Educational only — not investment, legal or tax advice.

Closing a seed round feels like crossing a finish line. In practice it starts a clock: your next investors will judge you on what you did with this money. The first 90 days set the pattern for the whole round.

Days 1 to 30: set the scoreboard

1. Define the milestones that would make your Series A easy. Not a wish list: two or three measurable results (revenue level, retention, a technical milestone) that investors at the next stage look for in your sector.
2. Build the plan backwards from them. Every hire and major spend should connect to one of those milestones.
3. Set your runway rule. Many founders aim to start the next raise with at least 6 to 9 months of cash left, which means hitting the milestones well before the money runs out.
4. Clean up the paperwork. File every closing document, update the cap table, and make sure board consents and any 83(b) elections are done. See founder vesting and the 83(b) election.

Days 31 to 60: hire carefully

• Hire to the milestones. The first hires after a seed should remove your biggest bottleneck, not fill out an org chart.
• Use your option pool deliberately. Decide grant ranges by role before you start offering equity, so early hires don’t use up the pool.
• Don’t scale before it works. Adding sales people before you have a repeatable way to win customers mostly increases burn.

Days 61 to 90: build the investor rhythm

• Start monthly updates now. See the monthly investor update.
• Run your first board meeting well. Send materials in advance, spend most of the time on one or two real decisions, and keep the reporting short.
• Map your Series A investors. Start relationships now, months before you need them, by sharing progress, not asking for money.

Warning signs to watch

• Burn rising faster than progress toward milestones.
• Hiring that is ahead of a clear plan.
• Metrics you can’t explain or that you’ve stopped reporting.

From the investor’s side of the table

After a round closes, I watched for one thing: did the company know exactly what the money was for? The founders who had defined their milestones before the cash arrived spent it faster on the right things and raised their next round on better terms.

The short version

Pick the milestones that unlock your next round, hire only toward them, and keep investors informed every month. The seed round is a budget for proof.

Sources

• NVCA model legal documents (Investors’ Rights Agreement)
• Cooley GO glossary: Board of directors

Written by Fabian Cisneros. Educational only — not investment, legal or tax advice. See the full disclaimer.