Fundraising

The 2022 crisis is the third major tech downturn of the internet era, following the dot-com bubble and the Great Recession. Many experts are dispensing advice to founders on how to weather this storm. While this advice is broadly helpful, we must consider that it's been approximately 14 years s

Iddo Tal has an infectious enthusiasm for fundraising. He believes that when startup founders know how to raise money, they can find the freedom to approach investors with confidence and raise the capital they need to grow their company. Tal developed his methodologies in the course of leading five

For more than three months, Ukraine has been engulfed in the flames of a war with Russia. That might look like a red flag from an investor’s point of view, but everything is not so black and white in the country’s tech sector. Tech companies with Ukrainian roots and core markets in the

As a child, Marceau Michel always asked for a quarter. He knew if he kept asking for a quarter, he'd have a dollar one day. Then he’d be well on his way to having two — a slow but purposeful build toward amassing his own little fortune. Today, at the helm of the Black F

Whenever pro-rata rights are involved, you can always smell some drama. When a company raises a financing round, new and old investors often battle it out for the largest stake they can get. While this process can be competitive enough to be considered cutthroat, during the last decade's bull m

It's no secret that the tech world struggles with diversity. Women, African Americans and Latinos respectively comprise 33%, 8% and 7% of the total tech workforce and just 20%, 5% and 5% of its leadership, despite evidence of a correlation between diversity and success. As an industry, tech has

Back in March, I wrote about how BoxedUp pivoted to enable high-end video production gear sharing and its $2.3 million seed round. At the time, the company’s founder Donald Boone stuck out, so when I started the pitch deck teardowns, I knew I wanted to feature BoxedUp in one of the insta

Are you a founder looking to raise capital? If so, before you open the door to potential investors, your financial house might need a little spring cleaning. As a growth equity investor, we meet with many founders who have a solid handle on the day-to-day operations of their business and have some

Will Y Combinator one day fund 1,000 companies per batch? Its president, Geoff Ralston, doesn’t think that’s impossible. But for the tech press, the possibility creates a conundrum: We can do our best to pick favorites, but we can’t cover every single promising startup in its earl

One thing I love about fintech is the promise of unlocking more tools for more people. In a broad sense, the current era of fintech has done just that — people around the world now have access to financial services that were earlier either completely out of reach before, or, at a minimum, prohibi

If you follow mainstream tech media, you could be forgiven for thinking that venture capital is a founders' market today after two years of record round sizes and outcomes. There is some truth to this: VC had its biggest year in 2021, more than doubling from 2020, which was already a record yea

Why is venture funding so confusing? Isn't the formula simple? Well, to start, the presumption that a company knows what its investors expect with full clarity is a lofty one. Investors will have both financial and non-financial milestones they expect a company to achieve between raises, and th

Cram downs are back, and I'm keeping a list. At the turn of the century after the dotcom crash, startup valuations plummeted, burn rates were unsustainable and startups were quickly running out of cash. Most existing investors (those still in business) hoarded their money and stopped doing foll

The company behind Axie Infinity, a popular crypto play-to-earn game, raised $150 million in funding this week to help reimburse users who lost funds worth about $625 million in a hack last week. Axie Infinity’s creator, Vietnamese gaming studio Sky Mavis, had garnered wide acclaim for buildi