Fix your roof while the sun is still shining
How comfort quietly turns into drift after a successful raise
Founders often relax right after a funding round.
Not because they become lazy, but because money hides early symptoms that were clear when the team was small and survival was the only focus.
The sun feels warm. The runway looks long. Everyone breathes for the first time in months.
This is the moment drift begins.
Before funding, clarity comes for free. One customer type to satisfy. One hypothesis to prove. A tiny team doing whatever it takes to get traction. Even if you are not aligned, pressure forces you in the same direction.
After funding, everything becomes easier and harder at the same time.
Suddenly you have enough resources to do almost anything. That includes enough resources to do the wrong things for a very long time without noticing.
More team members. More customer types. More opinions. More stakeholder voices.
Less urgency.
That combination looks harmless until it is not.
Founders resist the hard work of sharpening direction at this stage. Not because it feels unnecessary, but because they don’t realise they lack strategic clarity in the first place. Everything still looks manageable. They have no idea what awaits them once the team grows, the customer mix expands, and the pressure shifts from survival to expectations. They think they can wait one more quarter. After all, “we just raised”. This is why post-MVP drift becomes predictable.
The part founders underestimate is that a lack of clarity compounds silently. It hits your burn long before it hits your revenue.
I know this because I lived it at Tørn.
I remember feeling like I was walking on clouds right after we closed a good round. Months of very hard work. Media coverage in Shifter. A sense that everything was finally under control.
In every investor deck we had a slide about how we would use the money. It said the usual things like product development and growth. Nobody asked what that meant in practice.
So we exhaled. For a few weeks we finally slept.
Then the ideas started flowing. Maybe we should improve the product for stores. Maybe that would unlock growth in suppy of products. Maybe it was time for a bigger marketing campaign because now we had budget. Maybe we needed a content creator because our stories looked weak compared to others.
You can see how this goes. A thousand attractive choices. No sharp direction. A team doing more without getting closer to anything.
It felt like progress. It was drift.
This is why I tell founders to fix their roof while the weather is still good.
That is when you have space to think clearly.
That is when the team is not exhausted.
That is when you can choose direction instead of reacting to chaos.
Founders sometimes worry that sharpening strategy too early will kill creativity.
The opposite happens.
A clear direction frees you. Discussions get shorter. Priorities stop shifting. Internal friction drops. Every hour of runway becomes worth more.
Runway extends far more through clarity than through capital.
If you have just raised, the most valuable question you can ask is simple.
Are we moving in the right direction, or just moving? And if we believe we are moving in the right direction, what does that direction actually look like and what is the argument behind it?
Answering that early is what separates founders who scale from founders who drift into the next fundraising cycle without progress.
Next week I will go into the second truth.
People don’t care what you do. They care what you do for them.
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Previous posts
If you missed my previous posts in this series, here they are: