Founders are responsible for the first sales a startup will make. For many founders, this is one of their very first experiences of sales and mistakes are often made.

While there are many factors that influence seed fundraising, your behavior during the process makes a big difference. Here’s the most common traits of founders who successfully close their seed round.

After you’ve committed to an idea for your startup, get feedback from potential customers as soon as possible. Insights from your first potential customers help direct product strategy, increasing your likelihood of making a sale.

YC’s next batch deadline is coming up. Should you apply? The answer is YES.

Getting a potential customer interested in learning more about your product is hard enough, but unfortunately early interest from a lead is a long way from a sale. Here’s how to take the process further and convert your first leads into real, paying customers.

Receiving a Term Sheet from a VC usually takes weeks of work and is often accompanied by understandable euphoria. However, signing a Term Sheet for a “priced round” is a much larger commitment than for a SAFE/Convertible Note. Thus, you need to ensure you follow the right steps to secure the best deal for your company. Here’s what you should do after receiving a Term Sheet.

Bad investors can do untold damage to a company and they only show themselves at the worst times. It’s hard to know in advance how an investor will behave in tough situations, so it’s best to protect your company by ensuring you have the right terms.

Selling tech products in Europe is harder than most people think. But the US? Much easier. Here’s why.

Fundraising has few guidelines and you won’t get feedback from most investors who pass. You will have more success and spend less time fundraising if you avoid the familiar pitfalls. Here are 3 of the most common mistakes and how to avoid them.

Seed fundraising places founders under significant pressure from a constant rush to close, to the slew of investor questions to secure their commitments.

Investors don’t like saying “No” to your face as a founder, even if there is zero chance they will invest. This creates difficult situations for founders while fundraising, which can be catastrophic for your round. Here are some of the most common scenarios and what to expect.

Huge progress this week in AI with outlier performance results from the latest Grok models and Perplexity launching Comet, the first credible competitor in the browser space for years. But all this progress is not without cost, as it's clear some companies are focused on speed versus safety.

If you’re in College or Graduate School and thinking about starting a company, then the summer is usually a perfect time to give it a try. Let everyone else sip wine in the Mediterranean, you have a company to build.

A lot of fundraising rounds fall apart during closing. Most of these collapses can be avoided by correctly handling investor communication after they verbally commit to invest. Here are the steps to make sure every yes becomes a check.

Interview projects are take home tests for job candidates. They demonstrate a candidate can help solve your company’s near term need, in addition to the culture and interpersonal skills reflected through in-person and phone interviews.

Raising your seed round is a big milestone for a startup, as it gives you runway for 2 years to scale both your team and customers into a rapidly growing and sustainable business.

Many early stage founders go after big partnerships as they appear to be a silver bullet for growth, through increasing distribution and revenue. Even when partnerships do happen, they rarely work out well for the startup as they absorb so much time. However, here are some situations where a partnership can be great for your startup.

It’s hard to fire an employee at your startup. The long hours, stress and shared victories create close relationships among team members. However, you can’t let your judgment be clouded if a team member isn’t performing. Here’s how and why you terminate bad hires fast.

There are now dozens of powerful AI tools that will help you create images, videos and text in ways that were not possible, even just a few months ago. However, the incredible opportunity these tools offer inevitably means abuse too.

Lots of fast growing startups start to struggle as they scale. The reason? Not enough people.

After 12 long years of trying, Meta has finally found its hardware platform: glasses. From the beginning of the smartphone era, Meta knew that building their customer’s hardware was the best way to ensure their software, and ads, can be used exactly as Meta intends.

If you don’t ask for help when you launch, you’re leaving a lot on the table. Here’s what to ask for:

This week's Apple Developer Conference was a chance for the tech juggernaut to turn the page on its disastrous approach to AI.

A great fundraise doesn’t make you fundable forever. Fortunes can rapidly change at a startup, so here's how to be prepared for a potentially tougher round next time.

This week brought some tough news for those concerned with privacy. OpenAI is under a court order to preserve its logs including deleted chats, meanwhile Reddit is suing Anthropic for continuing to access its data, despite being forbidden.

A core rule of startup fundraising: the CEO has to lead it. From time to time, I encounter teams where the CEO is not doing the fundraising, and this is a mistake.

Startups are hard, but you don’t need to deliberately suffer to succeed.

If you’re building a consumer company or a B2B SaaS company then the expectations have changed massively since the dawn of mainstream AI. Fast traction is no longer optional.

Meet Pankhuri Dudani, Co-Founder of Openhelix and a recipient of the Sterling Road Grant. A clinical dermatologist by background, Pankhuri is tackling one of the biggest gaps in healthcare—the broken communication between pharma companies and medical professionals.

Almost 14 years ago, my co-founders and I were accepted into the Y-Combinator program; since then, it’s had a profound impact on my career.

Most founders love shipping new features, the feeling is intoxicating. But that doesn't mean it's guaranteed progress.

