Remove Hiring Remove Marketing Remove Pre-Money Valuation Remove Seed Money
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How to Start a Startup

www.paulgraham.com

The market price is less than the inconvenience of signing an NDA. Microsofts originalplan was to make money selling programming languages, of all things.Their current business model didnt occur to them until IBM droppedit in their lap five years later. The best odds are in niche markets. People What do I mean by good people?

Startup 105
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Why the New Seed Might Be a Bad Seed

This is going to be BIG.

So whereas seed rounds five years ago may have been less than a million dollars on a pre-money valuation of three or four million, today''s seed is up and over a million and usually closer to two million, with post money valuations nearing $10 million. in seed money instead of $1.5M

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How to Fund a Startup

www.paulgraham.com

It wasnt because they werent accredited investors that I didntask my parents for seed money, though. When we were starting Viaweb,I didnt know about the concept of an accredited investor, anddidnt stop to think about the value of investors connections.The reason I didnt take money from my parents was that I didntwant them to lose it.

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To Follow On or Not to Follow On

This is going to be BIG.

The one thing that does effect them all is the cyclicality of funding and exit markets, but if you go back over the last 20 years, there's really only been a very short timeframe where you literally could not get a company funded. If you're doing seed deals, how often does a down round in a seed deal even happen? Down from what?