Steven Jiang’s Post

When you talk to Pete Tran and Ethan Trang, one thing is clear: their raw talent and ambition as young founders. From a simple idea born out of their personal struggles with learning, to winning at Build Club's pitch competition, we have loved watching their growth. Hear about DoryAI's journey in NextGen Ventures first 'Founder Spotlight' 💡 Full blog in the comments ⤵ #studentfounders #venturecapital #australiauniversities #studentVC

New SAFE benchmarks—share with your favorite fundraising founders. This breaks down one of the more finicky topics founders face while using SAFEs: what should my valuation cap be? We looked at 15,000+ post-money SAFEs signed in 2023 (using post-money here as that's by far the most common SAFE type). All US companies (apologies to international SAFE users). So - what's the biggest factor in deciding on your valuation cap? Turns out, it's the round size that matters most. More than industry, more than location, more than any other exogenous factor (repeat vs first-time founder also very important). If you're raising under $250K, a valuation cap of $20M is incredibly rare. If you're raising more than $5 million, a valuation cap of $20M is downright common. Medians for round size | valuation cap: • Under $250K  |  $5M val cap • $250K-$499K  |  $7M val cap • $500K-$999K  |  $9M val cap • $1M-$2.4M  |  $12M val cap • $2.5M-$4.9M  |  $19M val cap • $5M+  |  $30M val cap A couple things become clear at a glance here: 1. Founders are using SAFEs to raise angel rounds, pre-seed rounds, seed rounds, even what used to be considered Series A rounds. So segmenting this data by round size has only gotten more important over the years     2. Founders who choose to raise SAFEs at multiple valuation caps are considered to have raised multiple SAFE rounds. It's fairly common, but can have significant impacts to founder dilution down the road. I'm not saying don't do it - just don't do it blindly. Love seeing so many founders take advantage of Carta Launch (free cap table until you raise your first million bucks) which comes with SAFE creation tools out of the box! More data like this in our organic, non-GMO, pasture-raised Data Minute newsletter. Delivered weekly to the startup curious, subscribe at the link in graphic. #cartadata #SAFEs #founders  

🎉 Announcement!!! Seed Angel Forum is foregoing our typical quarterly pitch event in June in honor of Techstars Boulder Accelerator’s final Demo Day! CALLING LOCAL INVESTORS! Join us on June 6th for snacks & libations to pregame the final Techstars Boulder Demo Day and celebrate the Colorado startup ecosystem! We’re holding a Seed Angel Forum Reunion for Local Accredited Investors and prior Seed Angel Forum CEO/Founders. Investors: sign up to attend if you are an accredited investor and have made at least three early-stage investments in the last 12 months… and if you want to connect with some great founders and investors! Founders: you can RSVP if you’ve previously pitched at any Seed Angel Forum event over the past ten years. If you’re interested in pitching your company at a future event, please look to our Q3 and Q4 events to apply to pitch. RSVP: https://lu.ma/saf24q2

We almost became investors this week... here's what we learned.   During Finance Week at SpinLab - The HHL Accelerator, we had the unique opportunity to step into the shoes of an investor and look at startup investments from a completely new perspective. This role-playing exercise pushed us to think like those who would invest in our business, helping us see typical pitfalls and how to avoid them. Crafting a financial strategy can be overwhelming, and there are so many things you can do wrong. With tailored mentoring, brainstorming around our specific business model, and a solution sprint to refine our financial strategy, we’re now more prepared than ever. A big shoutout to SpinLab - The HHL Accelerator and the fantastic mentors and coaches Gwendolyn Schröter, Bjoern Bauermeister, CFA, Hendrik Schulze, David Blazek, and Eric Weber for their invaluable insights and challenging questions, which helped us untangle the complexities of finding the best financial strategy for our startup.

Your daily reminder that the correct way to visualize proportion data across categories is with a 100% stacked bar chart (like this one). Many people will try to visualize this with a small multiple pie chart, which is like a form of visualization heresy. #data #dataanalytics #datavisualization #datascience

I understand that SAFEs are "quicker and cheaper." You would think, however, that in deploying $5M the transactions costs of a priced round are low on a percentage basis and that any delay in the deal timetable would likely be driven by due diligence that a $5M investment group would surely want.

