New feature for accountants: faster book review and workflow solution

You know those stories about founders whose rounds get preempted? Yeah that didn’t happen with us. Here’s what I learned from raising a $13M series A in 4 weeks. 1️⃣ You don’t need constant catch-ups for a VC to invest.  Our co-lead (Rho Capital) and I met once after demo day and not again until the raise 1.5 years later. It’s on both sides to run a tight process. We’re fortunate that our co-leads ran a tight process: from first meeting to term sheet in 4 weeks. 2️⃣ Cap table relationships matter. Be diligent about writing monthly investor updates after raising your seed round. Stay close to your cap table. They can be very helpful for intros to series A leads. Also, investors back channel a lot. They’ll backchannel for you and help fill out the round. 3️⃣ Key lieutenants matter. Investors want to meet your execs. It’s a key part of the story: your ability to attract excellent talent and the path to scaling your company. Help your execs prepare for these meetings. 4️⃣ Fundraising = Sales, it all starts with qualifying well. Good sales reps don’t waste cycles chasing poor leads; they spend most of their time on the top leads with the highest conversion rate. Being great at fundraising means spending time on investors who are the right fit. Are they active in your stage and sector? Have they built a thesis in your space or are they learning about it the first time? Do they write follow-ons? Are they fast or slow movers? 5️⃣ The best VC meetings start with the fund: “We’ve looked into your space. This is our view, these are the open questions we have.” With these meetings, you’re not educating them from scratch. They already have an opinion and they’re looking for something in this space to fund. If you don’t qualify, you get stuck in endless pitch loops with firms who were never going to say yes. 6️⃣ In person > Zoom. I’m based in SF and have flown to NY multiple times. You know those stories of founders taking a 4 hour flight to Kansas City to close a six figure contract with that insurance enterprise customer? Same idea. Get on a flight to close the round. Meeting in person builds conviction. Fundraising is never easy. But it doesn’t need to be mysterious either. Y Combinator #S25 founders - One week until demo day!! Good luck. We’re all rooting for you.

The hardest part of every email is the subject line 30-40 characters to get their attention in an inbox with 100 unread emails

I spoke at a tech event last Thursday, 5 founders did their 1-minute pitch. One guy nailed his pitch Trivikram is building AI for product teams. Check out Tula - it gives PMs an AI sidekick 🚀 3 days later, we hooped together at UCSF 🏀 I love this city

Sold out 'Get YC Ready' event last night at the Wefunder office to talk all things Y Combinator! I had the chance to join: 📌 Tyler Maran - OmniAI (YC W24) Automate document workflows 📌 Yooni Ahn - Odo (YC S24) Help companies find and win government contracts with AI 📌 Rafi Sands - Tandem (YC S24) AI-assisted office leasing platform 📌 Robin Choy - Founder & GP Batch Ventures (YCW20) Early-stage VC backing the next generation of founders One person asked us why we were there. The answer was simple: giving back. The YC community has supported us in so many ways, the people and the energy are what make Silicon Valley what it is. Of course we’d want to pay it forward. Highlights from the night: + Live founder pitch reviews + An open Q&A with this stacked alumni panel + A practical founder checklist to sharpen your app Huge thank you to Nijansh V. @Heizen for organizing such a great event!

Calling all SF #accountants, #controller, and #finance leaders We’ve been building AI for accountants since the early days of ChatGPT. Now we’re bringing practitioners and firm leaders together for a hands-on workshop to actually build your first AI accounting agent. You’ll pick between two builds: 1. Invoice Management Agent → Automates your invoicing process end-to-end 2. CSV → Expense Report Agent → Instantly transforms raw CSV exports into clean, categorized reports We’ll guide you step by step and send you home with templates you can use right away. Seats are limited. Snacks included 🥨