Jay Yeh

Jay Yeh is a fundraising coach for founders, the host of the Funded podcast, and the founder of Adamant. The way he describes it himself: former VC, venture-backed founder, and now a fundraising coach. Three different seats at the table, in that order, and the work he does today only makes sense as the compound of all three.

The investor seat came first. Jay studied cognitive science, economics, and computer science at the University of Virginia, then spent his early career on the venture side of the table before going to Harvard Business School for an MBA in general management and international entrepreneurship. The pattern-matching habits investors develop (which decks land in thirty seconds, which timelines feel real, which founders move a room) became the spine of how Jay reads a fundraise.

Then the operator seat. In 2017 Jay co-founded Tape, a mobile video communications tool for connecting brands and audiences. He ran it as Co-Founder and CEO for three years and sold it in 2020. Building Tape and raising for Tape gave him the other half of the data set: not what investors want to see, but what it actually feels like to be the founder trying to manufacture the round. Around the same stretch he sat on Delta Air Lines' Tech Advisory Board for six years, which kept the enterprise-buyer perspective in view alongside the startup one.

Adamant is what he started after Tape exited, in April 2020. It is the coaching layer: one-on-one engagements, group cohorts, workshops, and pitch teardowns for founders raising pre-seed through Series A. The work is hands-on. Jay treats every fundraise as a narrative engineering project: who is the protagonist, what is the shared dream with the investor, and where is the deadline structure that turns interest into a wire.

Funded is the public layer. Across 200+ episodes since 2020, Jay has interviewed founders directly after they closed: Bessemer-led $35M term sheets written overnight, $5M raises that started with a cold LinkedIn DM, angel armies of CISOs unlocking enterprise rounds. The companion show, The Backchannel, is a solo essay format where Jay names the patterns. Calendar Density (packing first meetings into a tight two-week window so investors feel the round moving) is the framework most associated with him.

Beyond the podcast, Jay writes the Fundraising Fieldnotes newsletter weekly. The vast majority of founders who interact with his work get it for free through the newsletter and the show; the coaching is for the small percentage who want to compress the timeline. Jay lives in Venice, California. He can be reached at jason@fundedpod.com.