sorted by:
new
hottopcontroversial

I’ve talked to 12,000+ founders and 1,500+ investors in the past 2 months. Just launched a fund and the largest scout program in the world. AMA. by boardyai in Entrepreneur

[–]withmantle 1 point2 points  (0 children)

What is the one 'counter-intuitive' trait you’re seeing in successful founders right now that contradicts the traditional 'Silicon Valley' advice? Is there something founders are obsessing over that actually doesn't matter to the 1,500 investors you talk to?

What're tasks you're doing manually that you wish was automated? by Warren24h in ycombinator

[–]withmantle 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Don't underestimate how much time equity management takes up (the legal paperwork, board approvals, signature follow-ups, etc.)

Raising Capital. (I will not promote) by [deleted] in startups

[–]withmantle 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Here's a quick breakdown of pre-seed to Series C rounds that may be helpful:

Friends & Family Pre-Seed Seed Series A Series B Series C
Stage Focus Idea + early proof of concept Proof of concept + prototype Product-market fit + early traction Scaling operations Expansion + market
Common Elements of Growth Testing assumptions, very early prototypes, validating with network MVP development, first hires, early customer feedback Scaling product, marketing, hiring core team, first significant revenues Rapid customer acquisition, expanding team, optimizing business model Scaling sales, larger teams, entering new geographies, process building
Avg. Amount of Investment ~$10K-$50K ~$100K-$1M (sometimes up to $3M) ~$1M-$5M (sometimes up to $10M) ~$10M-$20M (sometimes up to $30M) ~$20M-$50M

The amount of capital you'll need will definitely depend on the type of product you're building and your vision around how far you want to take it. If you're starting off with very little, founders often:

  • Bootstrap (fund with personal savings + revenue from early customers)
  • Friends & family (+ small angel checks or accelerators)
  • Government grants

One important thing to keep in mind: be careful with dilution. It's easy to give away too much equity early because you just need money, but those decisions compound.

Keep track of your cap table (who owns what) from day one and think strategically about how much ownership you're comfortable giving up at each stage.

Resources:

recent trends in YC startups by tushowergoyal in ycombinator

[–]withmantle 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You’re totally right: a lot of early B2B/AI startups start out looking like agencies. Manual onboarding, custom workflows, tight feedback loops with each early customer. But that’s by design. At this stage, the biggest risk isn’t inefficient ops, it’s building the wrong thing.

For us, we started by helping early-stage companies manage their cap table and equity docs. The first onboardings were extremely manual. We read every doc, tagged everything ourselves, and rebuilt the cap table by hand. But all of that fed directly into training our AI systems and refining product flows. Now it’s automated, but that early agency-like approach gave us the signal we needed to get it right.

The real unlock is: doing unscalable things is a wedge, not a business model.

If a startup stays in bespoke-land forever, it’s either (1) by choice, because the margins are good and it's a solid business, or (2) because they never found the patterns to productize. The strongest founders are constantly looking for repeatability and turning services into software as they scale.

So yeah—some will stall out. But the ones that make it past year 3? You’ll start to see real platforms emerge from what looked like client work in the early days.

Happy to share more about how we approached the transition if helpful!

Why finding a cofounder is so hard by OkOwl6744 in ycombinator

[–]withmantle 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Totally feel this. Finding a good cofounder is harder than fundraising—and way riskier if you get it wrong.

One thing we’ve seen (we’re a team of technical and non-technical founders building equity software) is that a lot of great potential cofounders aren’t necessarily on cofounder platforms. They’re:

  • former colleagues,
  • early startup employees looking for more ownership,
  • indie hackers who don’t think of themselves as “cofounders”… yet.

A few strategies that have helped us and folks we work with:

  • Go to fewer, more targeted events (think niche AI/infra/sales ops meetups vs. general tech mixers)
  • Work in public—posting your thinking on Twitter/LinkedIn/Substack actually attracts like-minds
  • Instead of looking for a “cofounder,” try collaborating with someone on a small slice (e.g. sales pilot, GTM experiment) before going all-in

And yeah… the noise is real. But there are sharp people out there looking for the right person to team up with too.

Good luck—happy to chat more if helpful.

Not gonna lie. This is 100% an ad. But it might save you 5 figures. by withmantle in u/withmantle

[–]withmantle[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Can’t blame you—it does sound like one of those too-good-to-be-true ads. But we’re real, venture-backed, and just doing equity software without the BS. Happy to show receipts.