Y Combinator group partner and Twitch co-founder, a go-to voice on seed fundraising mechanics.
Seibel's formulaic, repeatable pitch structure: a two-sentence company description anyone can repeat, traction, unique insight, market size, and the ask, with examples of each done well and badly.
Seibel on the mechanics of leverage: investors respond to scarcity and competition, so batch your meetings, create parallel processes, and never negotiate from a single-bidder position.
Michael Seibel's SaaStr session on pitching a seed-stage startup: the exact structure of a two-minute pitch, the most common ways founders confuse investors, and live Q&A with founders in the room.
Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel break down rookie mistakes founders make around investor terms and incentives: what investors actually optimize for, misaligned terms to watch, and how naive founders get squeezed.
Michael Seibel's practical guide to cold-emailing investors: structure, brevity, credibility signals, and real examples of what gets a reply.
Dalton and Michael debate when a startup should bootstrap versus raise venture capital, including honest talk about which businesses are venture-shaped at all.
Michael Seibel explains why fundraising works differently in Silicon Valley than everywhere else: risk appetite, check-writing speed, and what that means for founders elsewhere.
Seibel contrasts pitching investors with pitching customers: investors buy the upside story and the market, customers buy the solution — and mixing the two kills both.
Dalton and Michael respond to criticisms of Y Combinator and explain how YC actually affects fundraising outcomes, including honest discussion of demo day dynamics.
Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel at TechCrunch on YC do's and don'ts, including how founders should think about applying, demo day, and post-batch fundraising.