What does a founder need todo to raise VC money?

It really depends on the founder, stage, and VC firm, not to mention some specifics for a given market (for example, deep-tech is very different, mostly IP and regulation driven traction), but let me give you some general pointers:

• If you're talking first money in, you're most often talking about angels and not VCs, they aren't particularly sophisticated and while angels are quite different, they are generally looking to back strong founders with complementary skill-sets chasing a very large market/problem-space. Here you're selling mostly sizzle and not steak.
• If you're talking first institutional money, ie. a VC, you can assume a higher level of investor sophistication and a greater diligence requirement. How this translates is usually into different successive stages of validation, it's not exactly the same for everyone, but this should give you a good starting point:
  • (1) Problem validation (is this a real problem, is it important, is it big enough)
  • (2) Product validation (does your solution actually solve the problem, do people want to use it, is this the best way to solve the problem)
  • (3) Market/Business model validation (do customers actually want to pay for a solution, do they want to pay for your solution, is this the way way to extract value from customers, are you able to convince someone to give you money)
  • (4) Product market fit (do you have sufficient traction to demonstrate that the market you are chasing wants and are willing to pay for your product with positive unit economics)
• For most Seed stage VCs, they are looking for strong problem validation, some product validation, good team, large enough market (usually $1B+, since at $100M in revenue where a business will IPO, that would represent about 10% market-share, though recently with larger funds, some are chasing $10B+ markets, because that's the only way their economics will work). At this stage you can sell the work you've done talking to customers, showing a working prototype, talking about design partners, and supporting your market size. Here you need to sell some of the steak, but still mostly sizzle.
• For Series A stage, most VCs, in SaaS in particular, usually want to see about $100K monthly recurring revenue, positive unit economics, and with most of the money going to testing and scaling your customer acquisition and retention engine. We're talking selling the steak.
• The more validation you have the more negotiating leverage you have at any stage, but understand that taking a high valuation early, while letting you keep more of the company, also sets a very high bar for the subsequent round, and if you don't meet milestones you won't be able to raise. Valuations are a double-edged sword.
• If you have gaps on your team, try to fill them with advisors, if you don't have a domain expert, find a domain expert and have him as an advisor.
• If you're a founder with a very strong brand, where either you've successfully built and sold companies before, or you are a senior executive/operator from a hot tech company, then the market is a bit different from you. You only need to sell the sizzle, and many VCs will invest on you purely on the strength of your team, it's like raising money on easy mode and VCs will chase you instead of you chasing them.