During a challenging fundraising round, I once offered to return investors' money because I believed in the long-term vision of Discord over short-term gains.

Raising the next round of funding is often harder than founders anticipate, especially in a changing economic environment.

In the early days, investors rejected our multiplayer game idea because they doubted its potential for success, which ultimately led us to pivot to Discord.

The initial thesis for Discord was that a durable gaming company needed an established distribution advantage, leading to the creation of a group chat app for gamers.

The breakthrough for Discord's growth came from inviting users to provide feedback rather than just promoting the app, which helped build a community.

Despite initial struggles, we showed some growth, prompting an investor to suggest we raise a Series A round, which I eagerly prepared for.

Raising from many investors can create momentum, but managing a large number of investors can be challenging, often referred to as a 'party round.'

The easiest way to fundraise is to have a good metric that's growing; when I ran a startup that wasn't growing, I spoke to 140 investors and only got two angel checks, but now that I'm working on a growing startup, it took us one week to raise our seed round.

We raised our Series A on a prototype, which was challenging because many investors doubted our potential to become a public company.