A podcast · hosted by Martin Tobias · Incisive Ventures
Every raise,
by the numbers.
CEOs walk through exactly how their last round got done — how many investors they pitched, how many said no, what the deck did, and what finally got the lead over the hump. Fifteen minutes. Same questions every time. No victory laps.
The Format
Fundraising advice is mostly survivorship theater.
"We were oversubscribed." "It came together quickly." "Great investors leaned in." None of that helps you raise. Round Numbers asks every CEO the same questions about their last round — the list, the meetings, the nos, the deck, the close — so the answers become comparable. One raise is an anecdote. Twenty raises, same questions, is a dataset.
The Stat Line
Every episode opens with the numbers.
Before the story, the score. Amount, investors pitched, meetings taken, nos collected, term sheets, weeks start-to-wire. Guests share the real numbers — that's the price of admission.
— what a stat line looks like. Every raise gets one.
The Feed
Latest episodes
Sam Rivera: A $1.5M pre-seed with no lead for six weeks
SAMPLE — placeholder episode showing the format. A pre-seed founder on chasing angels before a lead, the deck nobody read past slide 3, and the deadline that finally closed the round.
$1.5M · 62 pitched · 47 nos · 2 term sheets · 9 wks
Listen →Jane Doe: 84 pitches, 61 nos, one lead that almost walked
SAMPLE — placeholder episode showing the format. A seed-stage CEO reconstructs an 11-week raise: the list, the deck that stalled on the traction slide, and the customer call that flipped the lead.
$3.2M · 84 pitched · 61 nos · 3 term sheets · 11 wks
Listen →The Playbook
What everyone who's raised tells Martin.
Every episode ends in three takeaways. They roll up into a running master list of what actually closes rounds — ranked by how many guests said it, updated with every episode.
Parallel, never serial
Batch every first meeting into a tight window so partner meetings land the same weeks and term sheets can collide.
Find the lead first, fill the round later
Angels and small checks follow gravity. Until a lead is circling, everything else is conditional interest.
Manufacture momentum
Scarcity and a real deadline move partnerships. Investors buy what other investors are about to buy.
The Host
Asked by someone who reads decks for a living.
Martin Tobias writes first checks at Incisive Ventures and has sat on both sides of the table — raising rounds as a CEO, and hearing hundreds of pitches as a pre-seed investor. So the questions aren't a journalist's questions. They're the ones an investor asks another founder when the recorder is usually off.