Fundraising Process and Tactics
Founder playbooks for raising: creating FOMO, running a process to a term sheet, timing raises to milestones, targeted outreach, and the odd power dynamics of pitching.
26%
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 every two weeks.
Investors and founders on term sheets, valuations, and what VCs actually look for.
- Creators
- 34
- Updated
Original Xholic analysis
What 50 top Venture Capital posts reveal
Across 50 posts from 34 creators, the venture conversation splits between founder playbooks for raising and structural critiques of how VC works. Critical stance leads (32%), followed by supportive (26%). Power-law thinking is a shared premise, but voices diverge on whether conviction or consensus finds winners, and whether founders should take VC at all. Industry-structure and power-law themes post the highest median scores, while valuation/dilution content scores lowest.
- Dominant tone
- Neutral
- Median score
- 14.5
- Leading format
- Opinion
- Recent posts
- 26%
38% of posts
All-time engagement
40% of posts
Published in 90 days
Conversation map
The themes creators return to
Power Law and Outlier Returns
Venture as a game of extreme outliers: a few companies driving most returns, legendary wins and losses, DPI, and capital concentrating into fewer hot companies.
22%
VC Industry Structure and Reform
Critiques of 2 and 20 fees, megafunds vs emerging managers, delayed IPOs, underfunded deep tech, public VC vehicles, and policy proposals to fix venture.
22%
Bootstrapping and VC Skepticism
Founders choosing profitable bootstrapped paths, misaligned fund incentives, VC horror stories, capital efficiency, and vetting investors before taking money.
20%
Valuations, Dilution and Round Sizing
How valuations are set through risk reduction, dangers of overraising before PMF, markup expectations, dilution math, and how high valuations complicate exits.
20%
Conviction vs Herd Behavior
Debate over independent conviction versus consensus, committee dynamics, thesis rigidity, hype-driven checks, and avoiding competition over hot seed deals.
18%
Investor Profiles and Deal Stories
Interviews and breakdowns of specific firms, GPs, and landmark deals such as Wiz, Cerebras, Eclipse, USV, and market news on major valuations.
18%
What VCs Look For
Investor criteria for backing startups: exceptional strength over checkboxes, founder quality, traction, track record, social proof, and outlier potential.
16%
Tone and stance
SentimentNeutral leads
Author postureCritical leads
Performance benchmark
- Median likes
- 90
- Median reposts
- 6
- Median replies
- 11
- Median views
- 11.2K
Posts with media make up 50% of this collection. Their median all-time score is 17.9, compared with 14.5 for text-only posts.
Format mix
- Opinion40% · score 31.5
- List20% · score 9.98
- Announcement12% · score 3.48
- Tutorial12% · score 13.8
Consensus and debate
Where creators agree, and where they do not
Shared view
Venture returns are driven by rare outliers
Multiple voices treat the power law as the defining fact of VC. Startup Archive quotes Marc Andreessen that about 15 companies generate roughly 97% of a year's returns. Luca cites Sequoia, a16z and YC wins offsetting losses. Harry Stebbings highlights a Cyberstarts investment in Wiz that reportedly returned its fund about 30 times over. Rohit Mittal calls the power law more extreme than ever.
Shared view
VCs back exceptional strength, not checkboxes
Naval Ravikant (via Startup Archive) argues investors look for one exceptional trait across team, product, traction or social proof. Andreessen likewise favors strength over lack of weakness. Erik Bruckner adds that the best thesis is backing exceptional founders rather than thesis fit.
Shared view
Overraising and high valuations carry real costs
Richard Chen warns that raising too much before PMF breeds lack of focus and sets a high markup bar. Rohit Mittal says a $100M+ valuation can make a company harder to sell. Mark Cuban (via Big Brain Business) calls raising an obligation and dilution, not an accomplishment. apriori calls most mega-rounds wasteful.
Shared view
Fundability depends on demonstrable milestones
Andrew Feldman frames valuation as step changes when engineering or market risk is visibly reduced. Steph from OpenVC says traction, track record, social capital and hot markets can't be built overnight, and relays advice to raise when there is market pull. Luca says VCs reject where a company is, not the idea.
Open debate
Conviction versus consensus as the path to outliers
Erik Bruckner, sam lessin and Simon Dedic champion independent conviction and avoiding hot-deal competition. Nicole DeTommaso counters that most VC is herd mentality and that FOMO is the biggest lever. Joe Magyer relays Abe Othman's view that 'Who else is investing?' can be excellent diligence.
Open debate
Is VC worth taking at all?
