Founders who seed-strap on small sums from friends, family and members skip the Series A, as 62% of US companies seeded in 2022 have done, according to Carta. The price of keeping growth targets in their own hands, says Precursor Ventures' Charles Hudson, is fewer investors for the next few million.
Reality
- Evidence55
- Adoption55
- Hype gap+25
- Incentives50
- Confidence55
A contributor column puts the one-year fall in Europe's junior technical hiring at 73.4%. The best-evidenced case in the same piece has Ford calling 300 experienced engineers back to fix what its cameras missed.
Reality
- Evidence28
- Adoption34
- Hype gap+42
- Incentives68
- Confidence44
Carta's Q1 2023 medians put Series D 58% below a year earlier and seed down 14%. Portage's Stephanie Choo calls the last round's valuation close to irrelevant, and the negotiating has moved to deal terms.
Publishers:carta.com
Reality
- Evidence52
- Adoption40
- Hype gap+5
- Incentives65
- Confidence55
Twenty-one of those 81 carry the number while still private, so the comps a Series A gets underwritten against are marks rather than distributions, and the arithmetic that produced four is sensitive to one ownership input.
Reality
- Evidence52
- Adoption58
- Hype gap+24
- Incentives66
- Confidence56
The Luxembourg administrator has now taken in €40M since 2021 and put almost 300 funds on its platform, and it is spending this round on licences and onboarding rather than on buying an incumbent's book of clients.
Reality
- Evidence30
- Adoption45
- Hype gap+25
- Incentives78
- Confidence45
Benedict Evans argues the hard part of enterprise software was never writing it. If the build step collapses to five minutes while adoption still takes eighteen months, the estate grows faster than anyone can inventory it.
Publishers:ben-evans.com
Reality
- Evidence33
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+12
- Incentives30
- Confidence43
Carta administered 71 tenders worth about $3 billion in the first half of 2026. Nearly 70% came from Series C or later companies, where the median offer reached $28.5 million and most of it filled.
Publishers:carta.com
Reality
- Evidence52
- Adoption64
- Hype gap+22
- Incentives84
- Confidence58
The Twistlock founders raised thirteen to seventeen times the cybersecurity seed norm, then binned the product it funded. The pivot is the most useful part of the story.
Reality
- Evidence56
- Adoption45
- Hype gap+14
- Incentives62
- Confidence52