What VCs Look For
How investors assess startups: exceptional founders, traction, product, social proof, founder quality, and venture-scale potential.
34%
Best tweets about Venture Capital
50 Best Tweets About Venture Capital (2026)
A curated collection of the sharpest, most-shared X posts about venture capital—saved so you do not have to dig through the timeline yourself. Updated weekly.
Investors and founders on term sheets, valuations, and what VCs actually look for.
- Creators
- 36
- Updated
Original Xholic analysis
What 50 top Venture Capital posts reveal
The 50-post conversation concentrates most on what VCs look for (34%; 17 tweets), followed by fundraising process and valuations/deal terms (24% each; 12 tweets each). Cited posts pair investor-selection and outlier-return frameworks with founder concerns about fundraising mechanics, terms, valuation, and control. The overall median all-time score is 17.93; media-bearing posts have a higher median score than text-only posts (19.015 versus 16.374).
- Dominant tone
- Negative
- Median score
- 17.9
- Leading format
- Announcement
- Recent posts
- 44%
36% of posts
All-time engagement
100% of posts
Published in 90 days
Conversation map
The themes creators return to
Fundraising Process
Fundraising tactics and mechanics, including emotional selling, FOMO, term sheets, leads, warm versus cold outreach, and reading investor conviction.
24%
Valuations & Deal Terms
Valuations, dilution, preferred equity, overfunding, mega-rounds, down-round risk, public comps, and the mismatch between private marks and exit value.
24%
Founder–Investor Dynamics
Founder–VC power dynamics and investor conduct, including board control, bad term sheets, diligence on investors, unreliable commitments, and value-add skepticism.
22%
Outliers & Venture Returns
The power-law economics of VC: concentrated returns, outlier hunting, portfolio construction, ownership, pricing discipline, and consensus versus conviction.
22%
VC Market Structure
Structural critiques and reform of venture capital, covering megafunds, delayed exits, LP incentives, markups, emerging managers, and funding gaps for deep tech.
20%
Bootstrapping & Founder Control
Bootstrapping and alternative financing as paths to profitability, autonomy, dividends, and founder control outside the VC model.
18%
AI Reshapes Venture Capital
AI's effects on venture investing, including AI-native sourcing and diligence, accelerated deal velocity, model-layer concentration, and changing investment frameworks.
16%
Tone and stance
Sentiment Negative leads
Author posture Critical leads
Performance benchmark
- Median likes
- 83
- Median reposts
- 5
- Median replies
- 9
- Median views
- 14.5K
Posts with media make up 50% of this collection. Their median all-time score is 19.0, compared with 16.4 for text-only posts.
Format mix
- Announcement 100% · score 17.9
Consensus and debate
Where creators agree, and where they do not
Shared view
Selection posts emphasize exceptional strengths and visible signals
The largest theme in the analytics is what VCs look for (34%; 17 tweets). Its cited posts emphasize showing an exceptional strength—such as team, product, traction, or social proof—while another frames track record, social capital, market context, and traction as important fundraising signals.
Shared view
Outlier economics is a recurring investment frame
Several posts frame venture as an outlier-driven business. They argue that exceptional outcomes, rather than merely satisfactory checklist performance, shape returns; they also stress investor conviction and entry-price discipline.
Shared view
Posts urge founders to assess investor conviction
Founder-facing posts advise evaluating investors’ decision processes and conviction: conduct independent reference checks, ask whether a partner has authority to lead a deal, and look for follow-up that uses limited political capital.
Open debate
Venture funding versus founder-controlled alternatives
Posts disagree in emphasis on when venture funding serves founders. Some advocate bootstrapping, control, and profitability; another argues that early-stage investors should seek opportunities that would otherwise go unfunded. These are expressed viewpoints rather than a measured conclusion about the best financing path.
Open debate
AI’s implications for venture investing vary across posts
AI-related posts raise different implications for VC: one questions a defensive selection approach, another reports a view that AI has inverted established investing frameworks, and another predicts automation of sourcing, diligence, and monitoring. These are competing perspectives and predictions.
Open debate
Valuation is framed as both signal and constraint
Posts present valuation as both an input to investment analysis and a possible constraint. One describes public-company comparables informing round valuation; others warn that an oversized pre-PMF round or anchoring on a prior private valuation can complicate later financing or acquisition discussions.
What performs
Patterns behind standout posts
The highest listed outliers span founder-facing VC narratives
The top three listed outliers have all-time scores of 268.79, 191.03, and 132.57. Their subjects are fundraising power dynamics, investor selection criteria, and bootstrapping versus VC, respectively.
Structural critiques also appear among listed outliers
Two additional listed outliers have all-time scores of 85.61 and 84.02. Their posts discuss, respectively, a prediction that AI will disrupt VC work and an argument that conventional VC time horizons do not fit some capital-intensive technologies.
Media-bearing posts had the higher median score
Across the dataset, media-bearing posts have a median all-time score of 19.015, compared with 16.374 for text-only posts. Media posts represent 25 of 50 posts (50%).
Statistical standouts
- View standout post 1 Score 268.8 · 14.99× median
- View standout post 2 Score 191.0 · 10.65× median
- View standout post 3 Score 132.6 · 7.39× median
- View standout post 4 Score 85.6 · 4.77× median
- View standout post 5 Score 84.0 · 4.69× median
Creator landscape
Who shapes this conversation
The five most represented creators account for 20% of the selected posts.
-
1. apriori
@apriori0x
2 posts
-
2. Erik Bruckner
@E_Bruxxx
2 posts
-
3. Gabriel Jarrosson
@GJarrosson
2 posts
-
4. GREG ISENBERG
@gregisenberg
2 posts
-
5. Hadley Harris
@Hadley
2 posts
-
6. Aaron Harris
@harris
2 posts
Greg Isenberg highlights founder autonomy
Greg Isenberg’s cited posts describe fundraising as an awkward power dynamic and present profitable, independent company-building as an alternative for founders weighing liquidity and control.
Hadley Harris questions defensive investing and recommends diligence
Hadley Harris’s cited posts question whether downside protection is the right startup-investing lens in the AI era and recommend that founders independently reference-check VCs.
Erik Bruckner favors conviction over consensus
Erik Bruckner’s cited posts argue for backing exceptional founders beyond rigid thesis fit and for investment processes that let a high-conviction partner support unconventional opportunities.
Since the previous snapshot
What changed since Aug 7, 2026
- 80% of the selected posts remained.
- The creator count changed by -4.
- The leading sentiment remained stable.
How this analysis was made
Themes, sentiment, stance, and post format are classified per tweet. All counts, shares, medians, creator concentration, freshness, and performance comparisons are then calculated directly from the published snapshot.
