Founders Air $87 Billion Cloudflare VC Stories as X Thread Exposes Pitch Power Imbalance
Updated
Updated · TechCrunch · Jun 5
Founders Air $87 Billion Cloudflare VC Stories as X Thread Exposes Pitch Power Imbalance
2 articles · Updated · TechCrunch · Jun 5
Summary
A weeklong X thread turned founders’ private fundraising complaints public, surfacing stories of VCs sleeping through pitches, ghosting after term sheets and treating rejected startups like portfolio companies anyway.
Greg Isenberg sparked the discussion with a tale of a partner sleeping through a $15 million Series A pitch for more than 30 minutes, and founders including Mark Pincus and Liz Wessel said similar meetings still sometimes ended in term sheets.
Matthew Prince shared the sharpest allegations: he said a Sequoia partner doubted whether Michelle Zatlyn could lead a security infrastructure company and that Vinod Khosla once suggested firing co-founders and taking their stock.
Cloudflare’s current scale — an $87 billion market value and expected 2026 revenue of $2.8 billion — gave Prince’s account extra force, while Shaun Maguire publicly asked him to identify the Sequoia partner.
The thread also included positive investor anecdotes, but its broader takeaway was that startup fundraising remains opaque and deeply shaped by uneven power between founders and venture capitalists.