Tibo argues fund math misaligns incentives, and GREG ISENBERG questions the VC route; both highlight bootstrapped, profitable paths. Others treat VC as a craft to master: Aaron Harris lays out running a process to a term sheet. apriori, while critical of mega-rounds, calls venture a critically important source of capital formation.
Open debate
Concentration: inevitable or overstated?
Rohit Mittal says capital flows to fewer companies at a faster pace, and Jay Kapoor says VC now backs the sure thing. Martin Tobias rejects the 'only generational companies' framing, citing a SaaS investment at a $3M valuation that just received a term sheet above $200M.
Open debate
How to fix the industry's structure
Dan Gray proposes pillars including strengthening emerging managers and not delaying exits. Patrick Ryan questions 2 and 20, floats alternative fee models, and shares research on state roles. Molly O'Shea's VCX coverage instead points to a market response: public vehicles opening access as companies stay private longer.
What performs
Patterns behind standout posts
Chamath's DPI post is the top outlier
Chamath Palihapitiya's fund wind-down post with GP/LP lessons scored 293.29, 20.26x the 14.48 median, the largest outlier in the set.
Founder stories post high scores
GREG ISENBERG's story of a GP sleeping through a Series A pitch scored 230.01 (15.88x median). The STORY format, only 4 posts, has a 34.3 median score versus 3.48 for ANNOUNCEMENT.
Structure and power-law themes lead engagement
VC Industry Structure (median 34.707) and Power Law (30.708) have the highest theme median scores. Valuations/Dilution (6.98) and Bootstrapping (9.09) trail despite each covering 20% of posts.
Opinion is the dominant, strong-performing format
OPINION accounts for 40% of posts with a 31.51 median score. LIST posts (20%) have a 9.98 median overall, though Startup Archive's Naval list (161.08) and Aaron Harris's three-paths list (142.15) are outliers.
Statistical standouts
- View standout post 1Score 293.3 · 20.26× median
- View standout post 2Score 230.0 · 15.88× median
- View standout post 3Score 161.1 · 11.12× median
- View standout post 4Score 142.2 · 9.82× median
- View standout post 5Score 77.5 · 5.35× median
Creator landscape
Who shapes this conversation
The five most represented creators account for 20% of the selected posts.
1. Dan Gray
@credistick
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. Harry Stebbings
@HarryStebbings
2 posts
Distributed voices, no dominant creator
34 creators contribute 50 posts, with the top five accounting for 20% of placements; no top voice exceeds two posts.
GREG ISENBERG holds the highest creator median
Among top voices, GREG ISENBERG's two posts carry a 138.45 median score. They pair a pitch horror story with a reflection on bootstrapping after Adobe abandoned its Figma acquisition.
Policy-minded critics score well
Dan Gray's two posts, on scaling VC productively and on its dual purposes, post a 32.03 median. Patrick Ryan amplifies Dan Gray's research on state roles in funding deep tech.
Since the previous snapshot
What changed since Oct 3, 2026
- 80% of the selected posts remained.
- The creator count changed by -2.
- 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 34 creators
Ranked 01–50
- 01
@chamath ·
I stopped managing external capital about a decade ago so I could focus on compounding internal capital. But the nature of Venture Capital is that VC funds take many years to be fully realized. I’m at the tail end of that journey so am sharing the latest summary from Q2. I will hopefully wind down these funds in the next year or so and close this chapter. My learnings for GPs and LPs: 1. Reporting should be simple and obvious. 2. Net DPI is all that matters. Optimizing for returns creates discipline and discipline will save you in the bad times. 3. You must compare yourself to the Cambridge Index. It’s fuel if you want to be a 🐐.
- 144Replies
- 88Reposts
- 1.8KLikes
- 530.9KViews
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@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.