Xholic's all-time score compares engagement while accounting for reach, post age, and creator consistency. It is used for relative comparisons within this collection.
This report analyzes the exact 50-post snapshot shown below. AI identifies editorial categories and drafts explanations; all statistics are calculated from the snapshot, and every narrative claim is checked against cited posts before publication.
Best Venture Capital tweets
Top Venture Capital tweets from 36 creators
Ranked 01–50
- 01
@gregisenberg ·
I was once pitching in a board room at a top 3 VC firm for a $15M Series A. 12 people in the meeting. One of the GPs fully fell asleep. Out cold for 30+ minutes. Nobody acknowledged it. Everyone just kept going. I kept presenting my Series A slides to an unconscious man in a Herman Miller chair and somehow that was considered normal. That's venture capital. You might fly across the country to perform for people who may or may not be conscious. It's a dance. And sometimes you lead and sometimes you follow and sometimes your partner is unconscious. If you're raising right now, just know: every founder has a story like this. The process is weird. The power dynamic is weird. You're not crazy for thinking it's weird. No one talks about it because they want to continue raising. But I'm happy to stick my neck out there. It is weird.
- 02
@StartupArchive_ ·
Naval Ravikant’s advice for raising venture capital: “It is an emotional sale, not a rational sale” “The process of raising money from an investor, a friend of mine once joked, is the process of young men and women seducing old men and women. You’re essentially trying to get them to look at you, and to see themselves in you… And so it is an emotional sale. It is not a rational sale. And you have to understand that at its core level.” And as Naval explains, emotional sales do not happen via checklists. For example, it’s rare to fall in love with someone because they check a bunch of boxes (e.g. pretty good looking, pretty nice, pretty smart, etc.). “Usually there is one thing about the person that is so overwhelming that makes you fall in love with them. And in that same way, when an investor is deciding to make an investment in a startup, they usually look for one exceptional characteristic about the startup that they truly adore.” Naval believes there are four categories in which you can really excel: Team. “If you can show that you have done something exceptional, other than starting this company, that’s a huge thing.” Product. “A lot of entrepreneurs make the mistake of showing investors a half-finished or not-working product and then try and explain their way around it. The reality is investors are users also, so they’re highly visual. They want to see it. They want to play with it. And they’ll make up their mind very quickly.” Customer traction. “If you have users and if those users are organically joining and growing, that’s very good. If you have to say: give us money and then I’ll go get customers, they don’t like to hear that.” Social proof. “Social proof is basically looking at what other people are doing and doing that. So in the investing context, what this means is if you have one investor committed, very often you can get more investors interested. Or if you have a famous entrepreneur or advisor who’s very knowledgeable, involved with with the company, that can help bring investors.” Naval concludes: “So those are the four criteria that I think most investors look at, and you really want to be exceptional at at least one of them.
Watch video
- 03
@tibo_maker ·
more founders are choosing bootstrapping over VC - liquidity events now take 14 years on average. up from 7. that's your entire 30s waiting for an exit that might never come. - bootstrapped startups are 3x more likely to be profitable within 3 years. VC-backed companies optimize for growth metrics, not money in the bank - preferred shares mean founders often walk away with nothing. even when the company "succeeds," VCs get paid first. sometimes that's all there is - bootstrapped companies spend 1/4 of what VC-backed startups spend on customer acquisition and grow just as fast. capital efficiency wins - VCs can force a sale whenever it suits them. drag-along clauses give them that power. you built it, they decide when to sell it - fundraising takes 4-5 months of full-time work. that's 4-5 months not building your product or talking to customers. most founders who reach traction don't need VCs anymore by then - AI tools let solo founders build what used to require a 10-person team. the capital requirement that made VC necessary is disappearing - 38% of startups now launch without external funding. up from 26% in 2019. the shift is already happening - most VCs are not operators. they can pressure you to grow but can't help you build. the "value add" is often just intros to other portfolio companies - VC money outside of AI has dried up. if you're not building AI, you're fighting for scraps anyway - a $10M business you own 80% of beats a $100M valuation where VCs control the outcome. math is math - the ZIRP era is over. cheap money inflated VC activity for a decade. that's not coming back - founders are getting ousted by their own boards. the company you built becomes a job you can be fired from - VC turns you into a middle manager of your own company. board meetings, investor updates, formal reporting. you didn't quit your job to get another boss - the pressure to hit arbitrary growth targets breaks people. chasing 3x year over year because your investors need it, not because your business needs it - you stop building what customers want and start building what looks good in a pitch deck. that's how products die - VCs funded hundreds of AI startups in the last few years. most are already dead or irrelevant. the foundation model companies just absorbed their use cases - when funding dries up, VC-backed companies panic. bootstrapped companies just keep going. you're already used to operating lean. you started a company for freedom. VC often takes that away if the business feeds your life and you control it, why give that up?
- 04
@geoffwoo ·
the venture capital bloodbath is coming and most vcs have zero idea agents will replace 90% of what associates and principals actually do: • deal sourcing through network analysis • due diligence via automated data mining • portfolio monitoring with real-time metrics • pattern matching across 10,000x more deals what exactly are you getting paid for when an agent can analyze every startup in your sector in 3 minutes? the entire industry is built on information asymmetry that ai just eliminated most funds will become algorithmic within 24 months the only vcs who survive are the ones who can actually build companies, not just write checks and send intros
- 05
@ry_paddy ·
Venture capital, for all its ability to drive innovation, is mismatched with many of the technologies civilization needs most: - Building a nuclear reactor costs billions and takes over a decade. - Bringing a new cancer drug to market requires $1-2 billion over ten to fifteen years, with a 90% failure rate. - An estimated 80% of energy startups fail because funding dries up during the scaling phase. Meanwhile, the biggest VC firms are pouring record funding into AI, crypto or whatever the latest thing is. I am not pointing fingers - the time horizons for exit, incentives and LP demands drive this behaviour - but we are leaving critical opportunities to drive human progress underfunded. A growing body of research proposes three roles for the state to help bridge this gap: First, acting as a limited partner for emerging fund managers, where studies show moving public LP activity earlier produces the same productivity gains as doubling the allocation. Second, funding self-sustaining "venture philanthropy" vehicles that make small, broad investments in university spin-outs, accepting that over 96% will fail while the outliers more than cover losses. Third, guaranteeing junior tranches in securitized "megafunds" that pool hundreds of R&D projects into bond-like instruments accessible to pension funds and insurers, unlocking debt markets 400 times larger than VC. Read the full breakdown below from @credistick on the research that underpins these strategies.
