What we learned running curated 1-on-1 sessions between founders and investors.
Every term sheet clause answers one of two questions: who gets paid, and who gets to decide. Why founders who negotiate only on valuation lose control later.
Venture returns follow a power law: a handful of companies produce almost all of a fund's value. Here is why good VCs pass on good companies, and what that math means for founders raising from them.
Most startups don't fail because the idea was wrong.
Michael Seibel's advice to Y Combinator founders comes down to one uncomfortable idea: if you are not a little embarrassed by your first version, you waited too long to ship it.
Early adopters love your product and tell everyone. The early majority is watching from the sidelines, unconvinced, and the gap between the two groups is where most startups quietly stall.
OpenRouter went from a routing layer for AI models to a $7.5 billion Stripe acquisition in three years. The deal is also a live test of one of the oldest tensions in building an aggregator business.
In 1958, Bank of America launched its first credit card in a single city instead of the whole country. Andrew Chen's idea of the atomic network explains why that was the right call, and why founders and investors read the exact same growth chart so differently.
A venture fund runs on other people's money and a fixed ten-year deadline.
Facebook's former VP of Growth argues that most startups optimize the wrong side of the growth equation first. Here's what founders and investors should each take from his framework.
And Why Investors Should Want Them To?