Funding Rounds: Sign of progress or pressure to perform? Start-up life is full of ups and downs. But funding rounds are a different game. - Seed funding feels like a victory. - Series A brings high expectations. - Series B puts more pressure than ever. It's a cycle of progress and performance. So, are you ready to tackle it head-on? Share your thoughts below 🩵 #StartUpLife #FundingRounds #PerformancePressure

Just opened our Pre-Seed angel round at Quanted — cheers to that! We’ve had a brilliant early response from the market to our new product during our first 2 months, now its finally time to share the news and share your chance to join in the upside. If you've worked with financial data, you know the pain of spending months evaluating new datasets (I've been there way too many times...). We're fixing that. Quick update if interested: → 𝗢𝗽𝗲𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗼 𝗮𝗻𝗴𝗲𝗹𝘀 𝗳𝗶𝗿𝘀𝘁: We're offering an early-bird for Angels who share our vision, offering a compelling chance for value appreciation when we progress to our VC-led round early next year. To learn more, sign-up for our Demo Day and follow-up Q&A here: https://lnkd.in/dXW2Zush → 🇬🇧 𝗨𝗞 𝗧𝗮𝘅 𝗥𝗲𝘀𝗶𝗱𝗲𝗻𝘁𝘀: We’re pending for SEIS/EIS approval, which means a substantial tax advantage for you. With SEIS you effectively risk 27.5p per £1 invested, whilst EIS is 38.5p per £1. That turns £50K into £13.8K whilst maintaining all of the upside. →🏦 𝗩𝗖𝘀: If you’re excited at the thought of deploying some capital into a market shaping startup, the round will open to you in January. In the meantime, we’d love to introduce ourselves and what we’re building so feel free to schedule some time here for a 1:1. Here’s a few more reasons to be interested in this opportunity: - We’re tapping into a $40B+ market here, and it's only growing. - We have over 20 data vendors ready to integrate with our platform - Our technology can shrink a 100-hour, 6-month data processing marathon down to a mere 30 minutes for vast datasets. - Plus, our advisory board is made up of industry heavyweights from hedge funds and data firms who’ve been pivotal in guiding our strategy. Charlie Simionescu-Marin and I are extremely proud of what we’ve accomplished these last few months and even more excited about where we’re headed — it would be amazing to have your support. If you’re interested, or just want to chat more about the opportunity, don’t hesitate to reach out. Happy to talk anytime. Cheers, David

Despite what you might read in the news, successful founders come from ALL backgrounds, including from different age groups. For example, Sérgio Mascarenhas Oliveira co-founded the med tech company Brain4Care in his eighties, before passing away in his 90s. I was excited about to read about Brilliant Minds, a VC fund that supports early-stage founders over the age of 60, and is also working to shift our perception of who can be a founder. This topic is even more important given advances in healthcare and longevity. If you are in this age group, I hope you consider launching a startup knowing your next act is still to come and may be your greatest yet! https://lnkd.in/dS5nRKJC

As the pitch deck plays a crucial role in attracting investors, we prepared for the founders Mid-Demo Day halfway through the Spring Accelerator 2024. 🚀 During this pitch training session, evaluators provided their expert advice. Representing ZAKA VC team were Ján Kasper, PhD., MBA, PhD., Andrej Petrus, and Natalia Mikusova, while Pašek Peter represented Accace. "Into this batch, we managed to select 36 start-ups from 10 countries. This diversity brought with it a much higher quality of ideas and solutions – something we confirmed during our mid-demo day training. There's still room for start-ups to improve, to work on their pitch decks to capture investor interest. But those we've already seen presenting are on the right track, and of course, we want to continue supporting them further in the program." says Peter. For Mid-Demo Day presentations we selected 8 start-ups to showcase their own pitch decks and receive feedback from advisors. 🗣️ This allowed all founders from the Spring batch to observe various approaches to creating pitch decks and identify elements that potential investors may seek in this document. Special appreciation goes to all the presenting start-ups for their excellent work: 👏 BITERIUM AI 👏 Cerebria Tech 👏 Jusi 👏 Swayme 👏 Pooly 👏 eternity.ac 👏 Flyer's Guard 👏 Progalit #aceon #aceonaccelerator #pitchdeck #training