- 06
@lessin ·
Never Compete. I was on with someone from our team at slow talking about competition recently… ‘how do you compete in venture capital’, etc… win deals. My honest philosophy? I hate competition professionally (love it in sport, but not business)…. And I think competition is especially stupid in early stage venture capital, where you are competing over / crawling over each other for out of the money call options on things that almost certainly will not work. Early stage VC competition on deals almost by definition leads to over-pricing / overpaying … and it also demonstrates a fundamental lack of creativity. Egotistically, if you want your money to matter / to make a difference, you want to be funding otherwise unfunded opportunities — where you see something others don’t… where money is most expensive, commands the highest return AND - to put a nice spin on it - where the money matters the most. So if you find yourself in a competition over a seed deal, IMHO you are a bad capitalist / limiting your returns, an un-creative person / a mere ‘market participant’ (yuck), and also misusing the incredible mandate and license you have to find things and make them happen in the world. You have to be careful about seeing mirages, because some things / most things are not funded because they are actually bad.. you can’t like things just because they are unliked… BUT your job is to have discipline in the wilderness / in the wander, and as the game evolves … both as a capitalist, and egotistically as someone who realizes how awful it is for your tombstone to say ‘market participant’
- 07
@StartupArchive_ ·
Marc Andreessen on what VCs look for in startups “The conventional statistics are that about 200 of the 4,000 venture-fundable companies per year will be funded by a top-tier VC. About 15 of those will someday get to $100MM of revenue, and those 15 will generate something on the order of 97% of all of the returns for the entire category of venture capital in that year.” He continues: “Venture capital is such an extreme feast or famine business. You’re either in one of the 15 or you’re not.” As Marc explains, VCs are looking for extreme outliers, and when they’re evaluating your startup, they’re asking themselves if this business is one of the 15 businesses that year that will get to $100MM in revenue. One principle Marc believes helps firms invest in outliers is investing in strength rather than lack of weakness. “The default way to do venture capital is to check boxes: really good founder, really good idea, really good product, really good initial customers. Check, check, check, check. ‘Ok this is reasonable, I’ll put money into it.’ But what you find with those checkbox deals is that they don’t have something that makes them really remarkable and special. They don’t have an extreme strength that makes them an outlier.” The takeaway for founders here is to make sure they highlight to VCs during the funding process that they have a really extreme strength across an important dimension. Video source: @ycombinator (2014)
Watch video
- 08
@bg2clips ·
Brad Gerstner tells the story of how he got into venture capital: "One of the things that I thought was interesting stylistically in my first exposure to venture back in '99, 2000, is they were generalists. People would walk in off the street, two people and an idea. And it seemed like the office was always full of people doing kind of random things, frankly, from restaurants all the way through..Even today on Twitter, @paulg is like you shouldn't actually say you're focused on anything because you should back the best entrepreneurs." – @altcap on the @JTLonsdale podcast
Watch video
- 09
@credistick ·
Venture capital has outgrown its ability to competently manage capital. The magic of VC is the interface between GP and entrepreneur; making judgements about ideas and people that stretch into the future. The desire to scale VC into an asset class has undermined that discipline, as the structures that enable scale have obscured idiosyncrasy. This has observable, measurable consequences. Slower innovation, weaker companies, and slipping returns. A growing desperation expressed in trying to extract more from less. I sympathise with the honest techno-optimists who believe that more capital means greater acceleration. But that bullish sentiment is being exploited by rent seekers, enabling misallocation and technological stagnation. In truth, venture capital can scale, but to remain productive it must be scaled proportionally along the right dimensions, without compromising the fundamental mechanics of capital coordination and liquidity. 1) Venture capital must not become as top-heavy as it is today. First-check firms provide the discovery of new opportunities. If the downstream market grows out of proportion with that discovery layer, everything begins to crumble. 2) Exits must not be delayed in order to absorb more capital. Going public is extremely beneficial for innovative companies, and has positive externalities for innovation generally. Private capital feels easier, but it is poison in the long-run. With this in mind, I propose four pillars of scaling venture capital toward greater productivity, in the context of national capitalism — how states can wield capital for industrial growth: The first pillar is to remember that venture capital is an exit business, not an endlessly printing markups business. Companies should be oriented towards an exit once they reach an appropriate scale and are sufficiently derisked. Historically, that has been somewhere between 6–8 years. It may be longer for others that require it (see: SpaceX), which is fine. In practice, that means not wilfully shovelling growth capital into businesses that would otherwise be public. Which means finding a more productive purpose for that capital, which may be challenging for large, lazy allocators. (Building on themes explored in a large body of research, cited in Hitting Escape Velocity.) The second pillar is to ensure that the foundation of small and emerging managers is robust, producing a healthy stream of opportunity. This runs contrary to larger VC incentives and LP bias toward brand power, but the alternative is concentration that rots returns and consensus that rots innovation. (Building on work by Martin Aragoneses of INSEAD and Harvard University’s Department of Economics, and Sagar Saxena of the University of Pennsylvania.) The third is to ensure R&D intensive technologies have access to patient early capital that can carry them through to commercialisation. This helps prevent VC simply flowing down the path of least resistance to scalable software slop. Where venture capitalists do not quite have the courage to back novel “HALO” technologies from inception, they may need outside support. (Building on research by Kyle Briggs of the University of Ottawa Department of Physics.) The fourth is to provide access to well-structured mezzanine financing for companies with extreme setup costs, from nuclear plants to clinical trials. This gives early VCs the confidence to invest in these categories knowing there is downstream capital and liquidity when an IPO may be too distant and too risky. (Building on work by Andrew Lo, of MIT’s Department of Financial Engineering.) So, in the spirit of Kyle Harrison’s techno-solutionist commitment, here is how we may address those pillars…
- 10
@lucainweb3 ·
Venture Capital is entirely a game of outliers One outlier in a portfolio erases ten bad bets sitting next to it. And every outlier looks completely crazy in the room it gets pitched in. Sequoia wrote $214M into FTX and lost every dollar by November 2022. The headline broke and I assumed the fund was in trouble. A few years earlier Sequoia had put $60M into WhatsApp and made around $3B in three years. a16z poured money into fab .com in 2013 when the press was calling it the next Amazon. It raised $336M and sold for parts. That same year a16z led a $25M round into Coinbase - that position was worth approximately $11B at the 2021 listing. Y Combinator gave $20,000 to a website for letting strangers sleep in your house in 2009. That check was worth over $1B by Airbnb's IPO and completely revolutionized the real estate market. If it sounds completely crazy, you're probably closer to an outlier than you think.
