Why Investors don’t fund overworked founders

You want to raise capital. You want investor attention. You want to be “in demand.”

But if you’re like some founders I meet, you’re spending most of your time on the wrong stuff.

Payroll compliance. Tax filings. Cap table chaos. Admin fire drills.

Necessary? Sure.
Investable? Not even close.

I’ve worked with hundreds of founders, and you know what separates the ones who raise from the ones who just burn through months in Google Sheets?

They protect their time like it’s money. Because it is.

What stops momentum?

The silent killer of startup momentum isn’t your pitch.
It’s not even product-market fit. It’s where you spend your time.

Time is your scarcest, most valuable asset. Yet most founders are bleeding out 500+ hours a year (that’s three months) on undifferentiated ops work that has nothing to do with building a business worth backing.
And so many don't notice. They think they’re being “responsible.” They think being a good founder means handling everything. That’s BS.
Being a good founder means being relentlessly focused on the 10% of activities that move the needle. You don’t get funded for clean tax compliance.
You get funded because you built something worth funding, and you showed up ready to scale it.

Investors aren’t betting on how many checklists you’ve completed.

They’re betting on:

• Your obsession with solving a real problem

• Your ability to attract talent and customers

• Your potential to build something that grows fast

That’s it. The best founders we see aren’t perfect operators. They’re ruthless prioritizers. They don’t try to win by outworking everyone, they win by out-focusing them.

Are you working on the business? Or inside it?

Are you shaping strategy, refining product, and building growth engines?
Or are you fixing payroll setups, managing employee onboarding, chasing down vendor invoices, and explaining your cap table to your bookkeeper for the fourth time?

That’s not “lean.” That’s just death by a thousand busywork cuts.

Enter Chore

I rarely plug tools. But when something actually solves a real pain we see every week, we pay attention. Chore is one of those tools. They're a fractional Chief of Staff, not a software platform you still have to manage. They assign you an actual person (they call them “Chore CEOs”) who takes over the operational sludge clogging up your calendar.

They handle:

• Multi-state payroll and benefits

• HR compliance and onboarding/offboarding

• Equity and cap table admin

• Finance and tax filings

• Everything you shouldn’t be doing as a founder

No hiring. No training. No babysitting. Just “here, take it”, and it gets done.

Your operations matter. But they shouldn’t be your job.

Founders fall into the trap of believing that if they don’t do something themselves, it won’t get done right. But “doing it yourself” doesn’t make you a better founder.
It just makes you a bottleneck. When you spend your day in legal, finance, or HR spreadsheets, you’re not doing “real work”, you’re just avoiding the harder, more valuable stuff:

• Talking to customers.
• Solving product friction.
• Pitching your story to investors.
• Building something investors want to chase, not question.
• Want to look fundable? Act like a founder who’s already raised.

Founders who raise well behave like they’ve already raised. They’re not in the weeds doing $30/hour work. They’re leading. Strategizing. Selling. Scaling. When investors see that, they lean in. When they see a founder drowning in ops, they assume the business isn’t ready, and they’re usually right.

You don’t need to be a finance expert, compliance guru, or HR wizard to build a great company. You just need to stop wasting time pretending you do.

Let Chore handle the back office. Let Thunder help you raise capital.
And you? You do the thing only you can do: build a company that solves problems.