incentives behind it.

From a VC’s point of view, encouraging lots of founders to send updates and drop by for friendly chats creates a large, free option pool. They get information, deal flow and optionality at very low cost. They can observe who is executing well over time, without committing capital, and without having to compete aggressively yet.

That is rational behaviour for them. The question is: is it rational for you?

Your goal as a founder is not to make their life easier or more comfortable. Your goal is to maximise the probability that you raise the right amount of capital, from the right partner, at the right terms, at the right time.

Sometimes those two goals align. Often they don’t.

A sophisticated founder therefore looks at the market through a game theory lens. Who are the players? What are their incentives? What outcomes are they maximising for? And crucially: when an investor gives me a recommendation, is it primarily for my benefit, or for theirs?

This doesn’t mean that all VC advice is bad. It means you should never confuse “a VC said it” with “it must be true and optimal for me.”

If random coffee chats and endless pre-fundraise updates are not the answer, what should you do instead?

The alternative is what many experienced operators now call run the process.

Running the process means treating fundraising as a deliberate, long-term strategy rather than a loose collection of friendly conversations. You start by thinking in terms of a fundraising path: where you are now, what type of round is likely next, and which funds are structurally suited to that stage, that check size, that geography, that story, and whether you have the network to actually reach and influence them.

Then you design how you will arrive on their radar in a way that doesn’t depend on cold coffee invitations. A much more powerful path is through the portfolio: building relationships with founders who are already backed by the funds you care about, executing so well that they willingly introduce you when the time is right, and creating a pattern of evidence that makes you hard to ignore.

You also treat the actual fundraising phase as a focused sprint rather than a perpetual background activity. You prepare. You decide which funds you want to target and in what order. You gather warm intros. Then you move with intensity over a relatively compressed time frame, so that investors are forced to make decisions instead of letting things drift.

Inside that process, you might still have the occasional coffee. But the coffee is now a small tactic inside a larger, intentional design, not the central strategy.

Are all coffee meetings useless? No.

If a top-tier partner you genuinely want in your cap table asks you for a coffee, and there is a realistic path to working together in the future, it makes sense to go. If you already have a long-standing relationship with someone and the coffee is part of maintaining that relationship, not a disguised pitch, that can also be valuable.

The point is not to eliminate informal moments. The point is to stop pretending that casual coffee meetings are the main engine of successful fundraising in a market where partners already do thousands of serious meetings a year.

The coffee break fallacy survives because it is chic, flattering and easy to repeat. It allows people to sound connected and knowing. It makes founders feel like they are “doing something” about fundraising, even when they are mostly burning time and cognitive energy.

But once you look at the numbers, the incentives and the actual behaviour of disciplined investors, the myth melts away.

You are not operating in the market of ten or fifteen years ago. You are operating in an ecosystem where there are far more startups, far more noise, and far more structure around how funds deploy their time. In that world, your edge does not come from being the founder who drank the most coffee. It comes from being the founder who understands the game, respects the constraints, and runs a sharp, intentional process.

Don’t optimise for being liked over lattes.

Optimise for building a company so compelling, and a fundraising process so well run, that investors have to sit up, clear their calendar, and make a real decision.

Do you have a compelling story to influence the best VCs?

We are a VC fundraising investment bank.

Mighty Nine

VC Game by Mighty Nine is your indispensable guide to understanding how venture capital really works and learning to play the VC game like the best founders.

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