- 11
@gregisenberg ·
Adobe abandoning its $20b acquisition of Figma got me thinking... Man, it's tough to be a VC-backed founder. You create one of the most game-changing products, Figma. Millions of people use and love it. Every designer looks up to you. You get a $20B offer. Finally, after 11 years of starting the company, you see that financial payoff. And then all of a sudden, some regulatory body in the UK says “no bueno”. Crazy part is, you’ve never even been to London and you don’t like tea very much. You’re more of a California guy. So, deal is off. This is the new reality of VC-backed founders. It’s IPO or bust for the most part. I think lots of founders and soon-to-be founders will look at this and ask themselves: Why would I go the VC route? The path to liquidity is tough. Yeah, maybe you can sell some secondary shares in a Series A or B. But also, you’re reliant on VCs to make that happen for you. Are you really in control of your destiny? This is more headwinds for the profitable, bootstrapped movement. Solopreneurship, multipreneurship, bootstrappers, call it what you want. You answer to no-one but yourself. You’re business might not be worth $100b but you can build a $1B business without VC. You probably won’t go to mars, but you can make it to the moon. Another trend: You’ll also see more and more people raise capital and issue dividends. Profit sharing. I saw 2 deals this week of founders raising money on a YC safe note but issuing dividends. It was music to my ears. And I bet music to theirs too. It might not look like it but I believe this to my core: It’s a beautiful time to be building internet businesses.
- 12
- 13
@StephNass ·
The cruel VC eye. Founders get pissed off when they realize they don't have what VCs want. ▸ Track record: academic and professional achievements ▸ Social capital: people who will refer you and invest in you ▸ A hot market: like AI right now ▸ Traction: retention, usage, and growth NONE of these can be built overnight. So by the time you decide to raise, 80% of your fundability is sealed! 👈 That's why fundraising is so frustrating. The cruel VC eye doesn't care how hard you're working. It cares about traction, track record, social capital, and a hot market. So founders end up optimizing for low-impact items: ▸ Your product ▸ Your pitch deck ▸ Your story Don't get me wrong, those are important items. But it can't be everything you're bringing to the table. So what should you do instead? Talk to "smaller" investors. Angels, accelerators, maybe emerging VC managers. Chase grants, too. Sure, you won't raise $4M. But $500k, maybe. Use that $500k to build up your team, get some traction, and reach product-market fit. Then you're VC material. You're not born VC fundable, you become VC fundable. (Or bootstrap all the way and keep 100% of that sweet equity!✌️)
- 14
@tibo_maker ·
I'll never raise VC funds again for my startups ❌ the VC horror stories going around X this week have been brutal to read - a GP fell asleep for 30+ min during a $15m series A pitch - one VC signed a term sheet, then ghosted. never wired the money - another wanted a cut of acquisition proceeds despite investing $0 - a top VC offered a founder his co-founders' stock in exchange for firing them - another committed $5m at the start of a round, then asked to be "downsized" to $100k the day they were supposed to close - one VC passed on a company because he didn't think a woman could lead a security company. that company is worth $87b now almost every founder I know who has tried to raise has a story like this. it's not rare. it's the default experience most founders don't actually need VC money. they think they do because the ecosystem trains them to. raise, scale, exit, repeat. that's the only path anyone talks about and even the well-meaning VCs are stuck with the math. they need outsized exits because the model runs on a power law. one or two big wins per fund cover everything else so if your business is doing fine but not on a billion-dollar trajectory, the attention just fades. follow-on rounds dry up. intros slow down. the partner who was in your DMs 3 years ago stops replying that's when the pressure kicks in. you start hiring ahead of revenue and chasing growth numbers someone wrote on a whiteboard. you stop building for users and start building for the next round I've raised before - that's why I won't again every product I've touched since has been bootstrapped and profitable today my portfolio is at $1m mrr across 5 saas products and the best part isn't the number, it's that I feel completely free free to move fast, change direction, double down, or slow down - whatever feels right no one wrote that on a whiteboard for me
- 15
@Suhail ·
All my bad VC stories mostly just make me sound like a wuss so I'll just share a good one: One time I crashed an Allen&Co event since it meant I could pitch 4 investors in one day in the same location. I didn't want a week gap in my fundraise so Max Levchin encouraged me to crash the event in Scottsdale after I joked about doing so. I flew to AZ and drove w my dad in the car to the Ritz. Anyway, everyone I pitched was very lukewarm until I get to Ben and Marc at a16z. I pitch them both at a coffee table. Neither seemed all that interested in my deck so I presumed they're also checked out on my company. Ready to close the laptop and return home, Marc stands up and says: "If anyone gives you an exploding termsheet, tell them to go fuck themselves." At this point, I hadn't even heard of what that was so I had no idea if this was a good or bad reaction. It was Friday. I went to the partner meeting on Monday. Termsheet that week. We had no other termsheet options. The rest is history. I really appreciate the conviction they had on two young nobodies.
- 16
@MollySOShea ·
NEW: The Death of Spreadsheet Investing. Inside Benchmark's New AI Playbook Everett Randle (@EverettRandle), GP at @benchmark Why every golden rule of SaaS just got inverted & how AI is rewriting venture investing: › You can now pass $1B+ in revenue with unproven unit economics.. › Late-stage companies can have much higher upside than a Series C Benchmark's AI Bets: Cerebras, Manus, Mercor, Sierra, Legora, Fireworks, Exa, Starcloud, Gumloop.. We cover: › The Disorientation: Scale No Longer De-Risks a Company › What Happened to the Golden Rules? › AI Inverted Nearly Every Framework › New Taxonomy: P x Q x M › Inference Is the Demand Engine › Tokenomics: Frontier vs Open Source › The Liquidity Shock: Reframing the Returns Math › Benchmark's Model: Founders Over Themes 𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒 (00:00) Everett Randle, General Partner at Benchmark (00:58) Coming off Benchmark's AGM (04:05) The Golden rules of Investing are all gone (08:58) Who actually has a handle on AI Economics? (12:57) Why Benchmark bets on Founders, not Categories (15:31) Brad Gerstner's "Age of Inference" Thesis (19:07) The most important shift since the Cloud (23:55) Inside Gumloop's AI automation canvas (26:40) The Token Maxing problem nobody's solving (27:25) Ev's "Mom Test" for frontier AI (31:33) What happens when frontier models get too cheap (34:44) Inside the new funding playbook (40:31) Venture Capital became a product, not a firm (42:35) The Biggest IPO wave Wall Street's ever seen (49:08) The secret behind Benchmark's wildly diverse bets (52:54) The mentors who shaped him
Watch video
- 17
@signulll ·
venture capital is too easy to dunk on cuz variance is enormous & noise dwarfs even that. capital access should function as signal but inverts into negative signal disturbingly often which is a hilarious miscalibration of the whole apparatus. tho fair, evolution fucks up constantly too, so maybe selection pressure just is like this. case in point.. met a guy recently (only because i know someone at his fund) whose entire lore is early faang employee, never founded anything, now runs a vehicle. proceeded to grill me on products i actually built & scaled, which was its own kind of comedy. then monologued about network effects for 30 min without clocking that this meeting was actively decrementing his own. i love irony so so much.🤣
- 18
@rohitdotmittal ·
Etched is most likely going to be a very big company. Congrats to everyone involved. But it’s a clear example of how extreme the power law in venture has become - a hardware company started in 2022/2023 that is already a $10B+ company (and talking $20B) in just a few years. Venture capital is flowing to fewer companies, and it’s moving at a much faster pace. If something is working, deals are closing 10x faster than a few years ago. Investors are willing to write much bigger checks on limited proof points when the company sits in the right vertical. I tell founders the same thing every time: you’ll know if something is working faster than you ever could before. If it doesn’t generate immediate pull after a certain point, it’s probably not going to be a rocketship. A small number of companies with the right characteristics will absorb the vast majority of the capital. The game is increasingly about finding the idea that attracts that capital right away.
