I too have raised before.

I'm not saying raising and then buying T-Bills is better than just raising less.

I'm saying if you find yourself with excess cash, you can't just un-raise. In that scenario, then short term T Bills are strictly better than cash.

The question is why you'd use money you raised for anything but the reason you raised it. You've probably raised a shit ton more than I have, but hear me out - when one raises, there's generally a timeline of fund deployment from the startup's UoF, right? That's how it was done in my case - we tell the investor what we need, why we need it, and when we need it, etc. And then if the investor agrees to invest, it's not just a lump sum sitting in the bank - a good amount of that money gets deployed to help the startup fulfill its mission.

I get that if you're running super lean and you've raised enough to run lean for a while and use cash when you need to, but at the same time why raise more than you have need for?

>if you find yourself with excess cash, you can't just un-raise

I always thought a startup can return cash to investors as long as the payments or dispersements are proportional to the amount of stock owned.