Most adults have an ongoing medical condition, minor or otherwise. As a fellow sufferer, no matter how much money I spend on medical care, the actual time a doctor spends on my case is pretty minimal. In the US, you'll usually spend more time with support staff than physicians.

When I encounter teams from Europe that are visiting the Bay Area, there are some common patterns which will deter most investors based here in San Francisco.

For decades American Universities have been the envy of the World. With the brightest minds and the best facilities, these globally recognized institutions acted as a magnet for talent everywhere.

I meet a lot of talented founders who, frankly, need to work on more difficult problems. As a general rule, your idea should be to build something 10x better than what’s currently out there. Here’s why.

Meet Arya Kakodkar and Imaad Bukhari, the co-founders of OmniPlane and recipients of the Sterling Road Grant. They’re building a stylus pen that works on any surface for AR and VR headsets, a tool designed to make writing and drawing possible on any surface.

Some companies are like catnip for investors, be it traction, founders, or customers, there are plenty of fundraising rounds each year where demand vastly outstrips supply.

I owe a lot of people a sincere apology. For almost a decade as an investor, I have told just about everybody who couldn't, to 'learn to code'. It was the gateway to startup freedom.

If you’re building a company taking on a hard science problem, there is a tendency to avoid near term deadlines, as your larger milestones are too far away. This is a mistake, here’s why.

This week’s government news was dominated by Signalgate. All kinds of theories have been floated about how it occurred, who is responsible, and if the messages were really secret.

I meet a lot of great scientists who are trying to turn their research into a real business. However, there are some early decisions those founders often make which can really hurt later.

There’s a lot of talk about engineer salaries in the current AI boom, with many founders understandably hesitant to pay huge salaries to their early employees.

Over the last 12 months, we have seen an uptick in founders quitting on their startup pretty early in the building process. Here’s the main causes of those shutdowns.

I meet lots of founders who are trying to build a Superhuman. They dream of creating the perfect lawyer, accountant or driver; a completely infallible robot only capable of taking the most optimal actions.

I am always pushing founders in Europe to move to San Francisco. Just like if you want to be an A-List Actor, you should probably be in LA, if you want to be the best founder you can be, SF is the place.

I started using Gmail ~20 years ago, back then it was a huge leap forward over Yahoo and Hotmail. Google gave you tons of space, and the speed was impressive. But 2 decades later, you can still only sort your inbox by time received.

You have to be incredibly resilient to build a company from idea to IPO. Almost everyone who has made it will tell you there were many times when their company almost shut down.

Large Geopolitical changes this week caused politics to enter many tech world discussions and the most obvious change has been in Europe. But is Europe now too weak to compete on its own?

When you get a term sheet from a VC, it’s usually a pretty happy moment after a lot of work. However, there’s often a few things in the first version of a VC’s term sheet that you might want to change.

Most founders feel that getting the highest possible valuation is the right goal for a fundraising round and that is mostly correct. However, there are some scenarios where taking a lower valuation may make sense.

Many early-stage founders are hesitant to charge a 6 figure amount, but if you’re selling to Enterprise customers, $100k a year is the minimum price.

Lots of founders want their first sales to be with large, Enterprise companies like Google or Uber. This is usually quite tough, and it’s often a lot easier to begin with the mid-market and then move up to Enterprise sales.

I know lots of people love TikTok, both for spending time and generating revenue, but this app is a tool for the Chinese Communist Party. Make no mistake, Congress was right to ban it and Trump was right, in his first term, when he wanted the same.

Every founder wants to make rapid progress and a big part of that is setting ambitious goals.

When you pitch your company, regardless of the situation, it’s always worth being enthusiastic. Even if public speaking isn’t your strength, you will need to sound excited.

When you take a multi-million dollar check from a VC, they’re really only looking for 1 of 2 outcomes. This can cause some very strange behavior in the future.

This week Google announced it’s made a major breakthrough in quantum computing. We’re still years away from this tech being used in everyday life, but Google now has a huge advantage in hardware.

AI has been the tech megatrend for a couple of years now but I think it would still be fair to say that while it’s on everyone’s mind in the technology sector, most of the tools are still a long way from mainstream usage.

The European economies are stalling. EU GDP is mostly flat over the last 6 years as the rest of the world continues to grow. But this is not a talent problem. Europe and the UK are home to some of the best educational institutions on the Planet and they are producing incredible founders.

Founders often complain that it’s unfair to ask a team at the pre-seed stage to have a tech advantage, as they’ve had no time to build.

Customer discovery is a grind. It’s not intellectually challenging, but it will test your motivation, as getting dozens, if not hundreds, of calls with potential customers is a lot of work.

There’s a lot of different approaches to pricing, but I suggest you keep it very simple and offer your customers fixed pricing.

A lot of founders start to ignore distribution and after they get a few interested leads. This is a mistake.

There are lots of important issues at stake in this election with both left and right claiming it's the most important of our lives and we simply must vote for them to save the country as we know it.

Even if your company is doing really well, you may still struggle to raise all the money you’d like. If that’s your situation, it’s usually best to stop fundraising completely and not continue conversations at a slower pace.

