By: Abby Sandoval

Most founders treat PR as something that happens after a raise. Announce the round, place the story, celebrate the coverage. That sequence gets the order backward, and it costs founders deals they never knew they lost.

Venture capital has grown dramatically more selective. Fewer than 1% of the thousand-plus pitches a typical VC receives annually result in investment. The founders who break through share a pattern: by the time they walk into a meeting, the investor has already encountered their thinking somewhere credible. They are not meeting a stranger. They are extending a relationship that started months earlier, in a publication or podcast, before anyone asked for money.

What Investors Find When They Search Your Name

Investors run searches before they take meetings. That is not a speculation. It is the standard process. What they find, or fail to find, shapes whether a conversation happens at all. Third-party validation through credible platforms and industry publications serves as external endorsement, signaling that someone else has already vetted this founder and found them worth paying attention to. It reduces friction. It does not replace due diligence, but it determines which companies get invited into the room in the first place.

A founder with consistently earned media coverage arrives at that meeting with something a pitch deck cannot manufacture: a track record of public credibility. The story has already been told, and a journalist decided it was worth telling.

Carson Spitzke, founder of Spitz PR, works with executives and entrepreneurs to build that kind of authority before they need it. “Investors are doing their homework on you before you ever pitch,” Spitzke says. “If they search your name and nothing comes up, that’s a signal. It tells them you haven’t done the work to build your reputation. PR fixes that problem before it becomes one.”

The Timeline Problem Most Founders Ignore

Building a credible media presence takes longer than founders expect. The guidance for seed-stage companies is to begin PR work 3-6 months before fundraising outreach, enough runway to establish expert positioning, earn journalist relationships, and create the kind of sustained visibility that reads as authority rather than a one-off announcement.

Companies with strategic PR in place before outreach see two to three times more inbound investor interest and close rounds roughly 40% faster than those without a media presence.

Spitz PR builds that foundation through strategic placement in publications relevant to a founder’s sector, positioning them as a credible voice before the ask is ever made. “The goal isn’t coverage for its own sake,” Spitzke says. “It’s making sure that when an investor looks you up, what they find makes them want to take the meeting.”

A pitch deck tells investors what you believe. Earned media shows them that others believe it too.