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Private companies staying private longer than ever. Startup founders are signing up for a decade (maybe 1.5 decades) AFTER seed. Fund managers expecting to wrap things up in the standard 10-yr fund lifecycle will be disappointed.

Carta saved 3,500+ hours a month with internally built AI agents. Not by automating busywork, but by scaling complex judgment. Our second essay on First Round Applied Intelligence explores exactly how they did this, in a crazy amount of detail.

I’ve joined Cognition to continue to work on the future of software engineering. I was employee #2 at Windsurf and have worked on AI+code for years. There’s never been a more exciting time and place for it than now at Cognition. I had a place at Google DeepMind as part of the

18 months between venture rounds is not the right expectation. These days the median is over 2 years, even for many AI companies. Non-AI, it's even longer. Plan accordingly!

Less than 30% of startup founding teams split equity equally last year. (Data is a snapshot of the equity split before any funding) But the equal split crowd is gaining share year by year.

Stacking SAFEs seems easy and free and is not.

Attention of basically any kinda can be redirected. Pretty boss move here

“Every pre-revenue startup is raising at $30-$40 million right now”…lol. Stop comparing most startups to AI companies run by ex-cofounders of OpenAI. Median seed valuations for AI companies are $19M post-money and basically all of them have good revenue.

I sat down with Peter Walker, Head of Insights at Carta, and the best data storyteller on the internet. This episode is filled with data-backed insights for startups. Here's what we covered: 1/ Why it's harder than ever to raise at Seed 2/ How much ARR you need for Series A

Most undercompensated* people in the startup ecosystem as well.

Data on the pre-seed market below. Jenny is right that many start at $10M - and many get done at $10M. But the ranges are super wide! Pre-seed is the land of the messy. carta.com/data/state-of-…

Venture capital brightspot - the massive wave of down rounds seems to be slowly fading. Typically down rounds make up ~10% or so of VC deals. Over the past few years that's been more like 20% or even higher. Q2 2025 saw the lowest share for down rounds since late 2022.

Dilution matters and founders should care about it.

Hundreds and hundreds of companies have raised between $500K-$2M this year as their first round. And yet I don’t doubt Nichole when she says she’s has barely seen any who want less than $4M. In network vs out of network is an absolute chasm in startups.

Thousands of tech tweets per day but the only things I’ve ever bookmarked here are ways to unpinch shoulder muscles or stretches for lower back pain.

Startup optimism - more companies are starting to graduate from Series A to Series B faster. Not boom-level yet, but better than it's been in years. Downside is there are many, many Series A companies who raised the A in 2021 / 2022. They are running out of time.

Startup graduation rates from seed to Series A are getting slightly better. AI is healing I guess.

The running joke is that every startup has one “lost” co-founder. The one who was there at the start, maybe still owns a sizable chunk of equity, but left or was kicked out and they were lost to the sands of time. if you are running a company, it's not uncommon to lose one of

Graduation rates for 2024 Series As are better than grad rates for 2022 and 2023. Still well below the ZIRP years but getting better!

BREAKING: Carta’s Path to $500M ARR, Raising $1B, & Why PE is The Future.. new interview w/ CEO Henry Ward "Competition is for losers" - Peter Thiel "If a lot of people are doing something, don’t do it. Do the thing that nobody else is doing…" Such an insightful conversation