- 409Replies
- 236Reposts
- 6.6KLikes
- 10.1MViews
Rewrite this post in your own voice and angle.See the hook, structure, and reusable template behind this post. - 03
@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- 11Replies
- 35Reposts
- 313Likes
- 26.5KViews
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@harris ·
Over hundreds of venture rounds I’ve noticed they all fall into 1 of 3 paths 1. Investors throw cash at crazy growth (great!) 2. Founder runs a process that produces a term sheet (great!) 3. Hail mary stumble through cold pitches that gets lucky (avoid) https://t.co/q0D4tIHn7n
- 19Replies
- 8Reposts
- 187Likes
- 28.6KViews
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@MollySOShea ·
BREAKING: Inside $VCX — The Public Venture Capital Fund (aka on 𝕏: "mini Anthropic IPO") Portfolio: • Anthropic - 21% • Databricks - 18% • OpenAI - 10% • Anduril - 7% • SpaceX - 5% Fundrise CEO Ben Miller (@BenMillerise) breaks down the launch of their publicly listed closed-end fund, Fundrise Growth Tech Fund (NYSE: $VCX) ..and why it has gotten so much insatiable demand. VCX debuted at roughly $700M valuation & surged +18x, with shares spiking to $575, way above the estimated net asset value (NAV) per share of $18.97. VCX debuted on the NYSE March 19, 2026 giving over 100,000 investors access to a portfolio of top private companies including Anthropic (~20%), Databricks (~18%), OpenAI (~10%), Anduril, & SpaceX How we got here? Private markets are now where most value is created. VCX portfolio companies grew ~193% vs ~25% for public tech benchmarks, highlighting the gap between private and public market growth. Meanwhile, IPO timelines have stretched from ~3–5 years to 10–15+ years, meaning public investors are increasingly missing the highest-growth phase. We discuss how VCX works as a closed-end fund, why it has traded at a premium (despite most closed-end funds trading at discounts), & how @fundrise accessed top-tier companies during the 2022–2023 venture downturn — including buying from distressed sellers and stepping into competitive rounds. We cover: • VCX launch & @NYSE debut • Portfolio (Anthropic, OpenAI, Databricks, SpaceX) • Risks: volatility, cycles, and downside scenarios • Will megafunds like a16z or General Catalyst go public? • Private vs public market growth gap (193% vs 25%) • Macro shift: value creation moving to private markets • IPO window + why companies stay private longer • How Fundrise sources and wins allocation • Closed-end fund structure, NAV, premiums/discounts 𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒 (00:00) Benjamin Miller, Co-Founder & CEO at Fundrise (01:12) The idea that almost got rejected (04:27) How the 2023 crash created big opportunities (05:54) From $700M to $6.5B in days (07:38) How a closed-end fund works (11:09) Inside the VCX portfolio (OpenAI, SpaceX, Databricks) (14:50) What Robinhood & Destiny are doing (17:02) Why private markets are pulling ahead (21:38) IPO environment right now (22:17) The SaaSpocalypse & market volatility (25:55) What happens if VCX trades down (27:39) How VCX moves through cycles (31:25) How they decide where to invest (35:45) Investment size and scale (36:59) Most underrated portfolio company (40:37) Biggest lesson: pain = success (43:30) Origin story: why Fundrise exists (47:12) Will big VC firms go public? (50:52) Future of venture capital (54:05) Biggest risks ahead (57:18) Democratizing venture capital (01:00:56) What’s next for VCX (01:03:05) Dealing with skeptics
Watch video- 31Replies
- 44Reposts
- 326Likes
- 89.6KViews
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@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’
- 47Replies
- 30Reposts
- 434Likes
- 73.4KViews
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@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.
- 13Replies
- 35Reposts
- 211Likes
- 30.7KViews
Rewrite this post in your own voice and angle.See the hook, structure, and reusable template behind this post. - 08
@BigBrainBizness ·
Billionaire Mark Cuban says if he were 20 today, he'd skip venture capital and take the $100K-a-month consulting business instead. Here's why: Cuban was given two paths a 20-year-old could take today. Path one: build an AI coaching and workflow business for small and medium-sized businesses. It's an agency-style consulting model that could bring in $100,000 a month. Path two: what many young founders are choosing now. Build a product, raise venture capital, blitzscale, and take a big swing. Cuban didn't hesitate: "I'm taking the money. I'm taking the hundred thousand dollars a month... And using that and just learning everything I could so when the opportunity comes along, I can afford to do it myself." The consulting business isn't the end goal. It pays you to learn, and it builds the capital you'll need when the right opportunity shows up, so you don't have to give away your company to chase it. That's exactly how @mcuban got rich: "I'm a billionaire because I didn't give up a big chunk of my company. When we sold, I still owned a third of it." Venture capital works the other way. Every round you raise sells part of the company: "If you're raising a ton of money, just remember raising money is not an accomplishment, it's an obligation. And it's dilution." The real danger is when founders start treating each round as the win: "Particularly if you get caught in that trap of okay, I'm going to do I did my seed, I did my angel, I did my seed, now I do my series A, then I'm going to go to a series B. And you think that's the accomplishment. You've already failed." He has seen how that story ends, even when the company becomes a massive success: "Like I've seen huge multi billion dollar exits where the original founder, I mean it's not nothing to make $10, $20, $30 million, but out of a multi billion dollar exit to make $30 million." And what that means for the founder: "That means you're working forever for somebody else."
