Fredrik Harestad

Founders, only you, your team and your investors should own shares in your startup❗ I see so many early teams giving away equity to service providers, tech agencies, coaches, lawyers, fundraising consultants, media, or even “work for equity” deals with people who are not real employees. I get why it happens. In the early days, paying with equity feels easy. Cash is tight. You want to move fast and get help. But here’s is the hard truth: 👉 Equity is the most expensive currency you have. 👉 Every extra name on your cap table makes your life harder later. 👉 Future investors will care. A LOT. When you give away slices to anyone outside founders, team, or investors, you lose control & (a lot of) money. Here’s a simple structure: ✅ Founders: reserve equity for yourself (with founder vesting!) ✅ Team: use an option pool to incentive core team members ✅ Investors: money for equity & use pooling structures for angels Everything else - services, advice, legal, agency work - you pay for. If you can’t afford it, find a way to earn your first money. Get creative. But keep your cap table CLEAN. P.S. At a later stage, it could be an option to consider giving important advisors a small amount of shares. #startups #investments #venturecapital

192

82 kommentarer

So much of the VC world is measured in numbers, but not everything. There are certain non-financial metrics that are just as vital to success. To Henri Pierre-Jacques, GP of Harlem Capital, venture is a people’s business. Whether you’re investing in founders, building trust with LPs, or selling into enterprises, at the end of the day, it’s still a person on the other side of the table. In the latest episode of High Stakes, we get to the heart of how we should be thinking about success in VC: beyond the spreadsheet.

56

6 kommentarer

🔥 A DeFi protocol with ~11 employees is now doing more volume than Robinhood, and you have never heard of it. It's called HyperLiquid and its the most important platform in finance right now. In traditional finance, scale and infrastructure usually come with headcount, compliance layers, and media attention. Hyperliquid flips that model on its head. Running a decentralized trading platform that completely changes how markets function. Built on its own purpose built Ethereum like blockchain, it facilitates high frequency derivatives trading with the efficiency of Nasdaq, but no custodial risk, corporate bottlenecks, or 'trading hours". The numbers are hard to ignore: 💰 $400 billion in montly trading. 💰 $106 million in monthly revenue (August 2025) 💰 More volume than Robinhood in July, with 90% fewer employees But what’s even more interesting is the governance. Hyperliquid runs with no venture capital and minimal marketing. It aligns directly with its users and validators through onchain incentives and decentralized governance. It's token went primarily to traders and early participants, not insiders. It’s lean. It’s efficient. and run on a new kind of exchange infrastructure which is global, real-time, and fully programmable. Why it matters: - For allocators, it represents a working model of what next gen financial rails will look like, lower cost, higher throughput, 24/7, and with full transparency. - For infrastructure investors, it’s a signal that Crypto is maturing to take over TradFi. The core question is what happens when markets no longer have gatekeepers? All of this builds up to something bigger. In my next post, I’ll unpack how Hyperliquid is the future of growth and power distribution through incentive alignment, and how WallStreet might actually be rekt.

169

18 kommentarer

Firstly, this isn't a post about Europe vs US. They're different beasts at different stages of development… However, as a European VC, it's critical to be connected to the US VC market. If you are, on average, you'll get bigger markups for your portfolio by taking advantage of the UK/US arbitrage among other things. Two examples of this are Lawhive and StackOne from our portfolio. Both have founders who've moved to the US and both have raised from GV (Google Ventures) with deep US ties of course. Same with companies like Mimica (Khosla Ventures), Carwow (Bessemer Venture Partners, Accel) and many more. You need to be able to pick the phone up to tier 1 US VCs and get them to meet your portfolio. So when Adam Shuaib, PhD, Millan Suri and I went to SF a few weeks back, we tried to cover as much ground as we could, meeting about 40 of the tier 1 US funds like Founders Fund, Greenoaks, Sequoia Capital, Thrive Capital, Andreessen Horowitz…. It takes time to build this network but the rewards are great. As you can see, we also went surfing.

74

2 kommentarer

A Founder’s Guide to Seed Fundraising by Mike Wilner and Max Nussenbaum This book is for founders who are considering raising money, founders who are in the middle of raising money, and founders who have already raised an angel or seed round but find themselves needing to raise another one. It covers everything from the basics of seed fundraising for first timers to the advanced tactics that enable founders to create urgency for investors and close rounds quickly. This book is broken up into six chapters. If you’ve never fundraised before, you should read all six chapters. If you have fundraised before, you’ll get the most value out of Chapters 2–6. Chapter 1: Seed Fundraising 101: This chapter will give you a baseline understanding of the seed funding landscape, along with the implications of seed funding for founders, angel investors, and VCs. Chapter 2: How to Run a Swift Seed Fundraise Chapter 3: Fundraising Narrative Preparation Chapter 4: Researching & Engaging Angels Chapter 5: Researching & Engaging VCs Chapter 6: Pitching & Closing This book provides simple answers to address all of the issues. ~~~~~ ♻️ Found this helpful? Repost it so your network can learn from it, too. And follow me, Fazlur Shah, for more content like this. #startups #entrepreneurship #venturecapital #investing

154

29 kommentarer