How is your startup actually priced, and how much should you give up? These sessions demystify valuation math, dilution over multiple rounds, and how to think about ownership.
9 min
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.
1h 7m
Zapier CEO Wade Foster explains why the company raised only a tiny seed round and never went back to the well, plus contrarian takes on growth and hiring that follow from profitability.
6 min
Stanford GSB professor Ilya Strebulaev summarizes his large-scale research on how venture capitalists actually make decisions: what they weight (team vs market vs product), how many deals they screen, and how valuations are really set.
3 min
Bill Gurley argues venture capital is structurally a bad industry: excess capital, misaligned incentives, and what that means for founders taking money at peak prices.
8 min
Benchmark's Bill Gurley with Bloomberg on the VC landscape, staying private too long, and lessons from Uber's capital raising for founders and boards.
53 min
Union Square Ventures' Fred Wilson in a long-form TWiST conversation on how USV picks investments, his views on founder-investor relationships, and stories from Twitter/Tumblr-era deals.
1 min
Bill Gurley on why founders and investors over-index on TAM slides, with examples of huge companies whose initial TAM looked tiny.
1h 3m
Hustle Fund's Elizabeth Yin on her high-volume portfolio strategy, how tiny first checks change the founder-VC dynamic, and her outlook on seed fundraising.
1h 34m
20VC roundtable arguing why the venture market today is structurally worse than the 2021 peak: pricing, AI concentration, and exit math — and what founders should do about it.
52 min
Former YC president Geoff Ralston's fundraising fundamentals lecture: round mechanics, dilution math, SAFEs, investor psychology, and process design for a first raise.
45 min
YC CFO Kirsty Nathoo explains SAFEs versus priced rounds with worked cap table examples, showing exactly how caps, discounts, and stacking SAFEs dilute founders.
17 min
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.
VC Peter Harris rips apart a real pitch deck for Appointment.com on camera, slide by slide, explaining what he'd need to see to invest.
22 min
Wilson Sonsini partner Becki DeGraw walks TWiST through negotiating a term sheet: which terms actually matter, market norms, and where founders should spend negotiating capital.
53 min
Classic Stanford GSB session walking through a venture term sheet clause by clause with the negotiating dynamics behind each term.
17 min
Hustle Fund explains the YC SAFE and dilution with worked examples: post-money caps, stacking, and the cap table founders actually end up with.
11 min
Slidebean's Caya compares SAFEs, convertible notes, and KISS instruments with real numbers, from his own experience raising for Slidebean.
46 min
Aaron Harris on fundraising in the AI era: how AI company valuations diverge from SaaS norms, what investors currently over- and under-weight, and process implications.
57 min
Jason Calacanis answers founder questions about raising a seed round in 2026: current check sizes, AI-market dynamics, accelerator math, and what he funds today.
Point Nine's Christoph Janz presents the five metrics that matter when raising a SaaS Series A and B, with the benchmark ranges his fund actually uses.
23 min
SaaStr session on the risky business of Series B: why it's the hardest round, what growth-stage investors diligence, and the trap of a too-high Series A price.
26 min
Startup Grind breakout on fundraising and valuation for AI startups: how AI valuations are being set in the current market and what justifies premium pricing.