Blake Robbins

Here's a problem we see all the time in early studios: they copy-paste a VC fund's operating cadence and wonder why nothing feels right. Weekly deal flow reviews. Portfolio monitoring calls. Valuation-focused LP reports. All borrowed wholesale from a fund playbook. But a VC fund's primary activity is deal selection -- source, evaluate, check, board, wait. A studio's primary activity is venture creation -- generate, validate, recruit, build, launch. Those are fundamentally different jobs. When you run a studio like a fund, things break in specific ways: Your meetings are wrong. You're reviewing deal flow instead of venture build progress -- milestones, blockers, resource allocation. The work is building, not sourcing. Your team is wrong. Studios need builders at every level -- operators, designers, engineers. Not just investment professionals. You can't build companies with a team designed to pick them. 📉 Your metrics are wrong. Entry valuations and markups don't tell you anything useful. Cost-to-build-a-venture, time-to-market, and venture survival at 18 months -- those are the numbers that actually measure whether the studio is working. Your LP reporting is wrong. Report operational progress -- what's building, what's launching, what's been killed and why. Not just portfolio movements. Here's the lesson -- the studios that struggle most are the ones that adopted VC templates without modifying them for fundamentally different work. The portfolio companies don't exist until the studio creates them. Not a fund that happens to build things. A builder that happens to have a fund. The operating rhythm should reflect which one is primary. 🎯

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BREAKING: Capital One is acquiring Brex for $5.15B. Yes, that’s less than half of Brex’s $12.3B peak valuation. Cue the hot takes. But zoom out 👇 For early investors, this is a monster win: - Ribbit Capital led Brex’s $7M Series A in 2017 - That bet turned into a ~700x return, even after dilution - YC, Kleiner Perkins, DST, Peter Thiel, Max Levchin? All did very well This is venture capital in its purest form: - You don’t need every round to be “up and to the right” - You need one asymmetric outcome early For late-stage investors, it’s a different story: - Liquidity, yes - But nowhere near the outcome implied by 2021–2022 prices The contrast is brutal when you look at Ramp: - $1B+ ARR - 50,000+ customers - $32B valuation (on paper) Same market. Very different trajectories. Brex’s pivot to enterprise, its EU banking license, and ~$13B in deposits made it strategically attractive to Capital One — especially as banks race to modernize their fintech stacks. Congrats to the Brex founders and team! Such a fantastic run!

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The hardest thing in VC isn't finding the next big thing. It's saying no to a founder. I was a founder once. I know what it's like to pour your whole life into a company until it becomes the very extension of who you are. Sadly, the no is inevitable in our line of work. But over the years I've learned how to be less bad at it: 1. "No" is not the cruelest word in venture. "Maybe" is. The slow fade. The "let's touch base in 6 months." These aren't kindness. They're just a way of keeping optionality at the founder's expense. Yes, sometimes an opportunity is genuinely too early. But you know the difference. If you know it's a no, say it. 2. Don't hide behind abstractions. A famous investor once counseled founders: "Believe the no and not the why." Investors usually don't want to open a Pandora's box of heated back-and-forth with founders, so they take refuge in vague cover: "it's too early," "we don't have enough experience in this space," "the market's not big enough," or the classic "it's just not a good fit for us." I've used every one of those. Now when I pass, I try to be direct about why I don't have conviction. But I'm also aware that in saying no, I may be describing the limits of my own imagination. So I explicitly say: this is my read...it's based on incomplete information and a highly subjective point of view. I may well be wrong in my assessment. 3. You're not saying no to a pitch deck. You're saying no to someone who probably hasn't slept in months. I'll be honest, there were times I'd glance at my phone during a pitch or quickly check email during a pitch. Not because I'd lost interest, but because something felt urgent and I was already juggling 100 things. It took me too long to understand that when an investor checks their phone, the only message a founder hears is: "this is not that interesting." I accepted the meeting. They've been at this for months or years. The least I can do is be fully there for an hour. 4. Founders remember how you made them feel. Forever. The company you pass on today may be run by someone who pivots and builds something extraordinary tomorrow. Or who becomes a founder you want to back in five years. Or who tells every other founder in their network exactly what kind of person you are. As in every other facet of life, reputation takes a lifetime to build and a minute to destroy. 5. If you're passing, try to be useful. Introduce them to an investor whose thesis actually fits or a corporate partner they've been trying to connect with. It costs you ten minutes. It saves them months. In summary, there is no way to make rejection painless, whether in one's personal or professional realms (startups are both and that makes it doubly bad). But there is a way to make it honest and dignified. To every founder I've said no to: I tried to do it right but I know I didn't always succeed. I also know some of you will prove me wrong and I genuinely look forward to that.