Watch video- 4Replies
- 16Reposts
- 112Likes
- 9.4KViews
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@tibo_maker ·
I'll never raise VC funds again for my startups ever ❌ not because I hate VCs - some of them are great people but the math just doesn't work for what I'm building here's why the math never works for builders like me: - say a VC raises a $100M fund - they'd need to return 3x to their investors - that's min $300m from one fund with maybe 20 bets - so every single company they back needs to have a shot at a billion-dollar outcome. that's not a preference, that's a structural requirement - now if Revid does $1M MRR, that's life-changing money for me but for a VC fund, it's a rounding error - the only way they make money is through a big fat exit. acquisition, IPO, or another round at a higher valuation so someone else can take the risk off their hands 🤯 our incentives are completely misaligned from day one, and when incentives are misaligned, pressure follows raising forces you to grow at a pace that you and the market aren't ready for you hire fast, burn fast, pivot fast, and die fast trying to hit a number someone else wrote on a whiteboard meanwhile I wake up every morning and decide what to build, who to hire, what to charge no board meeting, no quarterly targets I didn't set, and no one asking why I didn't grow 3x this year Revid, Outrank, SuperX, PostSyncer, Feather - all profitable, all mine 🚀 the portfolio just crossed $1m mrr and the best part isn't the numbers 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 staying small and profitable keeps you alive long enough to actually figure things out that's not a consolation prize - that's the whole game, at least for me 😇
- 71Replies
- 14Reposts
- 252Likes
- 18.9KViews
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@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…
- 18Replies
- 17Reposts
- 145Likes
- 19.2KViews
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- 11
@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- 9Replies
- 20Reposts
- 170Likes
- 22.8KViews
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@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.
- 112Replies
- 150Reposts
- 1.4KLikes
- 681.3KViews
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@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.
- 86Replies
- 34Reposts
- 104Likes
- 6.1KViews
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@MartinGTobias ·
Just shut up about how "bifrucated" and "Concentrated" the Venture Market is. "You only make money being in the generational companies." 🤮 In June or 2022 I invested in a SaaS software company selling into senior care. Traditional SaaS, no AI, No agents, nothing sexy. Invested in a first-time founder at a $3M valuation. Took a chance on a hustler. This year they will do over $13M in revenue (have been profitable last two years), exit the year at over $50M run rate and just received a term sheet at over $200M valuation. Just build something that solves a huge problem people will pay for. Don't worry about the media. Focus on customers.
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@Hadley ·
Every VC is understandably scared of making investments that will get crushed by the model companies. So they’re searching for things that feel protected. I wonder if that’s the right approach. Focusing on downside protection has generally been a terrible way to invest in startups.
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@auren ·
99% of venture capital firms are just lifestyle businesses. they don't scale. they would go out of business without the top 2 partners. they are not building anything enduring. most VCs don't take their own advice. they back ambitious people but not ambitious themselves
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@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!✌️)
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@JayKapoor ·
Venture capital used to be about finding the hidden gems. Now it’s entirely about backing the sure thing. Lesson if you’re raising is that if you’re a hidden gem, start to behave like a sure thing. Else you will stay hidden.
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@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
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@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.
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@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.”
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@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."
