Xavier Jameson

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

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2009: The financial crisis had crushed fundraising. Barely any new capital went into venture funds. Yet the vintages from those years went on to deliver some of the strongest returns in history. Fast forward to today (2024/2025): Venture capital fundraising is at its lowest point in more than a decade. What does that mean? - ⁠Less money will be available to startups over the next years - The bar for raising capital goes up again: quality matters - ⁠Entry valuations will reset to saner levels --> Funds raised now are likely to outperform, just as history shows The paradox of venture: the best time to commit capital is exactly when most people hesitate. Investors (Limited Partners) should lean in now, not when the next boom makes it easy.

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I met a YC founder who raised $3.5M, but kept the team to 3 people. He took 2 years to launch— then grew 10x to $2M ARR in a year: Benji built an end-to-end recruiting platform with just 3 people. Today, he raised a $50M Series D. Since 2022, he grew Ashby from 70 to 220 employees—and 2,700 customers. He hit $200K ARR the year he launched— then 10x’d to $2M ARR the year after. I asked Benji why it his end-to-end solution worked when so many “one stop shops for X” fail: 1. There were big unsolved pain points. 2. Existing vendors were small companies.  3. It was possible to build a bundle of best-in-class products. “If you can give people 1 product that works better than 4 products without losing functionality…people will be happy to use that.” It sounds too easy— and it is. Benji was a Director of Engineering, where he spent 90% of his time hiring— he experienced the problem first-hand. He thought about his idea for 18 months before going all-in. He had 100 conversations with potential customers before he started building. He graduated YC, raised $3.5M, but didn’t hire anyone. He kept his runway long. It wasn’t just turning 4 products into 1. Benji understood the pain point, the customers, and the space. He succeeded for the same reason most startups do: He put in the the work— the unsexy, everyday work. The work behind the scenes. The work that doesn’t make headlines. The work you never see. /// Listen to the full episode with Benjamin Encz on The Product Market Fit Show #startups #venturecapital #founders

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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

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