How to Build a Unicorn From Scratch – and Walk Away with Nothing
A veteran VC and former founder walks through a fictional-but-realistic 'grim fairy tale' in which a founder builds a billion-dollar company and ends up with nothing, term by term: participating preferred, ratchets, guaranteed IPO returns, redemption rights.
We're Raising $3.5m in Funding: Here is the Valuation, Term Sheet and Why We're Doing It
Buffer publishes every detail of its $3.5M Series A: the valuation, the actual term sheet, investor list, ARR ($4.6M), and the unusual structure that let founders and early employees take secondary money. A landmark in fundraising transparency.
Dear White Venture Capitalists: If you're reading this, it's (almost!) too late.
The viral 2015 essay, written while Hamilton was broke and pitching her fund, calling out venture's failure to fund underrepresented founders. It directly led to her first LP check and the founding of Backstage Capital.
Ban Warm Introductions!
Johnson's much-debated argument that the warm-intro requirement is not just exclusionary but bad investing: it selects for network proximity over merit, and firms serious about returns should build open top-of-funnel instead.
SparkToro Year 3 Retrospective: Investor Payback, Systemic Challenges, and V2 on the Way
Three years after the unusual angel round, Fishkin reports real numbers: profit-sharing distributions actually paid to investors, growth against plan, and honest assessment of the model's tradeoffs.
Is It Fair To Tell Founders 'Just Execute And You'll Be Fine' When We Know It's Not A Level Playing Field?
A sitting VC interrogates his own industry's meritocracy narrative: standard fundraising advice assumes network access and pattern-matching benefits that underrepresented founders don't get, and he discusses what honest advice looks like instead.
Founders: Please don't allow anyone to screw your early backers
Janz describes later-stage investors pressuring founders to restructure or squeeze out early angels and seed funds, and argues founders must defend the people who took the earliest risk, both morally and reputationally.
The growing dissonance between two business models (SaaS and VC)
A SaaS-focused VC admits the venture model's power-law needs are increasingly mismatched with how most healthy SaaS companies actually grow, and explores what that means for founders choosing capital.
Who Gets Funded to Build in Africa? Lessons from a $7.3M Nigerian Seed Round
Uses a $7.3M seed round raised by an American founder for a Nigerian-market app to examine who global VC actually trusts to build in Africa, and what local founders face by comparison.