The funding gap at the early stage is real, pre-seed and seed are left wide open, as you can read in Flavio Lobato’s article: “The VC unicorn obsession is creating an early stage funding wasteland” both angel and seed round activity has been on target for their lowest year since 2014.

Having VCs moving to later stage doesn’t only pose a funding problem but early-stage tech entrepreneurs are left high and dry when it comes to mentorship and true assistance as explained by John Vrionis in his article: “Venture Capital Is Losing Sight Of Its Most Important Investments: Seed-Stage Entrepreneurs.”

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The basic of a new startup is to do something disruptive that very few people can see as viable or even feasible. You are here to disrupt the status quo, so what seems an obvious opportunity for you, won’t be for the rest of us. That’s why fundraising at early stages is so hard. You have no metrics to backup your vision, barely a viable product and a nascent team. So getting rejected is normal, all you need is to find someone who understands and believes in your vision, not only that but also believes your team is the one…

Recently, we have seen too many startups putting their existence at risk or destroying their value simply because the founder sees him/herself as a CEO for the lifespan of the company.

As a startup grows, managerial challenges become different. They evolve from vision+product to vision+product+team to vision+product+team+finance.

Founders end up spending most of their time managing PnL, relation with investors, forecasting revenues and dealing with large clients.

Most of them never studied those skills, most of them dislike those activities and more importantly most of them are not good at it.

Because they see the founder as the leader since…

We always tend to say valuation is a vanity metric.

While the right metric is in fact an equation: Amount of cash + Valuation + Investor smartness + Terms

When fundraising entrepreneurs tend to forget two things:

1) Roughly 90% of startups fail

2) As an individual, there is little difference in your life, if your net worth is $20m or $40 or $100m.

But there is a massive difference between having $0 or $20m+

So your only objective as a founder is to ensure your startup sustainability. The best way to achieve this is to surround yourself with talented…

Startup’s profitability is a growing discussion these days. It’s a recurring topic that gets more discussed when financial people feel we are at the end of a bullish cycle, and that feeling is here.

Profitable startups have inevitably a higher survival rate during downturns, check 2000–1 or 2008–9.

Now, should your startup aim for profitability? which often means growing slower.

I think there are 2 key criteria to take into account

1) Am I on a “winner takes all” market? or can 2–3–4 competitors coexist in this market. …