- 19
@HarryStebbings ·
In 2020, one of the best venture capital investments ever was made. Out of a $54M Cyberstarts Fund I, @giliraanan made a $6.4M investment into @assaf_rappaport and @wiz_io. On Wiz's $32BN exit to Google, that investment returned the fund a reported 30 times over. $6.4M turned into $1.42BN. A 222x return. Gili is one of the greatest investors of the last decade. I sat down with him and have condensed my notes from our discussion (episode released today). 8 Lessons from Turning $6.4M into $1.42BN 🔥 1. Venture doesn't work (for most) ⚠️ The distribution of returns is not equal, and Gili believes the current influx of cash will end in catastrophe for many players. If you are an LP distributing your allocation evenly across the market, you shouldn’t be sleeping well at night. 2. Stop "Babysitting" Founders 🍼 Gili is clear: He is not in the business of babysitting. If you trust a founder to protect a nation's most sensitive data, you must trust them to handle a large bank balance without getting "sloppy or lazy". 3. The Science of Exceptions 🦄 Venture isn't about rules; it’s about the exceptions. If you apply lessons linearly—like assuming every company needs to follow a "Triple, Triple, Double, Double" path—you’ll struggle. Greatness doesn't have a limit, and it often doesn't follow a textbook. 4. Growth is DNA, Not Engineering 🧬 Velocity is the best predictor of a healthy business. When a company grows at an insane pace, it becomes part of its DNA; it rarely just fades away unless there is a massive external event. If you have to "engineer" growth with a horrible magic number, you’re in a bad business. 5. Be Selfish and Greedy 💰 Gili argues that for an early-stage investor, being selfish and greedy aren't negative traits—they are requirements for success. Price matters, especially in a market where entry prices are no longer balanced with the probability of a unicorn exit. 6. The "Branding Event" IPO 🏷️ Forget liquidity. Gili views going public as a marketing and branding event—a way to tell customers and employees, "I am here to stay". In reality, an IPO is often the opposite of a financial event because of the "shackles" and limitations placed on selling stock. 7. Secondaries as Talent Retention 🔄 Secondaries are a tool to retain your best engineers and product managers. When employees are fully vested after four years, a secondary program is the "antidote" that prevents them from leaving to diversify their family wealth elsewhere. 8. The "Shittiest Investor in the Room" 🪞 Even the greats feel the sting of failure. Gili admits that during his decade at Sequoia, he spent many days looking in the mirror thinking he was the "shittiest investor in the room". It takes immense determination to keep going when you won't know if you're actually good at your job for five or six years. (Links in Comments)
- 20
- 21
@nic_detommaso ·
The biggest lever in VC fundraising is FOMO. Many may not agree with this but the reality is most of VC is herd mentality. Investors look to others to validate their decisions. Very few do it on their own. As a founder, your goal in your fundraising sprint is to make everyone you talk to believe that they will miss out if they pass on your company. Here’s what can help generate fomo: 1) Get to know VCs before you start fundraising. Talk about your company and vision, avoid giving too much financial info. 2) Say you are not fundraising lol (this makes VCs want to pre-empt your round). 3) Set a date to start formal fundraising. Reach out to the VCs that expressed interest previously. 4) Get a term sheet as fast as possible. It can be from any VC but getting a lead early is what makes VCs swarm and move quickly. If you do this well, your round can get filled quickly. The reality: 1 VC saying yes makes other VCs look harder to see “what they are missing.”
- 22
@etnshow ·
.@avipat_ Co-Founder of @usekled, says too much venture capital is being allocated on hype rather than conviction. "You drop out of Stanford, walk into a VC office with no idea and a Stanford hoodie on, and walk out with a $5 million cheque." "The great companies never came out of this behaviour." "When we were raising, people would say, 'I saw your Twitter video got 4.4 million views. Take my money please.'" "The people I said yes to were the ones who actually sat down and looked through the company." "Real conviction is very hard to find nowadays."
Watch video
- 23
@jaltma ·
My guests on Uncapped this week are @kevinhartz and @BennettSiegel, co-founders of the early stage VC firm A*. They've backed companies like Notion, Mercor, Ramp, Decagon, Similie, and many more. They also announced a new $450m fund today. We discussed the state of venture capital firms in the current AI cycle, what it means for seed specialists, trends with great founders, and what they're seeing in AI. Timestamps: (0:00) Intro (0:25) The A* Capital story (1:16) Why big funds went into seed (7:50) The mother of all bubbles (10:46) Why founders are getting younger (13:00) Mapping talent, not markets (16:31) The rise of AI researcher founders (19:16) Why seed investing is so hard (22:54) Concentration and venture returns (27:34) The AI rollup craze (31:15) AI vs traditional software (33:15) Robotics and the future of AI (35:39) What’s next for A*
Watch video
- 24
@harris ·
Every VC likes to pretend their companies will IPO. This has real implications. To quantify their potential investment opportunity VCs match a startup to similar public companies. This helps inform the current round valuation. Unless of course it is a super hot round. Then nothing matters. We build a tool to help founders get ahead and shape the public comp narrative, Public Comps, now in the Venture Codex. Link next.
