Seed Round

A seed round is a startup's first substantial round of outside investment. It is raised to turn a working product into early traction and to reach signs of product-market fit, typically following pre-seed capital and preceding a Series A. It's the round where the company transitions from "we're building something" to "we're building something people want," and where the bar for the next round (Series A) gets established.

The 2025 benchmarks (Carta and PitchBook):

Venture Capital

Venture capital (VC) is the asset class of equity investment in early- and growth-stage private companies, organized through 10-year limited partnership funds. Institutional limited partners (pension funds, endowments, sovereign wealth funds, family offices, fund-of-funds) commit capital to general partners (the VC firm itself) who deploy that capital into startups expected to produce power-law returns. It is distinguished from private equity by stage focus (earlier, higher risk, equity rather than leverage) and from angel investing by institutional scale and structure. It is the most-recognized category of [Startup Investment] and the funding model that produced Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Stripe, OpenAI, and most of t...

In 1994, my brain started thinking about my startup 24×7. It hasn’t stopped since. It’s not awesome.

I know the “grind hard” startup narrative is that we should always be thinking about our startup and marry every thought to that commitment. And honestly, I get it. That sounds really committed.

But when does that break? When do we hit a point where our startup is consuming all of our thoughts and emotions and isn’t productive anymore? How do we balance the drive that fuels us with the guilt that prevents us from separating our jobs from our lives?

Why We Can’t Stop

I think a lot about why my brain won’t stop thinking about my startup. I mainly think about that at 3 a.m. when I’m staring at the ceiling trying to tell my stupid startup brain ...

Top 10 SaaS PPC Agencies (2026)

Most agency roundups skip straight to the list. This one doesn't - because for a meaningful number of people reading this on Startups.com, the honest answer is: you're not ready for a dedicated PPC agency yet. And paying one before you're ready is one of the fastest ways to burn budget and lose confidence in the channel.

The good news is the readiness criteria aren't complicated. I've seen the same five failure modes over and over. Not "wrong agency." Pre-conditions not met.

If you clear the framework below, the agency list is for you. If you don't, there's a more honest path forward before you get there.

Are You Ready? The PPC Readiness Framework

Before you shortlist a single agency, work through these six d...

How far off are we from not needing any employees — ever?

I know this sounds a little out there, but maybe not. We're watching a dramatic shift happen, where more and more Founders are replacing all the people they used to hire with AI.

I don't love it. It's weird. I'm used to working with a team, and that has always been one of the best parts of my job: building startups. But for millions of Founders who are just starting out, who don't have the resources to hire an entire team, being able to do the things it used to take a team to do (without one) is awfully appealing!

This isn't an argument for why hiring people is "bad." It's not.

This is an exploration about how much longer we're going to need to hire anyone at all, and what that means...

Every Founder lies about why they are building a startup.

It's not because they are deceptive; I find Founders to be the most vulnerable and honest people I've ever met. It's because they aren't honest with themselves about why they are really building their startups.

When you ask a Founder why they are building, they are inevitably going to give you a stock answer like "I want to change the world!" or "I want to build a huge company!" and, of course, that sounds flowery and wonderful.

But that's not the real answer. The real answer is why are we building anything at all? What is the core purpose within us that drives us so hard to run through walls, empty our bank accounts, and set fire to our personal lives? It's not because we couldn't w...

Keeping control of a startup has nothing to do with owning the majority of it.

You can own 90% of your startup and still have to answer to someone else.

We hear this all of the time from Founders when raising money "I want to make sure I don't dilute too much of my company to investors because I want to maintain control of it."

Ah, the illusion of control.

In our minds, it means that we have enough ownership interest that no one can tell us what to do. We believe we can raise capital and take on outside investors without also having to be driven by them.

As it turns out, we can lose control of our startups in a lot of ways that have nothing to do with owning a majority share.

What is Control, Really?

Let's first define what controlling a co...

A startup's work is never done — and that's a huge problem.

In reasonable parts of life, which startups clearly aren't, your workday starts and ends. You're told to do a job, you do it, and get paid on Friday. The correlation between your work, your progress, and your income is incredibly well understood.

But we don't have reasonable jobs, do we?

In our world, no matter how many times we cross a finish line, it's like we're instantly at the start of the next race, over and over and over. The moment we close a funding round, we're already out raising the next one. The moment we get a single paying customer, we need 100 more. Rinse, repeat.

How do you win a race that never ends?

The "Arrival Fallacy"

The problem starts when we actually believ...

Our happiness is directly proportional to our expectations. So what if we completely botch our expectations for how well our startup should do?

In over 30 years of helping Founders and most certainly in my own journey, I have never, ever heard a Founder give me a set of expectations that seemed perfectly reasonable.

For some reason, we all sprint into this abyss with the most insane expectations of how our startups are supposed to perform with almost zero grounding in either reality or reason.

While that may sound optimistic and exciting, it's also a giant recipe for failure and disappointment. Not because we're not awesome, but because what we assumed success would look like doesn't even remotely resemble reality.

The Snowflake Myth

Of cou...

What actually happens when the Founder runs out of gas and just can't keep going?

Does the startup just... stop?

In a world where we're all facing some level of burnout, we also have to consider what would happen to our startups if we just stopped contributing.

I've coached nearly a thousand Founders and CEOs through this "outta gas" problem, as well as myself, and I can tell you without question — it's never as bad as it sounds!

Burnout is Inevitable

Look, we all get burnt out eventually.

It doesn't matter what kind of superstar athlete you are in your startup, there's only so much of this pace we can endure before we run out of gas. This shit is hard.

The late nights, the nonstop worrying, the constant "if we can just make it past this mi...