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How Much Should You Raise in Your VC Round? And What is a VC Looking at in Your Model?

Both Sides of the Table

There’s a quick litmus-test conversation any early-stage VC will have with the founder and it’s one that you should be as prepared for as your elevator pitch. It goes something like this … VC: “How much money are you raising?” Founder: “$8–10 million” VC: “What’s your current burn rate?” A VC is looking for reasonableness.

VC 247
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The BS List - We Don't Like This Space (No. 52)

This is going to be BIG.

Ask specifically what terrible things about startups in this space the VC is trying to avoid. Is it too hard to unseat entrenched incumbents? Either VCs can identify a very specific, unassailable issue of specific risk they don’t believe the return is there for, or they’re just being lazy.

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How to Decrease the Odds That Your Startup Fails

Both Sides of the Table

The questions that a VC mulls before writing a check are precisely the questions you should be asking yourself. But this isn’t likely to be a VC-backable business (which to be clear is totally ok). Incumbent Strengths & Weaknesses. Market Size. Market Structure. ” Are you going into an industry (say, music?)

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The Opening

A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

So the existing incumbents are the defensive line. And they are not taking on any of the incumbents directly. It is also hard to take on the existing social nets. Why would someone with a million followers on Instagram or TikTok or Twitter leave those behind for a new social net? They look impenetrable. Until they aren’t.

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Both Things Can Be True: Bias and Bad Fundraising Advice

This is going to be BIG.

Any VC will tell you that the ones they said yes to, they mostly got there right away—and that there are very few “maybe” deals that get tipped over the fence. Here’s the way I look at the math: Let’s go over the structural bias first—the “pipeline” that happens before you ever even get near a VC. First is network bias.

advice 476
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The VC tide has gone out. A real innovation wave is now arriving.

Founders Coop

But VC bubbles deflate slowly. LLMs are compute and energy hogs, and renting state of the art bundles of compute and energy by the millisecond is what tech incumbents do best. Will selling AI tools to incumbents prove more valuable than “full-stack” competitive attacks? So what’s a founder to do?

VC 143
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Here is Why Non-Obvious Startup Ideas Can Yield the Largest Results

Both Sides of the Table

Try to imagine if you *didn’t* already know Amazon and the company walking into VC meetings telling people they were going to disrupt the selling of all goods starting with books but then extending into electronics, apparel, toys and so forth. The value prop is pretty clear.