Safe Financing Documents
The official home of the SAFE: current post-money SAFE documents, side letters, and YC's user guide explaining caps, discounts, and dilution math.
Term sheetsValuation & dilutionPre-seed
View item →
The accelerator whose partners and founders produced much of the canon of early-stage fundraising advice.
The official home of the SAFE: current post-money SAFE documents, side letters, and YC's user guide explaining caps, discounts, and dilution math.
YC partners share real investor horror stories from their founder days and from companies they've advised: exploding term sheets, tranched deals gone wrong, investors behaving badly after wiring, and how founders should protect themselves.
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.
Former YC president Geoff Ralston's fundraising fundamentals lecture: round mechanics, dilution math, SAFEs, investor psychology, and process design for a first raise.
YC CFO Kirsty Nathoo explains SAFEs versus priced rounds with worked cap table examples, showing exactly how caps, discounts, and stacking SAFEs dilute founders.
YC's Aaron Harris on how to get meetings with investors and run them: intro paths, meeting stagecraft, reading interest honestly, and converting interest into checks.
YC's Kevin Hale on pitch construction: clarity, the 'legible, obvious, conductive' framework, and live rewrites of muddled startup one-liners.
YC founders confess their actual fundraising mistakes: optimizing for valuation, taking bad money, serial meetings, and misreading investor interest.
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.
Founders at YC's Female Founders Conference compare fundraising experiences: rejection patterns, investor bias, and tactics that worked, with disagreement between panelists on the right approach.
YC's Carolynn Levy (inventor of the SAFE) and Kirsty Nathoo teach investor-school mechanics: instruments, rights, and what founders and angels each misunderstand about early-stage paperwork.
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.
Recent YC Startup School session defining the key terms founders must know before raising: SAFEs, caps, pro rata, option pools, board seats, and liquidation preferences in plain language.