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@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)
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@ry_paddy ·
There is a strong argument that 2 and 20 is a broken fee structure for venture capital that is damaging the IPO market, and harming innovation more broadly. It has been made by experienced LPs & academics, going back 20+ years. Simply put: - Private markets have been progressively more deregulated since the 90s, flooding capital in - 2% annual mgmt fees incentivises mgmt fee collection - Funds get bigger & bigger, capital agglomerates - This in turn drives herding behaviour & less innovation - Result: fragile, VC-dependent companies stay private too long. Fewer IPOs, big losses once companies list (see article in here for more: https://t.co/K77uaTjGjW) As an emerging mgr, I believe it's worth considering radically different approaches - even if only as an intellectual exercise. It can give you real differentiation and better LP alignment. Two ideas: 1. Low or no mgmt fees, high carry. - Buffett famously charged 0/30 on his first fund. Ultimate alignment - The challenge here is covering fund admin costs, never mind paying yourself a salary - I am talking my own book, but you can do this and really strip out admin costs with SPVs on a deal-by-deal basis. No mgmt fees, low admin fees, carry only. LPs pick what they back, sponsors get paid if they're right. - Deal carry does drive some incentive misalignment here though. You get paid if all your deals suck but one does well, even if the portfolio is <1x). If possible you spread the carry across a portfolio of SPVs or run it as a very light fund - tricky to do this and avoid administrative / regulatory complexity, esp. in Europe (easier in the USA) - An interesting alternative way to cashflow your manco: a 'merchant banking' model for VC. Invest at pre-seed / seed and then also do placements on growth stage deals, late stage secondaries and/or fundraise for other VCs. - There is more and more cash in this industry now looking for a home (and under pressure to deploy, precisely due to 2 and 20), so there is a really great niche in being a "non-crappy" broker / intermediary between funds and companies. Fees are usually charged to companies, but you can also charge funds (this is kind of what a venture partner is) - Being a 'broker' isn't sexy or popular. It isn't "high status". Many brokers in VC suck, and it is frowned upon to pay introducers, especially at pre-seed - series A (red flag that the founder isn't good at raising etc.). - However, this is precisely what makes it such a great model. Few good competitors 2. Systematic capital allocation to "non hot" companies with high potential - Firms like Rule30 in the UK are building models that remove the slow, expensive, consensus-and-bias-prone decision making from the investment process entirely. - If you can allocate capital systematically and at speed like this, your cost base collapses. - Your model maybe starts to look more like "0.2 and 10" or whatever. - Ppl will argue it is hard to get alpha doing this, but the success of Blackrock, Vanguard, Fidelity etc. proves that tracking market beta (especially if you can index eg. top quartile in VC) is no bad thing. Don't get me wrong - I actually think 2 and 20 works well for small managers. However, it doesn't scale well, and it risks being outcompeted by models with better incentive alignment.
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@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.
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@MartinGTobias ·
Saw a seed VC post their actual 2025 backing criteria publicly this week: 18 pre-seed checks, 14 pre-revenue, 10 first-time relationships, 10 rounds they led, median check $500-750K, median valuation $7.5-10M, all highly technical teams, all US-based or actively relocating. That's not a vibe. That's a targeting brief, sitting in public view. If you're blasting 200 investors with the same deck, you're ignoring data like this that would take 10 minutes to read and could double your reply odds. Read the fund's actual portfolio and stated criteria before you email them. Same point I made last week on cold email reply rates: targeted outreach beats volume outreach by 3-5x. Specificity is the whole game -- for the investor's criteria AND for your ask.
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@ItzSuds ·
Learning in real time that post-investment, the most important job of a VC is to bear hug talent into joining a startup Fascinating to watch how the hottest, most well funded co in my portfolio is deploying VCs to recruit a key inference eng (They’re hiring IMO/IOI interns btw)
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@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
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@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.
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@MollySOShea ·
BREAKING: Rare Interview w/ @EclipseVentures Co-Founder & CEO Lior Susan Eclipse turned $147M into a $2.5B Cerebras stake. $12.5B AUM. 90 companies. 30 built in-house. $40B–$50B in portfolio commercial deals last year. Lior goes deep on the $100T physical-world opportunity, Eclipse’s Venture Equity model & why free cash flow beats gross margin. Fund Stats: › $1.3B raised in April across Fund VI + Early Growth III › 17x on Cerebras at the $185 IPO price › Portfolio companies raised $15.9B in 2026 alone › 30 of 90 companies built in-house through Venture Equity › $40B–$50B in commercial deals signed across the portfolio last year "We never thought of ourselves as venture capital. We call it operators with capital because we are operators with capital." Founded in 2015 by Lior Susan alongside Silicon Valley legend Pierre Lamond, who worked with Gordon Moore at Fairchild Semiconductor, helped build National Semiconductor & spent nearly 3 decades at Sequoia. Eclipse bet early on the physical world across semiconductors, manufacturing, robotics, defense, energy & infrastructure. Portfolio: @andrewdfeldman x @cerebras, Parallax, Prime Minute, Anduril, Wayve, Redwood Materials, VulcanForms, Bedrock Robotics, True Anomaly, Ursa Major, Oxide, Bright Machines, Verkada, Mytra, Peak Energy, The Nuclear Company, Reliable Robotics, Skyryse, Mind Robotics & ALSO. 𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒 (00:00) Lior Susan, Founder & CEO at Eclipse (01:02) The story behind Eclipse (02:35) How Lior met Pierre (05:54) The culture Pierre brought to the team (07:33) Why physical companies need operators (11:21) How Eclipse decides what to build (12:35) How Mind Robotics was spun out of Rivian (15:41) Why Lior started Eclipse (18:21) Why building physical companies is so hard (20:53) Why there are only 3 major memory companies (21:51) Why hardware can beat SaaS economics (24:33) Inside Eclipse’s physical industry bet (29:15) This is the best time to build (31:01) The Redwood Materials story (32:35) The "Second Act" of physical companies (33:20) Building moats in the Physical World (34:05) Why on-prem infrastructure is coming back (36:01) Building the "Eclipse Economy" (40:08) Why physical infrastructure creates jobs (41:19) From banana farmer to VC (43:37) What it really means to support a portfolio company (46:00) Who inspires Lior?