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Yesterday, Airtree announced a new $650m set of funds. But what does this actually mean for founders? Jackie and I joined Sachin and Adam to unpack all the details. Links are in the comments but the TLDR is that we've sized and structured it to provide world class capital (both in terms of size and services) to the best Aussie and Kiwi founders from pre-product onwards. We'd love your feedback. And, if you're the type of founder we describe, DMs are open!

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30+ VCs Backing Marketplace Startups Below is a cross-stage, cross-sector mix of firms that back marketplace and platform companies early and support them as they grow. Consumer and platform investors Upfront Ventures 1752vc (Formerly Pegasus) BAM Ventures Forerunner Brand Foundry Ventures Maveron BoxGroup Greycroft Alumni Ventures Marketplace natives and network effects specialists FJ Labs NFX Great Oaks Venture Capital RiverPark Ventures Left Lane Capital First Round Capital Lerer Hippeau Precursor Ventures Seed partners building two-sided platforms early Founder Collective NextView Ventures Uncork Capital Slow Ventures Bling Capital Gaingels Initialized Capital Felicis Multi-stage firms backing marketplace winners at scale Accel Bessemer Venture Partners Lightspeed General Catalyst New Enterprise Associates (NEA) Kleiner Perkins Bain Capital Ventures (BCV) Founders Fund

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Seed fundraising hasn’t gotten easier. After reviewing thousands of early-stage companies, one pattern is obvious: most founders don’t fail at seed fundraising because their idea is weak — they fail because they misunderstand how seed rounds actually get done. 👉 That’s why we put together the LvlUp Ventures Guide to Seed Fundraising. It’s not a hype piece. It’s the exact mental model we see strong founders use when they raise efficiently and get back to building. Some of the core takeaways: 🔹 Raise when you have momentum you can explain, not just a polished deck 🔹 Size your round to buy 12–18 months of real progress — not optionality theater 🔹 SAFEs and notes are tools, not shortcuts; understand how they compound dilution 🔹 One committed investor changes everything — momentum beats perfection 🔹 Speed and clarity matter more than squeezing every last point of valuation 🔹 The goal isn’t “winning the round” — it’s setting up the next phase of the company This is the guide we wish more founders read before starting outreach — not halfway through a messy raise. 👇 Question for founders raising right now: What’s been hardest for you — getting in touch with investors, structuring the round, or keeping momentum once conversations start? 👇Want the Full LvlUp Ventures Guide to Seed Fundraising? 👍 Like this Post 💬 Comment “Fundraising” ✅ I’ll DM you the guide and share next steps to get reviewed by LvlUp’s Investment Committee and our 25+ VC partners. #Fundraising #VC #Startup #Seed #EarlyStage #VentureCapital #StartupFounders #Founders #RaisingCapital #Startups #SaaS #Tech #CPG #B2B #Entrepreneurship #BuildInPublic #FundraisingTips #VCInsights

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This post is absolutely true. But the problem is many VCs won’t tell you their exit time frame at the pitch meeting or even know it themselves.

