See design app Canva's original pitch deck for investors

Created by the consulting company NOBL, this AI generator mimics and mocks the vague and impersonal presentations sometimes shared by consulting firms.

Investors sit in the audience, waiting to hear what this season’s batch of YC founders have cooked up. YC argues that going through the process of a demo day can help founders get a better understanding of their startup themselves.

In 2013, the cofounders of DoorDash created a simple, homemade video application to Y Combinator. They didn't know it at the time, but they'd be accepted—and their company would go on to be publicly traded on the NASDAQ.

This chart's source, Dealroom, uses "breakout capital" to refer to funding rounds or companies in the $15M to $100M total funding range. It labels the startup stage as under $15M, and the scaleup stage as $100M+.

When startups take on outside funding, those investments are divided into different "rounds." These rounds are catered to different stages in a startup's life cycle—a startup often needs different types of investors and amounts of funding at different stages of the business. For instance, a pre-seed investment round can include investments ranging from about $25K to $500K, whereas a Series D investment can be hundreds of millions of dollars.

In honor of Apple's 50-year anniversary, Sequoia Capital recently posted a tweet on X (the social media platform formerly known as Twitter) with a photo of the original 1977 memo for Sequoia's investment in Apple.

Angel investor Alicia Syrett details the top reasons investors turn down entrepreneurs. For example, the entrepreneur didn’t do their homework by, for instance, not researching the investor.

Many of the philosophies that the leaders of Y Combinator have infused into the program’s portfolio companies have become the playbook for building the next big thing, such as its focus on founder personality and more.

In the second part of a two-part series, convertible notes are explained to be a tool angel investors use to ensure they see a return on their investment in a startup.

Early-stage startups often try to secure seed funding from investors in order to take their idea from concept to reality.

Airbnb is arguably known as one of the most successful startup stories of all time. But back in 2008, many prominent investors rejected their pitch when they went out to raise money—and Airbnb's founder still has the rejection emails to prove it.

Startups raise money in different rounds from investors that include their friends and family, angels, and venture capital funds. These types of investors serve different purposes.

Daniel Ha is a venture capitalist who built a suite of AI agents to boost his productivity, both professionally and personally. At his VC firm, a troupe of agents gathers data on startups and analyzes it from competing perspectives to produce a confidence score. When his dad was diagnosed with cancer, Ha used an oncology-trained AI to help him understand the condition.

Those revelations include the company's unprofitability despite doing $18.7B in revenue in 2025, exactly how many voting shares Elon Musk will have in the company (roughly 85%), and more.

Peloton founder John Foley said investors rejected the company's initial funding requests because there was no clear indication of what the market for at-home fitness classes looked like. Ultimately, more than 200 angel investors gave the company its first round of cash.

Y Combinator invests $500K into each company in any given batch. $125K of that investment converts into a fixed 7% in ownership of the startup, and the other $375K is invested on something called an uncapped MFN safe. YC explains what that means and more terms of the deal in a detailed article on their website

When an angel investor funds a company in exchange for equity, startups issue new shares to them, rather than giving them existing shares, and boost the company’s valuation.

Angel investors leverage their high net worths to fund seed-stage startups. While they could see high returns, investing in such an early company is a risk.

ByteDance has ridden TikTok's major success to become the world's most valuable startup. This deep dive showcases some of the company's smartest moves and tactics, and where it's headed next.

In one of Paul Graham’s essays on his website, he took the time to explain how and why he and his cofounders (including his girlfriend at the time, and now wife, Jessica Livingston), came up with the idea of and eventually created Y Combinator.

Y Combinator Cofounder Paul Graham’s former professor’s husband Julian Weber provided $10K in seed funding to Graham’s previous startup, Viaweb in its early days. In exchange, Weber received 10% of the company. Weber’s involvement inspired Graham to start a program where investors were more involved with the companies they contributed seed funding to.

Angel investors fund startups at an early stage, at which time a company’s success is less assured. In exchange, they often ask for a significant equity stake.

Michael Seibel, group partner for startup incubator Y Combinator, explains how to build a minimum viable product (also known as an MVP) for any startup idea. Using real companies that experienced the Y Combinator program as examples, he walks through how to determine an MVP feature set, how to present an MVP to potential investors, and more.

Those programs, such as Y Combinator and Techstars, not only offer expert advice to founders, but also seed funding in exchange for equity. The goal is to help young startups learn from successful companies, making it more likely they attract venture capital.

From Pinterest to Yelp, Bessemer Venture Partners—one of the most well-known VC firms—has invested in many successful companies over the years. But the firm has also kicked itself for passing on a few great opportunities, like Apple and Google. Check out the other companies in Bessemer's "anti-portfolio" here.

The venture capital firm that kickstarted an industry.

When WeWork prepared to file for its initial public offering in 2019, its S-1 revealed its poor financial state to the public.

The disruptive innovator and founder of SpaceX and Tesla is worth hundreds of billions of dollars, an unimaginable sum. This simple interactive visual uses pixels (representing $1K each) on a scrolling screen to demonstrate the billionaire's wealth compared to other known financial values, like the cost of building a Boeing 777 or the net worth of Tiger Woods.

Valued at $2.4B in 2025, the company helps workers get gym access and meditation apps, in addition to basic healthcare. Listen to the founder of the company, Cesar Cevalho, explain how he scaled the company with Jeff Berman.

Entrepreneur Shaan Puri shares how seven strangers acted as Google’s earliest angel investors. The first gave Google $100K without even putting his equity agreement in writing. The investors on “Shark Tank” use their personal funds to support startups, but they’re often more predatory about terms than typical angels.

Stanford’s archive of lectures about creating a startup includes advice from Y Combinator notables such as former YC president and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and YC Cofounder Paul Graham.

That's a significant drop from 2022’s $242B, reflecting market uncertainty but continuing VC’s role in scaling transformative ideas. Rooted in early risk-sharing models, venture capital took off with firms like ARDC in 1946, later evolving into today’s influential players like Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz.

AngelList was created to connect startups and angel investors. It’s evolved since its 2010 founding and has been used by companies like Uber and OpenSea.

An S-1 or prospectus is a registration form filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission when a company wants to go public. They can be pretty juicy documents, as S-1s can reveal previously private details about companies to the public, often for the first time.

When WeWork’s S-1 came out, investors were particularly concerned about WeWork’s expenses far outpacing its growing revenue and its complex company structure, as well as a few potential conflicts of interest within the company.

More than 30% of venture capital deals come from leads courtesy of a VC’s former colleagues or professional network. You can learn more about how venture capitalists decide which companies to invest in by reading this article.

In a new era of work where many millennials wanted to work for themselves in offices with exposed brick, cold brew on tap, and casual dress codes, WeWork realized these entrepreneurs and startup workers didn’t want to do it alone.

First initiated in the 1980s, the Excel spreadsheet built off predecessors like Lotus and VisiCalc, leveraging a novel graphic interface to entice new customers and packaging the program with other Microsoft Office products. Forty years later, the tool faces challenges from Google and AI, but retains devoted users.

Peter Thiel was Facebook's first big investor. In 2004, he invested $500K into the social network, long before the company owned Instagram or renamed itself "Meta." In 2012, when he sold off most of his stake, he turned that initial $500K investment into more than $1B in cash.