A good chunk of this information would be useful to non-YC companies as well, I really hope they will open up the bits that do not require physical presence in SV.
All the founding rounds are discrete events. I wonder if there's an opportunity to have a way to do funding in a more continuous way. You can get more people chipping in funding at random points in the life of the company that unlocks over time.
That happens in angel/pre-seed/seed rounds. They're usually much smaller contributions and are much easier to do because you're not giving out equity, you're technically taking debt which will convert to equity on the next equity financing round (usually series A).
Also after an equity round, investors typically have pro-rata rights so you can't take any money without getting their permission and ask them if they'd like to contribute more to maintain their share.
You can do that, it's just stressful. Big company analogy: it's like what if instead of getting headcount allocated just once a year, you had to re-argue about how much headcount your team deserved constantly. ;-)
The closest is convertible equity, adopted by a good number of startups during their seed stage. You can read about SAFE by YC and KISS by 500 Startups, 2 informal instruments / agreements used to do convertible equity.
I had assumed they did this already. As much as we hate to admit it, pitching (or "running a process" — see comments below) is critical to the success of a company and therefore a required skill for founders. And YC seems to be an ideal place to build a collective set of best practices.
The program isn't actually just - or even mainly - about the act of pitching. There's an entire process around running a successful fundraise that changes from round to round and company to company.
Pitching is part of that process, and what we've learned is that the A pitch is a different thing altogether from seed pitches. We have a lot of work to do to get great at that, and I'm grateful for the help we're getting from alums who have gone through it before and have been giving us advice.
Perhaps? I’ve never seen autocorrect suggest lead when I’m typing led, but maybe it happens to others for sure. On the other hand, I see it not only far more frequently in online usage, but far more consistently, as if people think lead is a homonym of the same-spelling sort, not the same-sounding sort.
I don't think people use Roman numerals when they say 500k to mean 500 thousand. It is implied the SI system is used. How does it switch from SI to Roman numerals when talking about millions? Also MM is 2000.
I didn't downvote you, but MM in Roman numerals is million. It is also common enough to represent roman numerals in lowercase that mm, as used here, is totally valid.
I believe some parts of the world, particularly in Europe, interpret $500M as $500 * 10^3 (not $500 * 10^6)...So some use $500MM to universally avoid this confusion
