Firehose #158: 🍰 Capital stack. 🍰

There’s a broad spectrum of VCs and founders, the latter of whom possess differing levels of capability to maintain high growth and continually raise equity dollars at inflated valuations. For example, there are many companies who raise an angel/seed round, then a Series A, spend most of it on customer acquisition which flows right into FB and Goog... See more

In contrast to VC - where over the past 30 years of software, there’s been a circular “we shape our tools, and then they shape us” coevolution around how equity works - this hasn’t happened for debt yet. We haven’t figured out the right atomic unit

once you’ve got product-market fit with a rinse and repeatable growth strategy, spend is going to shift toward S&M away from R&D and raising equity to plug the CAC to payback gap in cash flow seems like an incredibly expensive way of achieving this when alternatives like Pipe exist. I think VCs that invested at the earlier stages are very aligned h... See more