TLDR Founders 2025-12-01

Startups on Carta raised the highest amount of funding in three years — up 48% over 2023. The latest State of Private Markets report analyzes this and other trends in the venture capital industry.

Read the report to learn why:

• Early-stage valuations are rising
• Down rounds are growing less frequent
• The Bay Area still reigns supreme

Although most of the market is raising at steady levels, a few mega-checks, sometimes reaching billions of dollars, are influencing Q3 totals and valuation benchmarks.

Read the full findings and analysis

Supabase, valued at $5 billion, raised $100 million after previously raising $200 million at a $2 billion valuation. Its CEO, Paul Copplestone, prioritizes sticking to a product vision over accepting demanding enterprise contracts.

Boutique Seed funds continue to lead the majority of sub-$10M rounds, despite mega-funds increasingly entering earlier-stage investments. Series A activity clusters around $20M, but competition intensifies above that level, with mega-funds taking a dominant role in rounds above $50M. This shift in dynamics compels investors to differentiate by emphasizing talent and innovation, as traditional stage boundaries blur and AI drives significant opportunity for reinvention.

Engineers assume all salespeople are incompetent. They think about scalability, speed, and reliability, but not money so much. Focus on how your product will save time and reduce effort. Don't be too loud, don't agitate them, and let them come to you.

There are a lot of accounting mistakes that can make benchmarking an apples-to-oranges comparison. Your accounting needs to be clean, or your leaders and board won't trust you. This post discusses the most common accounting mistakes. Don't wait until you are deep in M&A diligence or prepping for an IPO before correcting these mistakes, or it may materially impact metrics.

Peter Thiel recruited the founders of YouTube, LinkedIn, Yelp, and Affirm before any of them started those companies. When asked what he looks for in undiscovered talent, he said he wants people who are both stubborn and open-minded.

Scaling a team across borders? Justworks lets you pay US employees and international contractors in 60+ countries from a single dashboard - no tool-juggling required. Pay in local currency or USD, with 24/7 support when you need it. Sign up for any plan now and add on international contractors for free until 2027. Get started with Justworks.

Trae is an AI IDE that collaborates like a real engineer. It plans, codes, and orchestrates your full development workflow to help you ship faster.

Turn any creative concept into an interactive, fully functional app with Replit.

Voice-powered email tool that drafts replies in your style using context-aware AI, saving time by turning spoken input into perfectly formatted messages.

We often mistake perfectionism for "high standards," but it is usually just procrastination wearing a tuxedo. The obsession with flawlessness prevents you from finishing. In creative work, completion is the only currency that matters. The most successful builders shift their goal from being "perfect" to being "prolific." You are not sculpting stone, you are planting a garden. The only way to get quality is to force yourself to ship quantity.

Airtable recently acquired DeepSky just four months after launch. The speed of the deal signals a shift in what enterprises value in AI. While most startups compete on the "execution layer" (writing text or code faster), DeepSky focused on the "judgment layer" - the messy research and reasoning that happens before a decision is made. Instead of instantly answering a prompt, the system pauses to plan, runs parallel research threads, and synthesizes findings into business memos. Airtable owns the workflow. By acquiring DeepSky, it now owns the thinking that feeds it.

The current AI gold rush is built on a dangerous gamble: trading "996" work weeks (9 am to 9 pm, 6 days a week) for a future lottery ticket. While VCs risk borrowed money, employees risk borrowed time - an asset that cannot be refunded. When the bubble inevitably bursts, many will face the "9-9-6-0" outcome: years of sacrifice that yielded zero dollars.

The "garage startup" is a Silicon Valley cliché, but the psychology behind it is real.

Your brain evolved to seek information for survival, but the modern world hijacks this instinct with high-calorie, low-nutrient "junk food" like 24-hour news and social outrage.

Effectively selling requires active effort and understanding customer behavior, often through simple tactics that are underestimated.

VC due diligence involves evaluating a startup's founding team, market opportunity, financials, legal structure, and product.