Watch video
- 25
@nic_detommaso ·
Investing in unicorns - to build a simple VC exit model, you essentially need to track 2 things: 1) How much of the company you own at exit (the funding & dilution path) 2) What the total company is worth when it finally sells (the exit valuation) A big part of a VCs job is understanding exit potential of a startup when they write a check. Obviously when you’re investing at the preseed or seed stage (even at the Series A), your assumptions on exit potential are just that, assumptions. And very, very theoretical assuptions at that. Despite likely being off on every assumption made at that stage, you still need to understand / evaluate the inputs of the exit model to pressure test whether a startup can reach “venture-scale.” As a quick refresher, venture-scale means: The ability to scale to $100 million in revenue in 7 years with little capital and a low penetration of the market. Usually reaching a $1 billion+ valuation. So with that, a VC exit model at the early stages is not about “being right,” it’s more about having a sanity check. In today’s deep dive, I walked through a VC exit model and the inputs needed to figure out what your investment could be worth when a company exits. Read on: https://t.co/tgVYgCusr7 Image source: Crunchbase
- 26
@E_Bruxxx ·
The amount of VC deal passing because a startup doesn’t perfectly fit an investment thesis is outrageously staggering. Maybe I’m too old school, but I think the best thesis in venture is finding exceptional founders and backing them. Too many investors convince themselves they understand a market better than the founder who spends every waking hour living it. The founder is in the trenches talking to customers, hiring talent, shipping product, and feeling the market move in real time. Most VCs have a 10k ft view of the market. The biggest outcomes rarely fit into a box and the best founders create new boxes. Find the killers. Drop the bag.
- 27
@RetentionAdam ·
The advice I give is NOT for founders who think they're creating unicorns, decacorns, or the next Anthropic. What I care about is showing that beautiful tech lifestyle businesses can be built outside the VC ecosystem. I'd rather help a few founders avoid unknowingly signing up for a 10-year commitment to a low-paying job, reporting to a board and uncaring VC investors - when the bootstrapped path would've gotten them what they actually wanted. Not a unicorn valuation, but freedom. Freedom doesn't come from a $30B raise.
- 28
@E_Bruxxx ·
Talk to a number of solo GPs who left large funds and one reason comes up consistently: they got tired of watching their highest conviction deals die in investment committee because the partnership couldn't get comfortable. Consensus is good at protecting against obvious mistakes, but really good at killing non-obvious winners. That's a problem. One thing I'd be asking every VC if I were a founder: How are investment decisions actually made at your firm? Healthy rigorous debate is essential, and each deal should be challenged. But I've become increasingly convinced the best venture investments are made because one person sees something everyone else doesn't. If I'm a founder, I want to know: • Can one partner lead and get a deal done? • Does every investment need committee approval? • Does the person I'm building a relationship with actually have decision-making authority? Those answers tell you a lot about a firm's speed, culture, and willingness to back unconventional founders. Personally, I'd rather have one investor with overwhelming conviction than ten investors who are merely comfortable. Consensus breeds average. Conviction finds outliers.
- 29
- 30
@apriori0x ·
VC Exits Don't Matter 🤨🤨🤨 In this episode of Deeply Intents (🎤,🎧) I chat with @wquist of Slow Ventures and @credistick from Odin. This episode pulls apart the current discourse on venture investing looking at the world through investor and researcher perspectives [w/ plenty of spice]. 🥵🥵🥵 Timestamps 0:00 - Intros 3:01 - Exits don't matter 6:41 - Everyone eats their own BS 7:46 - Paper marks and management fees 10:25 - Now you can have your cake and eat it too 11:25 - Carry is not dependent on time value of $ 13:18 - Megafunds do the easy thing 14:39 - Top of funnel is still limitless 15:16 - 90% of venture = assett management 16:03 - True venture doesn't scale 18:29 - VC and software are tied together 21:00 - A machine for fake value 24:14 - In a perfect moment with AI 26:33 - Great investors are great editors 29:25 - Seed-strapping trends 31:12 - Businesses and art projects 35:30 - How important and big is it? 39:12 - The assumptions are the important part 39:43 - It's all a DCF, everything in life is a DCF 41:54 - Founder archetypes and success 45:39 - Founders should be the best investor in their own company 47:02 - What people in venture don't see coming 54:45 - Founder opportunity cost is extremely scarce
Watch video
- 31
@rodriscoll ·
This market is way more consensus up and down the stack than it's ever been in venture. Of the newly minted unicorns in Q1 of last year, 40% already had one or more up rounds by Q4. Once you're a winner, the money says king make, double king make, and so on. It's too hard to pick the guy at 50 pre that might make it. Just pile into the guy who's made it. Even at $12b, the worst case is a 1x. It's the venture capital equivalent of “you can't get fired for buying IBM.”
- 32
@lucainweb3 ·
VCs aren't saying no to your idea. They're saying no to where you are. The bull market playbook was simpler: right narrative, right timing, right intro, investment followed. A lot of founders are still running that playbook. The market it was built for is gone. If you haven't launched, have no revenue, and haven't validated product-market fit, a VC is the wrong conversation. Not forever, but right now. Bootstrap first. Get angels if you need outside capital. With AI, you don't need much to validate an idea anyway. The cost of proof has never been lower. Approach a VC when you have something to show: traction, partnerships, repeatable revenue. And that last one matters more than people admit. Not a one-time spike. Not an NFT mint. Recurring revenue from real customers paying you consistently. That's the bar in 2026. The founders who understand the difference between "too early for funding" and "too early for this specific conversation" are the ones who will close rounds this year.
- 33
@harris ·
vc's are great at being excited. in meetings, out of meetings. right up until the point they pass on your round. that's hard for founders to process and read. if you want to know what a vc really thinks, watch for follow up. see if they spend limited political capital on you. that's signal.
- 34
@richardchen39 ·
Why shouldn't founders raise a huge round at a crazy valuation before PMF? It's difficult since for most founders it's an ego thing. When they see their peers get these term sheets they should deserve the same. But: 1) I've seen so many startups fail because they raised too much money. I've never seen a startup fail because they didn't raise enough. It's counterintuitive but raising too much leads to lack of focus (trying things in parallel instead of going all in on one) and hiring too quickly (which causes drama with employees when pivoting to find PMF). 2) It sets the bar incredibly high for the next round in terms of traction needed. VCs expect a 2-3x markup between rounds. No VC will do a down round at early-stage. I've seen so many 2021 era valuation founders BEG for a down round, but they can't say "Please invest because my company sucks."
