Sara Du

Y Combinator just dropped their Request for Startups for Fall 2025 💥 It’s a blueprint of what YC wants to fund right now. The ideas they believe could become billion dollar companies. Some are no-brainers. Others are wild 👇

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New!! "The Bay Area Has 54% of All SaaS Funding. Everyone Else Isn’t Even Close" Based on Carta’s latest startup funding data (Q2 2024-Q1 2025), here are the Top 5 SaaS Learnings that every founder needs to know: #1: The Bay Area Still Owns B2B and SaaS (And It’s Not Even Close) The Bay Area dominates SaaS funding with 54.2% of all capital — that’s more than 5x the next... Continue Reading

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🚨 Founders: If you're not exploring cross-industry alliances, you're playing the wrong game. Some of the biggest breakout companies didn’t scale by outspending the competition they scaled by out-partnering them. 🚀 Think Figma embedding into dev workflows. 🚀 Calendly riding the rails of Zoom and Salesforce. 🚀 Zapier integrating with Trello and Slack before raising big money. 💡 The playbook? Fuse your solution with another industry's infrastructure and unlock distribution, data, or demand without burning capital. Cross-industry alliances do 3 things: 1. Collapse time by borrowing someone else’s audience. 2. Unlock non-obvious use cases that give you strategic moats. 3. Increase your valuation before the first funding conversation. If you're a startup founder and you’re stuck thinking, “We need capital to grow,” you’re asking the wrong question. Ask instead: 👉 “Who’s already serving my customer in a different way and how do we win together?” That’s how exponential growth actually happens. 💬 Founders: Which alliance would double your reach in 90 days? #Startups #GrowthStrategy #VC #EarlyStage #FounderTips #Platform #AI

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The first Vanta Frameworks for Growth interview just launched! Garry Tan from Y Combinator and I talked through lots of things, including: •  founders, how they've changed, and what YC looks for today •  vibe coding •  tractor sales in Iowa •  the age of AI, and how that's accelerating startups •  a mission to create more billionaires •  where he'd channel his intensity if he were just starting out today I'm excited for this one. Please let me know what you think!

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Fundraising isn't dating. It's a sales funnel. And most founders don't track it, so 3 months go by while they're still "in conversations." Here's the brutal math (seed round, current selectivity): 100-200 investor outreaches → 15-20% reply rate → 15-30 first meetings → 5-10 partner meetings → 1-3 term sheets → 1 close If you're not tracking conversion at each stage, you're not fundraising. You're hoping. Founders who close faster don't have better luck. They have better systems: 1. They track the funnel weekly Where are leads dying? Outreach, first meeting, partner meeting? Each bottleneck has a different fix. 2. They iterate the narrative Every week: one sharper answer to the question that killed the last meeting. 3. They batch meetings 10 meetings in 2 weeks beats 10 meetings over 2 months. Compression creates urgency. Urgency creates leverage. 4. They treat "no" as data A fast no is worth more than a slow maybe. It frees you to find the real yes. If your fundraise feels stuck, stop asking "Who else can I talk to?" Start asking "Where is my funnel breaking?" I stress-test fundraising packages for founders. Deck, model, cap table, assumptions. You get a written findings memo and a 90-minute call showing you what breaks before investors do. Link in comments. #fundraising #seedstage #venturecapital #startups

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We’re thrilled to share that Usul (YC S24) has raised $3.3M in Seed funding led by Scout Ventures with participation from BVVC, Teamworthy Ventures, True Ventures, Y Combinator and more. Usul is the modern platform for defense contract capture and federal growth. Our customers have won hundreds of millions in defense contracts for capabilities across Air, Land, Maritime, AI/ML and more. When Oliver Gomez, Joonghyun Lee and I joined forces during Stanford’s Hacking 4 Defense class, we interviewed 300+ defense companies to intimately understand how difficult it is for national security solutions to get deployed quickly at scale. In normal capital markets this is called dead weight loss. In warfighting, this costs lives. We're building an elite team of hackers and defense enthusiasts in San Francisco. If you’re interested in powering the next 1000 defense primes, email us at founders@usul.com or dm me. Read more about our journey in Erin O'Brien's Tectonic article below in the comments. Lastly, thank you to our amazing cap table for joining the ship. Bradley C. Harrison, Cody H., Nate George, Zach Beecher, Michael Keane, Joe Musselman, Gene Ebersole, Nick Nowlin, Thomas Lehrman, Stephen Schmalhofer, Michael Montano, Gustaf Alströmer 🇺🇦, Jared Friedman, Steve Blank, Jacqueline Tame, Jack Shanahan, Peter Newell, Steve Weinstein, Jeff Decker, Ivan Kirigin, Jeff Heitzman, Keith W. Gibson, CFCM, SCPM, John Tincoff, Michael Malis, Austen Allred, Tom Hsieh, Donald Donckers

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