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@credistick ·
Writing an article about the two purposes of venture capital, in the context of today's bifurcated market: 1) generating returns 2) driving innovation It's usually assumed that the two go hand-in-hand, where VCs generate returns from innovation, but it's unfortunately easy to find cracks in that premise. So what is the connection, and which arrangement is preferable? A free market absolutist (like Milton Friedman) would only care about profits. The job of a VC is to maximise value for their LPs, and the market determines fees. An industrialist (like Henry Ford) might point to the compounding returns from broader prosperity. A more ambitious goal that such absolutism may sacrifice. Essentially, while the fiduciary duty is to deliver the best possible returns in current conditions, this might reflect a less optimal "finite game". It may be desirable that venture capitalists play a longer-term "infinite game", focused on creating positive externalities and strategic goals. To explore this, I picked six interesting capitalists from history who would likely have strong opinions. I then set up an agent for each, based on their body of work, to set about debating the topic. The result (link below) is mostly for entertainment, but it's interesting from the perspective of understanding the spectrum of capitalism and how attitudes have changed. Amongst the questions, the six figures were also asked which contemporary firms or investors they most admired, and the answers were interesting: - Adam Smith spoke highly of @usv - Milton Friedman chose @foundersfund, and @sequoia under Don Valentine - Ayn Rand pointed to Mike Moritz of @sequoia, but was mostly critical of investors - Rockerfeller highlighted Warren Buffet and Berkshire Hathaway, acknowledging it's not a venture firm, along with @NoubarAfeyan and @FlagshipPioneer - Andrew Carnegie chose @sacca, @KaporCapital and DBL Partners - Henry Ford said, if forced at gunpoint, he would pick Arthur Rock for Fairchild Semiconductor, and Georges Doriot at American Research and Development Corporation They were also asked where they would invest if they managed a $300M venture fund today, what advice they would offer to LPs, and whether or not venture capital is failing the public.
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@JamesonCamp ·
Had a coffee with a friend who raised multiple times from Sequoia, Greylock, and serval more tier 1 VCs and we talked about capital raising Was awesome to hear some perspective on capital raising from a founder instead of a VC I combined it with some advice I got from other venture backed friends years ago for IG video that did well so I’m sharing here 3 things I learned: 1. Your TAM slide is made up. Everyone in the room knows it. The simpler the deck, the better. Just big vision and team. 2. Fundraising is dating. If a VC invites you to an in-person meeting, tell them you’re too busy. Create scarcity. (This advice came from a diff friend while I was raising years ago actually. 3. I pitched VCs a $200M business last year. They said “that’s cute.” Fund economics need billion dollar outcomes now. SpaceX changed the math. Early stage the actual KPI? Vibes. Aura. Whether they believe you’ll figure it out no matter what.
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@Hadley ·
Founders: do your own reference checks on VCs. Anyone can cherry pick a few positive reviews. The best targets are founders of startups a VC has publicly mentioned investing in but doesn’t now list on their site. That’s where the real signal is.
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@andrewdfeldman ·
After raising >$4 billion in 17 financing rounds over 25 years, I've learned that every single fundraise comes down to this simple graph. It’s how venture capitalists (VCs) think about valuation. Let me explain. The graphic shows how you increase valuation by reducing two very specific kinds of risk. Engineering risk - the risk that you can build your idea. Market risk - the risk that the market will buy your product. Unfortunately, while you reduce engineering risk in a smooth line through hard work day by day, VCs only give you credit for it when you hit a milestone. Daily work is hard to understand. Milestones are easy to evaluate. A working demo. A first customer. A signed contract. Hence the step function change in your valuation. The worst thing is to be raising money just below the riser in the step function. You don’t get paid for the risk you’ve reduced because its hard for VCs to see. And because they can’t see it, they don’t give you credit for it. You have done nearly all the work, but get no credit for it in valuation because you can’t demonstrate it. Reducing market risk is similar. A large legitimate customer committing to purchase reduces risk and can be easily demonstrated. Viral adoption of your solution similarly reduces risk and is demonstrable. This is how you drive valuation up. When you think about raising money, always think about how much money you need to comfortably get through the next major demonstrable milestone. When you present, frame everything as: “we will use this money to achieve this goal, which reduces the following risks.” And finally, when you complete a fundraise, I recommend immediately writing the slide deck you want to use for the next raise. Think about the risks that you would like to eliminate, formulate progress as “risk reduction on the engineering or on the market acceptance” dimensions. Every raise I've ever done comes back to this graph. Reduce risk. Demonstrate it. Get rewarded for it.