- 35
@HarryStebbings ·
WTF is going on? Anthropic and Elon. Cerebras IPO. Ramp at $40BN. I sat down with @jasonlk & @rodriscoll to discuss the deal, along with the biggest news in tech this week: - Anthropic Buys Compute From Elon & Commits $200BN to Google - Cerebras IPO: The Breakdown - Ramp's $40BN Latest Valuation - Hubspot Tanks, Monday Rockets: WTF is Happening in Public Markets? My notes below: 1. Foundation Made the Investment of the Decade with Cerebras Jason argues that Foundation’s success with Cerebras is a masterclass in “actual venture capital” because they did not just muscle into a hot round. They incubated the company in 2016, when the category did not even make sense. By playing the long game, finding a brilliant founder, seeding the idea, and holding roughly 9% ownership through a $40B+ IPO, they proved that the biggest returns still come from doing the hard work before a deal becomes obvious. 2. What Founders Have to Understand Is That to Win, You Have to Mentally Be Changed Forever There is a fundamental breakpoint around the four-to-five-year mark when a founder’s brain is permanently rewired by the intensity of the journey. Jason notes that winning at a high level requires a commitment to becoming a different person. The happy-go-lucky version of yourself from the early days is gone, replaced by someone who can often only relate to other founders who have survived similar maelstroms. 3. The Enemy of My Enemy Infrastructure Play Anthropic’s partnership to use SpaceX’s Colossus 1 data center highlights a massive consolidation where the strongest players are hoovering up all available capacity on the planet. For Elon Musk, this move transitions xAI from a buyer of CapEx to a net seller of capacity, turning a potential money pit into a $3 to $5 billion annual revenue stream because Grok is not currently growing at the same pace as leading-edge models. 4. The Crackdown on Shadow Cap Tables Anthropic is enforcing board approval for all secondary sales to reclaim cap table control and call out "bad actors". Rory warns that side contracts for "economic rights" are legally fragile; because the company has no obligation to honor unapproved transfers, many investors face "messy" losses at the IPO. 5. Model vs. Application: The Vertical SaaS Death Zone The industry is debating if horizontal models will consume the application layer or if vertical workflows will remain independent. Jason predicts a "terminal state of decay" for legacy marketing tools because agents have no need for manual templates. Once a model can perform an application’s core function directly within a prompt, that software becomes obsolete. 6. Token Maxing vs. The 100x Engineer Despite massive growth forecasts, a "micro backlash" is growing against "token trash" generated by mediocre developers. Jason predicts a clampdown on wasteful agentic spend, where companies prioritize unlimited resources for elite "100x engineers" while restricting "web heads" who burn compute for minimal productivity gains. (links below)
- 36
- 37
@LubaYudasina ·
"Venture capital is like a casino. The house always wins. It's a rigged system." TaskRabbit founder @labunleashed would know. She pitched every VC in Boston in 2008. Nobody was interested. So she bootstrapped TaskRabbit for the first 18 months by herself. Years later she sold it to IKEA for $100 million plus, and spent years afterwards separating her identity from the company. Now she's on the other side of the table, and what she wants from founders isn't the pitch deck. It's the story. In this episode: Why she calls venture capital a rigged casino How TaskRabbit ended up giving Lyft its first drivers The origin story most people haven't heard Why every founder competes for capital across every industry, not just their own What it took to separate her identity from the company she built Was so fun talking to Leah! Full episode: https://t.co/8D0C4b7dMZ
Watch video
- 38
@hpierrejacques ·
Venture capital is not immune to AI disruption. So we asked ourselves the hard question: If we were starting Harlem Capital today, what would we do differently? We spent three days in a house rebuilding our sourcing strategy from scratch. We walked away with three new truths: – Technical founders are back – The outliers are more extreme – Pre-seed is the new seed In an ai-native world, people are the moat. If sourcing is the edge then the systems behind it must evolve. Curious how others are dirupting themselves? https://t.co/Crq66u77YD
- 39
@legiondotcc ·
.@matty_: "A wave of VC activity drove up valuations. We're still metabolizing that." "A lot of those VCs aren't around anymore because they paid out valuations that weren't realized." "At Legion it's about finding founders who actually want to give retail a fair deal."
Watch video
- 40
@apriori0x ·
Amazon only raised $8M of institutional money pre IPO, which is about $17.3M in today's terms. Amazon was arguably the most important company in the US for the last decade or so. If Amazon and many other important companies can be built without Mega-round venture funding, then it suggests this new generation of software startups do not need Mega-round funding. For software companies without real capex spend or structural opex spend, mega-rounds make 0 sense. Ironically, Amazon built AWS which reduced capex spend for many software startups. Note that ~ 212 of the largest 300 US public companies by marketcap never raised from VCs. There is also plenty of empirical literature suggesting that raising too much actually hinders a startup's ability to succeed. Look no further than the crypto industry. Yes, legislation changed (Sarbanes-Oxley) which makes IPOing, pre-profit, 3 years into a company's life (Amazon) more difficult now. But at least it was public markets supporting the financing. Public companies have a much higher compliance and regulatory bar to meet. If your stance is that Mega-rounds simply substitute for the prior early pre-profit IPO option you must also admit they sometimes (often) substitute for a real business model. Ergo, blitzscaling strategies gave users a free lunch (subsidized usage) just long enough for them to get addicted and come to depend on the product which enables the enshittification cycle. Neither Ethereum nor Bitcoin raised from any institutional investors. They are not startups, but they were "projects" that created outsized returns without venture capital investment. If you were early to ETH, say ICO or around that time you actually could buy at a fair value and sell to liquid funds, who needed exposure, years later. This is similar to what IPOs used to offer retail investors (not the same). As opposed to the sinister low float high FDV SpaceX type of IPOs that mirror token launches. Token valuation does not equate to value creation the same way market cap of a public company does not. Valuation is about expectations of the future. But when those expectations are priced in private markets there exists significant information asymmetry for retail investors at IPO time. They become exit liquidity, the same way SoftBank can be exit liquidity for early round investors. There are still bag holders, it's just that the mega-round structure puts retail at the end of it. And it doesn't have to be this way. Mega-rounds can also create this status carrot for ambitious founders who want to be seen raising at large valuations, which actually risks putting the cart in front of the horse up to and including creating perverse incentives to generate as much narrative hype as possible without building anything real; as in marketing company 1st then product company. The focus shifted from the customer to raising the next round. Regardless, venture capital is a critically important source of capital formation. It is necessary and helpful. I just think *most* "Mega-rounds" are wasteful and not helpful for entrepreneurs or investors. One more thing. Real network effects self-finance. If you are yeeting $1B into a Series E, the flywheel does not exist. **Note that technically Mega-round is understood as financing round raise >$100M but colloquially I'm just using it to mean "frothy round".
