The First 90 Days After Raising: What Actually Happens

Welcome back to The Cap Table Newsletter! This bi-weekly newsletter will share key insights on angel investing, start-ups, and investment opportunities.

This week, we’re digging into something founders rarely talk about publicly… What actually happens in the first 90 days after money hits the bank.

Everyone glamorizes the fundraise. The term sheet. The announcement. The wired funds.

But here’s the truth: The real work begins the moment the round closes.

The first 90 days separate the founders who scale… from the founders who stall.

Let’s break down what those three months really look like.

Follow our new and improved Instagram to hear about Trending Deals, Founder Stories, & Investor News!

Subscribe Now to get this newsletter delivered straight to your inbox every other Wednesday morning!

The Cap Table is Powered by Otter.ai

The best founder tracking system I’ve ever built started as a simple problem: I kept forgetting details about the best companies I met.

Now, every founder call I take is automatically recorded, transcribed, and searchable using Otter AI.

When a company I met six months ago raises a Series A, I can pull up exactly what they said about burn rate, traction, or market size - in seconds. It’s the difference between guessing and having data.

I turned that system into a full VC Playbook - the same framework I use to track 1,500+ founder conversations a year, score them across 8 dimensions, and never lose a great deal again.

Download the VC Framework.

The money comes in. Your brain finally exhale-season ends. And then the real responsibility hits you: Now you have to deliver.

Here’s what the first two weeks typically look like:

You go from fundraise meetings to a new schedule: product reviews, team standups, hiring calls, onboarding, and investor follow-ups.

Every founder does a “silent reset.” You clean your Notion, reorganize your roadmap, rebuild your KPI dashboards, lock in your 90-day OKRs, and close the 10 random loops you ignored during the raise.

You send the first official update post-close. This matters more than you think. It sets the tone for how you communicate and how much trust you’re going to build.

The founders who do this well win long-term.

Fundraising isn’t the hard part. Hiring is.

With fresh capital, founders immediately feel the pressure to build the team they pitched. But most hiring mistakes happen right here.

You open roles you swore you’d open “right after the raise.” You get flooded with inbound interest. Investors introduce candidates. Your calendar suddenly looks like one giant back-to-back hiring sprint.

Speed is good. Desperation is not.

This is where founders accidentally:

Hiring defines your next 18 months more than the fundraising ever will. Treat these weeks like gold.

This is the part no one talks about.

Once the team starts to grow, something shifts: investors quietly expect output. They don’t say it explicitly, but the pressure is there.

You now have to hit the milestones you put in the deck.

This is where the great founders separate themselves.

They don’t panic. They over-communicate. They adjust plans without abandoning them. They build internal momentum one shipped feature at a time.

This is the stretch where conviction is earned.

Somewhere between day 45 and day 90, you have the first “so how’s it going?” conversation.

This is not a performance review. It’s a trust review.

Investors want to know:

As a founder, your job isn’t perfection. It’s consistency.

A clear update beats an impressive one. A steady hand beats a loud one.

The first investor check-in shapes how supportive, patient, and helpful your cap table will be for the rest of your journey.

Every founder overspends right after raising. It’s almost unavoidable.

New hires. New tools. New experiments. New ambitions.

But by day 60–75, founders start feeling the weight of burn.

How fast can we actually grow? Are these hires adding output or payroll? Can we really hit our Series A milestones in time? Do we need to slow down spend? Speed it up?

Runway stops being a number in a deck. It becomes a daily operating constraint.

This is where the disciplined founders stand out. They build dashboards. They reorganize spend. They prioritize. They start weighing short-term experiments vs long-term velocity.

This is where real CEOs emerge.

The first 90 days after raising aren’t about celebration. They’re about identity.

You’re building the way your company operates. You’re signaling how you lead. You’re showing investors how you communicate. You’re teaching your team what excellence looks like.

Fundraising is the story. Execution is the proof.

Everything that happens in these 90 days compounds into the next round.

The Cap Table is powered by BILL.

You never think fraud will happen to your company... until it does. BILL’s 2025 playbook shows that most fraud isn’t sophisticated; it’s preventable. Two fixes every team should implement immediately are enforcing separation of duties and locking vendor banking changes to shut down BEC attempts.

Read the full playbook here.

Founders think the hardest part is getting the money. But the real test begins after the wires clear.

You now have the resources to build. The team to lead. The runway to deliver. The investors to update. The pressure to manage.

If fundraising is the starting line, the first 90 days are the first mile. How you run it determines how far you go.

The founders who win aren’t the ones who raise the fastest. They’re the ones who transition from “fundraising mode” to “execution mode” without losing momentum.

They don’t wait to get organized. They don’t delay hard hires. They don’t hide misses. They don’t overspend in their first quarter.

They build cadence. They build trust. They build velocity.

If you just raised, or you’re planning to raise, remember this: The round isn’t the finish line. It’s permission to start going faster.

Until next week, Elana ✌️

If you enjoyed this week’s newsletter - feel free to check out some of our past articles:

In the meantime, Follow our instagram to see the latest founder and VC updates.

💌 Join our subscribers and sign up for this weekly Cap Table Newsletter if you haven’t already!

Also if you are interested in starting to Angel Invest you can apply to our syndicate to see our weekly deal flow!

Disclaimer: The Cap Table DOES NOT provide financial advice. All content is for informational purposes only. The Cap Table is not a registered investment, legal, or tax advisor or a broker/dealer.