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@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."
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@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.
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@ildivino_42 ·
16 mins into a VC call last night, I started questioning who was evaluating whom. I was drawing parallels between our vision for energy systems and Palantir. (for @energyailabs) “What’s Palantir?” This was a celebrated VC. ( a big one) The kind of name founders are told they should be excited to have on their cap table. In that moment, I struggled to see what he would bring beyond the cheque. As a founder, I want someone who challenges my assumptions, connects dots I’ve missed, and pushes my thinking further. Reputation alone doesn’t do that. We spend months proving we deserve an investor’s money. We should spend just as much effort deciding whether we want their judgment in the room.
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@sjdedic ·
Not gonna lie, randomly hearing Moonrock get a shoutout on the @solana x @Collector_Crypt podcast made my day: "Really good VCs form their own independent narratives and make their own decisions, it's not a game of 'me too' or following others." Couldn't agree more. And honestly, this might be the single biggest problem in crypto venture capital right now. Too many fund managers have stopped optimizing for returns and started optimizing for not getting fired. They don't want to justify losses to LPs, risk their reputation or blow their chance to raise the next fund. So they do the safe thing. They wait until a16z or Dragonfly leads, then suddenly everyone wants in. Before that? Nobody wants to take the first step. That's not venture capital. That's career management disguised as investing. And it kills exactly the kind of 0 to 1 innovation this industry was built on. No great outcome ever came from being risk-averse. They come from asking: "What if this actually works?" Coming back to Collector, I'm incredibly proud we spotted their potential early, several years ago. Our conviction in the team and the business has only gotten stronger, which is why we've continued to add to our position on the liquid market. Early-stage investing is all about founders. And if you're not willing to size up after meeting someone like @TuomHolmberg, who's been obsessing over his niche for 30+ years and solving its issues from having them experienced first-hand, then what are you even doing in early-stage investing? As @cdixon said: "The next big thing will start out looking like a toy." What started as small marketplace for Pokemon cards is growing into something entirely different. Pokemon cards alone will grow into a massive asset class in their own right. But that's just where it starts. From here, Collector expands vertically across sectors until it owns the entire value chain. This isn't a small marketplace anymore. It's a beast in the making. We've only seen the tip of the iceberg and I am proud to have seen it while it wasn't even a tip.
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@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)
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@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
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@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".
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@Erica_Wenger ·
My conversation with @rebeccakaden Rebecca Kaden is a General Partner at Union Square Ventures, one of the world's leading venture capital firms and an early investor in companies like Twitter, Etsy, Coinbase, and Twilio. She focuses on identifying the next generation of technology platforms shaping the future of AI, energy, and software. We discuss why AI is still dramatically underhyped, how the next wave of billion-dollar companies will be built, the future of open versus closed AI ecosystems, why venture capital operates on decade-long cycles, and the frameworks Rebecca uses to evaluate world-changing technologies before the rest of the market. We also discuss: - Why USV open-sources its investment thesis - The four possible futures of AI - How AI agents are changing venture capital - Why USV is investing in programmable energy - Why the best VCs think in decades, not years - Why founders should optimize for bigger outcomes, not safer bets Enjoy! Timestamps: 00:00 - Intro 5:28 - Market Cycles vs. Fund Cycles 8:28 - The Rebel Alliance & Open Ecosystems 11:18 - The Four Quadrants & Future Of AI 12:51 - Programmable Energy Bets 14:02 - Renewed Application Layer Conviction 18:11 - Public Thinking as Alpha 21:39 - Developing and Testing a Thesis 27:16 - Changing Market Structures From The Outside In 33:26 - Flexibility in Small Fund Sizes 35:59 - Selling on the way up 39:58 - Building Internal AI Agents 47:00 - Data at the Edge Thesis 51:46 - Trailblazer Trade-offs
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@JayKapoor ·
From emerging managers to mega funds we call it call all of it "venture capital." My latest guest @emelton, Managing Partner of @thresholdvc, explains that it's now two different businesses that just share a name. One kinda VC chases a handful of winners: 83% of VC dollars and by many accounts, ~80%+ of LP money keeps compounding into the same names. The other kind of VC is patient capital built to actually return it. Can they co-exist? If you're a founder, this episode helps you figure out which kind of investor is actually sitting across the table from you. And how to identify which investors are your kind of venture capitalist. Latest episode of my show CLIMB maybe the best understanding of this current moment in VC you'll find anywhere 👇
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@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?
