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How the pre-seed round made a comeback in 2024

VC Cafe

Carta reports that 20% of the rounds in 2023 were down rounds, but I believe the actual number is much higher. For that and other reasons (like cash preservation) VCs moved to focus more on earlier stage, and many funds that typically invest in A started deploying more into seed rounds.

Valuation 186
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Lean Startups aren't Cheap Startups

Steve Blank

In times when venture capital is hard to get, investors extract high costs for failure (down-rounds, cram downs , new management teams, shut down the company.) The Customer Development Model is designed to minimize the risk of launching a product for a market that does not exist.

Lean 260
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The Future of Startups 2013-2017

Scalable Startup

In the last five years, there’s been this sort of acknowledgment of the consumerization of the enterprise, which is consumer product development, design methods applied to business software, of which SaaS and cloud and all these things are examples. Alexia Tsotsis: Are you seeing down rounds because the NASDAQ is down?