The Sound of Silence: Why "Ghosting" is the Hidden Killer of Capital Raising

I recently asked over 200 founders a simple question: What are your top pain points when raising or deploying capital?

I expected to hear about valuation. I expected complaints about market conditions, interest rates, or complex term sheets.

Instead, I saw a different pattern emerge. A much more human one.

"No one gets back to us." "No one reads our messages." "Avoiding ghosting." "Excuses."

The single most pervasive frustration wasn’t the difficulty of the negotiation; it was the deafening silence that precedes it. In an industry built on relationships, founders' primary user experience is shouting into a void.

This is the "Ghosting Epidemic." And it is costing private markets more than just hurt feelings—it is destroying efficiency, draining founder focus, and killing momentum.

The Anxiety of the Void

The hardest part of fundraising isn't the "no."

A "no" is data. You can learn from it. You can pivot. You can cross a name off a list and move on.

The hardest part is the silence.

When a founder sends a pitch deck, an update, or a follow-up email and receives no response, they don't just sit still. They spiral. They waste hours analysing the silence. Did they see it? Did it go to spam? Is the valuation too high? Do they hate the business?

One respondent described the gruelling reality of simply trying to get "an affirmative response" and the exhausting cycle of "consistent follow-ups" required just to get a pulse. Another noted that obtaining "reliable, rapid, and clear responses from investors is rare" and that the lack of response "drives tremendous time/focus/resource costs".

This is the hidden tax on innovation. Every hour a founder spends chasing a ghost is an hour they aren't spending on their product, their team, or their customers. As one founder bluntly put it, the pain is simply: "Accessing investors, distraction from the business and the time it takes".

It’s Not Malice. It’s Noise.

If we want to fix this, we have to stop vilifying the investors.

Most investors aren't ghosting founders because they are malicious or arrogant. They are ghosting because they are drowning.

Investors are facing their own crisis of "deal flow-scattered opportunities" where curating relevant deals is "extremely time-consuming". They are inundated with noise, managing "lengthy back and forth when requesting information," and struggling to maintain communications across dozens of concurrent conversations.

The current infrastructure of capital engagement—email, LinkedIn DMs, scattered PDFs—was not built for volume. It was built for one-to-one correspondence. When you try to run a sophisticated capital raise on unsophisticated rails, the system breaks. The default response to overwhelm is silence.

The "Fast No" vs. The "Long Maybe"

The tragedy is that founders crave the truth, even if it hurts.

In our survey, founders explicitly asked for "candid feedback". They want to know if the investor is "legitimately interested" and if there is a real schedule for deploying capital.

A "fast no" is a gift. It returns time to the founder. It allows them to refocus their energy on prospects who are actually aligned.

But because our ecosystem lacks the infrastructure for efficient feedback loops, we are stuck in the "long maybe." Founders are left "waiting for payments" or "waiting for responses" for weeks, sometimes months.

One respondent put it perfectly: The process of getting to a yes/no generally takes months or years, which detracts from the "pursuit of the company's core purpose".

Moving From Chasing to Engaging

We cannot solve this problem by telling founders to "follow up more" or telling investors to "be nicer." We have to change the mechanics of their interaction.

We need to move away from a push-based system (where founders chase) to an engagement-based system (where interest is visible).

1. Transparency is non-negotiable: Founders shouldn't have to guess if an investor is active. They need to know whether the investor has "no available capital" or is actively deploying.

2. Feedback loops must be automated: If an investor passes, the "no" should be effortless to deliver and received instantly.

3. Signal over Noise: We need to stop flooding investor inboxes and start providing "meaningful information" that allows them to "quickly understand the value of the proposal".

   
   

The "Ghosting Epidemic" is a symptom of a broken system. It’s time we stopped accepting silence as the cost of doing business.

Founders deserve clarity. Investors deserve sanity. And the private market deserves infrastructure that bridges the gap between the two.