Distribution is hard and it’s especially tough early on, when you’re trying to get your first customer discovery calls. Most founders will need to go outside of their comfort zone and develop new skills in order to solve this problem.

This week we saw what seemed like science fiction as SpaceX’s Starship rocket took off and then was successfully “caught” back on the launchpad.

Although the CEO does most of the public messaging work for a company, all founders should be able to tell the story. Here’s why.

A lot of Sterling Road founders ask me how to make the most of a conference they’re attending. Here’s the basics.

It’s easy to dump on Google these days. Despite an enormous data and resource advantage, they’re being handily beaten in the era of large language models by startups with much smaller teams

When you get a new investor and you’re still fundraising, you’ll want to ask your new investor for intros to other investors in their network

After Demo Day, there’s an investor reception with lots of investors and other founders. This is a great opportunity to generate potential investor leads. Here’s how to maximize your contacts at the reception.

When you think you’re close to getting a term sheet or you have a VC who says one is imminent, it’s very tempting to stop meeting with smaller checks and wait for the term sheet. I would not do that.

Big Tech is hungry and legacy markets are an easy target. Now the FDA has partially approved Apple’s AirPods as hearing aids, we’re going to see massive changes in the $8B global market for these devices.

t’s YC demo day in 2 weeks and fundraising around the Summer 24 batch is already at fever pitch. Many founders are experiencing a lot of demand and it’s tempting to raise a bunch of money from lots of small checks. I’m biased, but if you are lucky enough to have plenty of interest, I suggest you engage those with deep pockets.

This has been a tough year for many startups that were king of their hill just a few years ago. The fundraising and acquisition situations we are seeing are incredibly stressful for founders, to say the very least.

If you’ve built a community, it’s not always immediately clear how you will make money.

A month of mixed news for the US economy. Most of us will be excited to see inflation dip under 3%, a 12 month low, and a strong indicator of near term interest rate cuts, especially with unemployment now up to 4.1%.

Getting great references is a big part of the hiring process and whenever you need to provide a reference, make sure that person is armed with your top talking points.

Meet Tim Issenmann, Founder of Newgrain and a Sterling Road Grant winner. Tim’s passion for analog photography led him to create a platform that provides an escape from the noise of traditional social media.

Here’s another way to make job offers to candidates. In this case, you start as high as you can and remove most of the negotiation.

Many founders’ first idea is a minor user experience improvement on a popular consumer app. They often fail quickly. Maybe the next generation of food delivery or college events is your destiny, but probably not. Instead, dream bigger.

Now that you’ve decided to make a candidate an offer, what should that offer be? Should you focus on equity or salary? What about their needs? It’s almost impossible to know what will make the candidate most excited, so I suggest making 3 offers.

Don’t agree to meetings you don’t want to attend. Instead, provide a polite no and move on, without creating a negative impression on someone else.

Finding someone great for your open role is incredibly hard, so when you finally find someone that meets that high bar, get them an offer before they leave the interview.

I always recommend allocating more than the standard 10% for your employee stock option pool. 15% is a good starting point.

I often see founders hesitate when employees ask for a larger equity stake in their startup. However, I would urge most founders to be generous with equity.

In our Founder Spotlight this month, we’re highlighting Mehdi Boudjadja, Ph.D., Co-Founder of Metofico, which provides data analysis tools for scientists. Metofico, created from Mehdi’s needs as a neuroscientist and developed with his brother, Salah Boudjadja, a software engineer, and it’s already become a valuable platform for scientists.

Today, we’re spotlighting Sterling Road grant winner Diana Canghizer. Her goal is to improve patient-doctor communication with a focus on gynecological and hormonal health.

When interviewing someone onsite, candidates often meet with several team members over the course of a few hours. During this time, I recommend all interviewers and coordinators collaborate in real time on the interview notes.

All potential employees for your startup want to talk to the CEO. And for the first 10 employees, the CEO should be the first and last person they communicate with.

It might sound crazy, but if you’re hiring salespeople to generate calls with potential customers, then you need to hire them in groups of 3.

Many founders I work with complain about getting tons of applicants for a role, but almost none of them are well qualified, so you have to wade through hundreds if not thousands of resumes, looking for someone worth even a phone call.

In our Founder Spotlight this month, we highlight Cole Calhoun, CEO and Co-Founder of Hopthru, which provides data analysis tools for public transport.

In our latest Pitch Practice session, Jose Sanchez from decisionLab presented their key-value store solution.

Here’s how you find the best candidates for your open roles.

Today, Sterling Road is releasing our 4th annual diversity report.

You need to be absolutely thrilled with your first employees. If you’re not overwhelmingly excited about the performance of one of your first hires, you need to let them go.

You need to be fulltime on your startup to get investors. Here are the 3 reasons why investors expect you to be full-time before they invest in your startup.

Let’s talk about when to stop seed fundraising. It’s easy to stop raising when the round is successfully closed, but what about when things aren’t going as well as you’d hoped? I recommend sticking with it for 90 days.