- 41
@LubaYudasina ·
Ankur Nagpal (@ankurnagpal) recently sold Carry and became a GP at USVC, a public markets fund led by Naval. What I always loved about Ankur is his honesty: from first-time founders figuring out whether to raise, to seasoned operators thinking about what comes after the exit, Ankur makes the messy, emotional side of building companies. We cover - Why most people should never raise venture capital - The three things he looks for in founders (and why the third one is controversial) - From reading Losing My Virginity at 13 to wanting to buy a sports team and put himself on the roster - SO much more! Timestamps 00:00 Intro 00:55 Twice Lucky, Still Humble 05:53 Confidence Is Just Age 08:18 Stress Beats Every Biohack 12:28 Venture Investing for Everyone 19:17 What Makes a Great Founder 23:05 Emotional Runway Kills First 27:53 Don't Raise Venture Capital 30:02 Your Happy Number 34:17 The $20K That Becomes Millions 37:42 Finding Your Zone of Genius 41:59 Read for Joy, Not Optimization 48:23 Maximize Your Surface Area I hope you enjoy this one!! Ankur Nagpal (@ankurnagpal ) joins Naval Ravikant to Disrupt Venture Capital: available on all major platforms
Watch video
- 42
@JesseTinsley ·
⚠️ Trigger Warning ⚠️ Random Tech investor pattern match I have seen repeatedly. On average Tech VC’s will invest as much preferred equity as there is a capacity to absorb 1x that amount in debt. Intentionally or unintentionally the pattern is clear the risk is effectively zero. Why? Because they can sell or dividend recap and get a 100% return 99% of the time. Not quite the “risk” capital many people assume it is because there is zero institutional senior debt above them. Its effectively you sell us control, will call this a “Venture Investment” post Series C or beyond and we tell you what you are allowed to do with “your” business. Seems more similar to private equity where you sell a majority just in this case VC has convinced everyone that reinvesting it in your business vs taking that money yourself is the only way.
- 43
@willsclips_ ·
Founders are often told to raise venture capital through warm introductions. @Seshproducts founder Max Cunningham started with over a hundred cold emails. One of those emails led to @MidnightVP becoming the company’s first investor. Sesh has since raised more than $40M from investors including @8vc, @diplo and @PostMalone.
Watch video
- 44
@StephNass ·
These 3 super signals make VCs open their check book right away: Bad signals are everywhere. Good ones are rare but they will help you raise faster. Let’s go through these 3 super signals step-by-step. 1️⃣ Track record of the founding team Successful investors invest in great teams. If the team has proven themselves before, their deck goes to the top of the pile. That means: · Previous exits · CxO at scale-ups · Selective environments (FAANG, MBB, MIT, Stanford) · Big wins in open source, major awards, or recognition Why does it matter? Because 60% of unicorn founders are repeat founders and 42% already had a $10M+ exit. In venture capital, your last win is the shortcut to your next check. 2️⃣ Traction Nothing beats proof that people want your product. Investors zoom in on retention and growth: · Consumer app → 40% D1, 20% D7, 10% D30, DAU/MAU above 20% · Ecommerce → $100k+ GMV, 50% YoY revenue growth Prove users come, stay, and bring their friends. 3️⃣ Who else is investing The truth: most funds don’t lead. They follow lead investors. That’s why having a strong lead (or any respected backer) changes the game. Some firms even index entire rounds off the names Sequoia, YC, or a16z. It's a herd mentality, but it works in your favor. Follow @StephNass for more
- 45
@GJarrosson ·
Treating Demo Day as a passive viewing experience means you will only get access to the deals that nobody else wants. Sourcing generational companies requires a proactive, highly targeted hunting strategy that begins long before the main event. By studying early launches and monitoring founder social signals, you can construct a high-conviction shortlist of teams to systematically court. This structural approach shifts you from a reactive investor to a precise, relationship-driven partner. Venture capital is a game won on the margins of persistence, and early outreach is the ultimate mechanism for tilting the table in your favor. @davj @Fondocom
Watch video
- 46
@JoinPond ·
Every VC says they invest in 'founder quality'👨🔧 Here's what the phrase actually means depending on who says it: @ttunguz means: show me your data instincts. Do you know your cohorts, your retention, your unit economics without looking? He's evaluating how you think, not how you pitch @hunterwalk means: show me how you lead. How you hire, how you handle the first time something breaks. He's evaluating whether your team will stay @bfeld means: show me you're built for the long game, ot the exit but the decade. He's evaluating whether you'll still be showing up when it's genuinely hard. Same phrase and three completely different evaluations happening in the same room Know which one you're in?
- 47
@rohitdotmittal ·
$15M+ raised and a $100M+ valuation can actually make a company harder to sell. Founders forget that they have to grow into the valuation and hopefully a lot more. The valuation is based on the company's future potential, not its current value. When you go to sell the company, the questions will be the exact opposite. At Helium Ventures, when we look at venture backed startups looking to sell, we ask a few simple questions: - how stable is the revenue? - how hard is this business to operate? - what growth levers still exist? - what breaks if the founder leaves? - why is this worth owning now? Founders often go into acquisition conversations anchored to the last round. Buyers do not. A founder says: “We were valued at $100M.” A buyer thinks: “I am buying a company with subscale revenue, limited leverage, and real operating work ahead.” This is why so many founder acquisition conversations go nowhere. The founder thinks in venture narrative. The buyer thinks in operating reality. The right question is usually not: “What multiple should I get?” It is: “What is this buyer actually buying?” Revenue? Technology? Team? Customers? A foothold in a market? A problem they don’t want to build from scratch? Once you understand that, pricing starts making more sense. Many founders would make better decisions if they stopped comparing acquisition offers to their last valuation and instead compared them to their real alternatives (at their current level).
- 48
- 49
@GJarrosson ·
Venture capital has fundamentally evolved into a spectator sport where media distribution dictates deal flow. If you aren't building a brand independently of your capital, you are actively losing ground. The lesson underneath the biggest names in tech right now is incredibly simple but widely ignored. Being deeply known for a specific expertise beats being superficially well-known every single time. Stop keeping your investment thesis a secret from the founders who are actively looking for it. Turn your repetitive weekly meeting talking points into high-leverage content that scales your authority.
Watch video
- 50
@sabben ·
💥🎯 Q1 venture capital data just dropped, for over 400 locations. All available at @dealroomco platform. Some insights Q1 2026: - $296.3B in VC funding year-to-date, the highest quarter on record - Global vc-backed startup ecosystem value now sits at $44.8T - AI Model Layer startups accounted for 60% of all VC raised, $181.1B - Scaleup rounds ($100M+) are surging — the biggest quarter since the 2021 peak 🏙️ Top 5 cities by funding: Bay Area — $212.3B New York City — $8.2B London — $6.4B Boston — $4.4B Austin — $4.2B 🌍 Top 5 countries by funding: 🇺🇸 USA — $247.6B 🇨🇳 China — $14.4B 🇬🇧 UK — $7.8B 🇫🇷 France — $3.4B 🇮🇳 India — $3.3B 🚀 Biggest rounds: @OpenAI ($122B), @AnthropicAI ($30B), @xai ($20B), @Waymo ($16B), DayOne ($2B), @nscale ($2B)
Watch video
Best Tweets by Topic