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@Magyer ·
Excited to share my conversation with Abe Othman of @Angellist. We talked about why small checks outperform, how VC valuations are more rational than you might think, and why asking "Who else is investing?" is cringe but still rational. Here are the longer takeaways: At seed, expensive does not necessarily mean overpriced. A startup raising at a $75 million valuation may simply be 15 times better than one raising at $5 million. Stronger founders, traction, teams, and markets usually come with stronger prices. The best-looking signals rarely stay secret. Repeat founders, elite credentials, and early traction matter—but founders capture most of that value through higher valuations. Niche investors may sound irrational for a rational reason. Specializing by geography, sector, founder type, or stage helps a VC become someone’s first call instead of everyone’s fallback option. A seed investor’s edge may last only a few years. Networks decay, markets shift, and investors burn out. Past success does not guarantee continued access to the best deals. Contrarian investing is dangerous when startups need more capital. Being right eventually does not help much if the company cannot convince anyone else before its next fundraise. Popularity can become a competitive advantage. Startups that raise easily can hire faster, survive longer, and attract more capital. At seed, consensus may help create the outcome it predicts. “Who else is investing?” may be excellent diligence. Abe once viewed the question as lazy. The data convinced him that investor demand can be one of the strongest available signals. A small check can reveal a hot deal. The investor may not lack conviction—they may have asked for more and been cut back because the round was oversubscribed. Large checks do not outperform. Deep conviction and domain expertise may help, but they are often offset by a harder truth: if the deal were universally exceptional, more of the allocation might already be gone. Quant investing may struggle to disrupt seed. The most useful data may not uncover hidden gems. It may simply show which companies are attracting the most meetings, term sheets, and competition. At seed, diversification may increase returns—not just reduce risk. Because outcomes follow an extreme power law, Abe argues that larger portfolios can produce higher average realized returns. Hope you enjoy! I'm a longtime reader of Abe's research so this was especially fun for me.
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@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).
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@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.
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@StephNass ·
I asked a VC what founders ask her most. Her answers on timing and pivoting weren't what I expected. Skylar Dorosin is a Principal at nvp capital, a seed-stage venture firm. She sees hundreds of founders and hears the same questions over and over. 1: "When should I raise capital?" Most founders raise too early or for the wrong reasons. Raise when you see pull from the market. Are customers showing real interest? Why now, and what actually changes if you do raise? Capital works best when it accelerates momentum that already exists. 2: "How do I think about design partners and pilots?" Most founders are killing their momentum with open-ended pilots that have no success criteria or path to conversion. Make design partners time-bound and structured around delivering something concrete, even if the product is still evolving. Tie pilots to outcomes, timelines, and a buying decision. If your "design partners" have been testing for 6 months with no commitment, they are just free users. 3: "How do I know something isn't working and when to pivot?" Too many founders confuse "building is hard" with "this specific idea isn't working." There's productive struggle and there's constant resistance. If customers aren't excited, willingness to pay isn't there, or progress feels like pulling teeth, it's worth reassessing. Pivoting isn't failure. The best founders stay honest with the data and pivot when it's clear. Skylar also covers co-founder selection, pricing strategy, hiring your first engineer, customer quality vs quantity, and your first sales hire. Read the 8 most common founder questions here → https://t.co/2w3O6SVPot
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@tseides ·
Venture capital is ultimately a people business. A conversation with @katelin_cruse of Seven Seven Six on bringing a human capital lens to investing: how Pixar and Reddit shaped her philosophy, and why sourcing and supporting founders takes as much EQ as IQ. https://t.co/MZIb0Og0Fv With thanks to @AlphaSenseInc, @MorningstarInc, and Ridgeline.
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@GJarrosson ·
Dropbox and AirBnB were able to reach billion dollar valuations after having raised only a relatively small amount of venture capital ($7M and $8M). Contrast that with other web startups of the era who raised more before crossing over into unicorn status - Square ($65M), Twitter ($55M) and Facebook ($40M). Training a generation of entrepreneurs to live as cash efficiently as possible during the market discovery phase of a startup, was one the biggest innovations of Y Combinator... Even with high price points, and valuations I still believe this is happening at YC today. Several Lobster Capital portfolio companies are portfolio and are unwilling to raise mega rounds... the ethos of YC has always been do more, with less.
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