Written By: Marc Halpin
I ran my first two marathons with the wrong mindset, just gritting my teeth and trying to survive. Between 2012 and 2017, I ran five more (never fast, never pretty) while raising $50M+ for my second venture-backed company, and realized I’d been approaching fundraising the same way, the wrong way.
Early on, I treated both marathons and fundraising like something to get through as fast as possible. In races, it was all about the medal, the time and the finish line; in fundraising, it was all about closing the round. Everything in between felt like something to endure.
Then I made a small but important shift that started with a question: what if I tried to actually enjoy the race itself? Not just the finish or the photo, but the miles, the pain, the challenge, the whole wonderful thing. When I started thinking that way, marathons changed for me.
I began to notice the parts I genuinely liked:
- The quiet early miles when the city is just waking up.
- The camaraderie with every other runner.
- The simple fact that I was out there at all, choosing to do something hard.
It still hurt. There were still dark miles. But the pain stopped being the enemy and became part of the experience. I didn’t become fast, but I became a better racer – more relaxed, more present, more willing to lean into the hard stretches instead of mentally escaping them.
That mindset eventually bled into how I thought about fundraising. Raising $50M+ was not clean or linear; it was messy, full of meetings, “no’s,” near‑misses, and “this might not happen” moments. For years, I saw it like my early races, something to grind through: build the deck, book the calls, survive the rejections, close, move on.
Then I asked the same question I’d started asking on the road: what if I tried to embrace this instead of just enduring it? Unexpectedly, some investor meetings turned into real friendships. People who started on the other side of the table became close friends and trusted sounding boards. We didn’t just trade equity and term sheets; we traded texts about life, family, and the next crazy idea.
Here’s the interesting part, from a sample size of exactly one (me): when I decided to enjoy both marathons and fundraising a bit more, I got better at both. Over time, I’ve seen the same in founders I work with: the ones who treat fundraising as a craft, not just a necessary evil, tend to raise cleaner, faster rounds. They build better relationships, tell sharper stories, and usually like their cap tables more.
That creates a loop:
Enjoy it a little more → show up a little better → get slightly better results → easier to enjoy.
Once you start to enjoy the race, even a little, you tend to run it better. And once you run it better, the finish line has a way of taking care of itself.
Kerosene — Helping Great Founders Raise Capital