Zynga sold for $12.7 billion. Its founder says startups fail due to this: They try to innovate too early (unless its deep tech). Mark Pincus calls it the “All new fails” rule: 1/ Don’t start with “new”: Start with what’s already proven to work. Copy it legally, study it deeply. 2/ Proven means 10 out of 10 users say: “Yeah, that works.” If they don’t, it’s not proven. 3/ Founders fail because they skip the proven phase: They chase novelty before they’ve earned the right to innovate. 4/ The Zynga story began with poker: Same table, same felt, same gameplay, nothing original. 5/ Then they made it better: No downloads. Just click and play. Friction cut in half. 6/ “Better” means 10 out of 10 users agree: Not your team, not your investors, real users. 7/ Only after proven and better do you earn “new”: That spark that surprises and delights users emotionally. 8/ Zynga’s “new” was showing your friends’ faces: It made games social, not solitary. 9/ Forget MVP, build a minimum viable idea: A concept that hits emotional resonance before metrics. 10/ Seek true signal: You’ll feel it viscerally before you can measure it. 11/ Silicon Valley worships originality: But originality without resonance is noise. 12/ Better founders are great students first: They copy what works before they try to change it. 13/ Most products die from founder ego: They’re “new” before they’re useful. 14/ Users don’t care about novelty: They care about ease, trust, and delight. 15/ “Proven → Better → New just works. And it built a $12.7B company. 📩 Get ai + vc intel in your inbox via my newsletter Startup Riders, link under my name ☝️ 📌 Source: Mark Pincus on Why Most Startups Fail a16z #ai #llms #agent #startups #founder #vc

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40%+ of Seed and Series A funding in 2026 is flowing into $100M+ rounds, as Zachary DeWitt recently highlighted. The market is making a big bet on mega rounds. I'm taking the under on their performance--I'd bet heavily on an index of regular-sized seeds vs the megas.   Here's what I think is happening. Ambitious founders surrounded by AI hype see Anthropic's and OpenAI's returns and think they need to do something similar. In their minds, this means raising huge rounds to fund NBA-level salaries for the most legible AI talent at Meta, Google, other AI labs, etc.   The problem is that this approach is fundamentally derivative. This is not how Anthropic, OpenAI, or any of the other most disruptive AI companies started. Disruption requires doing something that experts dismiss. If a startup requires raising mountains of cash to hire legions of expensive experts, it might have some degree of success, but it will not be disruptive.   Look, this is tricky. Anthropic raised giant early rounds and seems very mission-oriented, so I don't want to paint with too broad a brush here. That said, Anthropic's $124m Series A in 2021 was actually very unconventional in many respects, even in the context of a frothy 2021.   Besides being derivative (and thus not disruptive), this approach also selects for mercenary over missionary culture. And all things being equal, companies with missionary culture outperform. Because if you really care about solving a problem, you're willing to make sacrifices and do non-consensus things—not just copy what worked for the last wave.   So, why does this pattern persist despite these concerns?   The most economically dominant point is that the investors doing the big rounds make a lot of money on management fees. When partners at funds enjoy massive compensation from management fees, investment performance becomes a "nice-to-have."   To be fair, many of these partners are post-economic and are arguably more interested in hiring huge teams and building "platforms." The fees justified by mega rounds align nicely with the expense structure of empire-building. On the other hand, the smaller rounds are done by firms where the principals are making much less on management fees and have much more incentive to see a return on the capital via carry.   The mega firms would surely retort that many of the smaller rounds are done by firms that are here today, gone tomorrow. And there's truth to that. Mega firms with billions of assets are inherently more stable. At the same time, those firms are fundamentally targeting much lower returns. It's trade-offs all the way down.   So when I look at that 40%+ number, I see capital flowing into a pattern that selects for derivative thinking and mercenary culture, with an underlying incentive structure that ensures it keeps happening.   And that's why I'm taking the under on the performance of that 40%.

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Founders often scramble to prep materials *after* a VC shows interest. That’s backward. You should be ready for diligence before your first meeting with a VC. Smart founders: 🗂 Have their data room ready 📊 Can share a clear KPI dashboard if asked 💸 Keep clean, up-to-date financials 📣 Track and communicate metrics Flailing around getting your files in order can erode investor trust. Put in the work ahead of time and it will build confidence in you and your company. #FundraisingAdvice #StartupTips #RSCMFounderFriday

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