Pablo Lagos Allegre

One of the most important venture trends I’d like to explore more deeply is team size. According to Carta, in 2022 the average SaaS company raising a Series A had 22 employees. By 2024, that number had dropped to 15. By the end of 2025, I’d wager it will be closer to 12. Everyone understands that AI is removing jobs, but it’s worth being clear about which jobs are disappearing: manual, repetitive, and support functions. On the surface, this is a positive shift - it frees people to focus on more strategic, creative, and product-driven work. But it’s important to recognize that those supporting roles were often the ones CLOSEST to the friction points. They were the people uncovering nuances in process, surfacing customer pain, and flagging issues that needed attention to improve product and customer experience. It’s also important to recognize the tradeoffs. A study in The Lancet Gastroenterology and Hepatology found that when doctors used AI to spot pre-cancerous growths in the colon, their detection rates improved. But when the AI was removed, their ability to find tumors fell by roughly 20% compared to before the tool was introduced. In other words, AI boosted performance in the short term but chipped away at core skills in just a few months. That’s the real tension with AI: the efficiency gains are obvious, but we don’t yet know what happens when human judgment and skills start to atrophy. I’m a big believer in leveraging technology to drive efficiency and scale. But I also believe that frontline workers and customer support teams consistently generate some of the most valuable insights into what a company should fix, what new features might be needed, and where the trajectory of the business could shift. Startups should absolutely automate repetitive, manual, and low-leverage tasks. At the same time, they should remain intentional about maintaining direct lines of communication with customers and leads because no algorithm can replace the raw, unfiltered feedback that ultimately drives better products and stronger growth.

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Artificio is building a deeptech startup in Peru. They're raising $7M. Its founder went to Harvard and MIT. Yet, fundraising isn't a piece of cake. They're stuck between two dilemmas. Here's how co-founder Arturo Deza (the Harvard/MIT one) explained it to The Realistic Optimist: "Artificio is an outsider for both LATAM VCs and for American VCs, but for two different reasons. For LATAM VCs, we’re a rare occurrence of a local deeptech startup. They don’t have many benchmarks to point to, and are thus frisky about investing. They don’t know how to value us. Things would be easier if we were doing food-delivery, in which case we could both point to Rappi and call it a day. Of course, Rappi is a spectacular company. But we’re building something very different. For American VCs, we’re a rare occurrence of a non-San Francisco based company building extremely advanced technology. To American VCs, if you’re not based in San Francisco, it means you lack ambition. Many don’t understand that the world has changed, and that Artificio is five steps ahead. We’re playing “4D Chess”. We are not the only ones crazy enough to do this: in other industries, many founders have decided to build outside of the US while still taking US-based VC funding (Mistral AI in France, NotCo in Chile…). They know that post-pandemic, newer markets and opportunities are emerging outside the US that no one else is seizing." Link to Arturo's full Realistic Optimist interview in the comments.

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🔥 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.

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Airbnb has produced more than 500 founders who’ve collectively raised 3 Billion+ in funding. Some of the biggest founder factories are exactly who you’d expect - the YC giants that have already IPO’d like Airbnb, Coinbase, Dropbox, Instacart. But a few names stand out. Rappi is sitting on # 3, proving itself as Latin America’s Airbnb when it comes to producing new founders. And even Zenefits, largely known for its downfall, shows up in the top 15,  a reminder that failed unicorns might not have lived up to their business goals but can birth an entire ecosystem of future founders. Using Crustdata (YC F24)’s company and people APIs we ranked the top 15 YC backed founder factories: 1. Airbnb (W09) - 529 founders 2. Stripe (S09) - 326 founders 3. Rappi (W16) - 287 founders 4. Coinbase (S12) - 284 founders 5. Dropbox (S07) - 235 founders 6. Instacart (S12) - 181 founders 7. Flexport (W14) - 171 founders 8. Cruise (W14) - 143 founders 9. Twitch (W07) - 137 founders 10. Scale AI (S16) - 121 founders 11. Optimizely (W10) - 120 founders 12. Zenefits (W13) - 108 founders 13. Brex (W17) - 102 founders 14. Gusto (W12) - 97 founders 15. Podium (W16) - 96 founders

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📊 What Happens to Equity From Idea to the IPO Stage 📊 The startup funding journey. How much equity is typically given in the various fundraising rounds? In 2023, an analysis of 1,229 initial funding rounds on Carta revealed the average equity percentages founders allocated to investors: ▪️ 20.5% - Seed ▪️ 19.5% - Series A ▪️ 17.2% - Series B ▪️ 12.6% - Series C ▪️ 10.3% - Series D The image below shows the pie keeps getting bigger, but the founders' share get smaller with each passing fundraising round. There are two equal co-founders there. It's a long way to the IPO. According to a study by CB Insights, only about 1% of startups make it to IPO or get acquired. Where are you currently in your startup journey? What challenges are you facing? #equity #startups #fundraising #VC

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Y Combinator Summer 2025: Key takeaways Batch facts: • ~160 companies in the program • We spoke with 60+ teams in our focus areas (AI, B2B, productivity) before Demo Day • Average valuations hit new highs for YC Sample deals (revenue → round → valuation) 1. $0–2k MRR → $2M at $20M 2. $10–30k MRR → $3–4M at $30–40M 3. $20k MRR → $8M at $80M 4. $15M ARR, founder is 16 → $10M at $80M; round closed instantly What stood out: • Many teams building similar products (e.g., several in AI Q\&A) • First sales often happen inside the batch (companies selling to each other) • New norm: gather interest and soft commits first, then announce who made the round at the end — it used to be “first to commit gets in” • Teams feel very similar; it’s harder to spot a clear “top of the batch” Bottom line: valuations are even higher, traction even weaker than in prior years. Investor FOMO is extreme, and a record number of companies were oversubscribed before Demo Day. Still, we made an offer to only one company.

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YC’s new batch (S25) is live and investors are already swarming 🔥 Harmonic’s data highlights the 20 startups attracting the most attention. The signal is clear: this batch is dominated by AI-native and infrastructure-first companies. ▫️ Pally (YC S25) – Personal relationship management with AI insights ▫️ Avelis Health (YC S25) – AI auditing for medical claims ▫️ Motives (YC S25) – Video-based market and user intelligence ▫️ IronGrid – Insurance-backed warranties for battery storage ▫️ Imprezia – Native ad engine for LLMs and chatbots ▫️ Finto – Automated invoice processing with AI agents ▫️ Kernel – Cloud platform for web automation agents ▫️ Nottelabs (YC S25) – Framework for browser-based AI agents ▫️ BootLoop (YC S25) – AI-driven firmware development and debugging ▫️ Convexia (YC S25) – Automated sourcing of early-stage drug candidates ▫️ Closera (YC S25) – AI marketing workflows for real estate ▫️ AgentMail (YC S25) – Email API purpose-built for AI agents ▫️ Alter (YC S25) – Secure gateway connecting AI tools to enterprise data ▫️ Channel3 (YC S25) – API for AI-powered online shopping ▫️ Albacore Inc. (YC S25) – Autonomous underwater vehicles ▫️ Wedge (YC S25) – Compliance and monitoring for AI in healthcare ▫️ Halluminate (YC S25) – Testing and deployment automation for AI apps ▫️ Cactus (YC S25) – Run AI models directly on devices and wearables YC continues to be the strongest early-stage pipeline in the world. 👉 If you were writing checks today, which of these would you back? Image source: Lenny's Newsletter

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