At least anecdotally, I don't hear much from founders who are that close to zero. In my experience, speed is important because slowness drastically increased cognitive load and somewhat increases risk during fundraising. And also because fundraising is a distraction from why they got into it.
One way to think about it is in terms of a graph of number of VCs they have to think about/deal with at once. They're going to start the fundraising process with a list of firms, people, etc. Let's say that each week they take on n new items. If it takes 4 weeks to get an answer, they're juggling n*4 balls, many of the conversations in different states. Complexity goes up and/or throughput goes down. It's painful.
I suspect for entrepreneurs speed it also code for clarity, in that the "vc no" (and specifically the "California no" [1]) often present as slowness when it's really about something else inside the VC.
One way to think about it is in terms of a graph of number of VCs they have to think about/deal with at once. They're going to start the fundraising process with a list of firms, people, etc. Let's say that each week they take on n new items. If it takes 4 weeks to get an answer, they're juggling n*4 balls, many of the conversations in different states. Complexity goes up and/or throughput goes down. It's painful.
I suspect for entrepreneurs speed it also code for clarity, in that the "vc no" (and specifically the "California no" [1]) often present as slowness when it's really about something else inside the VC.
[1] http://ross.typepad.com/blog/2005/04/the_vc_no_and_t.html