Startups as Investments

Pre-seed, seed, Series A through D, bridge rounds, extension rounds, secondary. It's its own vocabulary, and new-to-VC people spend a lot of time nodding when they should be asking what any of it means. So: the whole lifecycle, end to end. What each round typically looks like, who invests at each stage, how check sizes and valuations move, and what's expected between rounds. Get this down and every pitch deck suddenly reads faster.

Resources coming soon

SaaS, marketplaces, consumer apps, fintech. Each has its own shape. Different metrics matter, different risks turn up, different kinds of moat are even possible. Evaluate a marketplace with SaaS metrics and you'll get the answer wrong. So this one runs through the four models you'll see most often in venture and what 'good' actually looks like in each.

Resources coming soon

Product-market fit gets talked about more than almost anything else in venture, and defined less. The point of this module is the best frameworks for spotting PMF during diligence: the Rahul Vohra '40% very disappointed' test, organic pull signals, retention curves. You can't measure PMF in a day. But you can learn to tell the difference between 'real early pull' and 'founder wishful thinking,' which is most of the work.

Resources coming soon

Every deck has a slide claiming the market is $100 billion. Most of those slides are wrong. The good ones are defensibly wrong; the lazy ones are just a Google search; once in a while you find a real number. The point here is to pressure-test a TAM: top-down vs bottom-up, comparable benchmarks, the standard traps founders fall into sizing their own markets. After this, when someone says 'we'll capture 1% of a $50B market,' you'll know the better question to ask.

Resources coming soon