Early-stage companies, discussed honestly
Notes from a New York community of founders, operators and engineers. Written for the stage where the company is small enough that every decision is still reversible — and expensive enough that most are not reversed.
Most startup advice is written by people describing a single outcome and generalising from it. The useful parts are narrower: what a term actually means, what a number is really measuring, which mistakes cost months rather than weeks. That is what this site collects.
What is covered here
Fundraising
Instruments, dilution and what a cap table looks like three rounds later, worked through with arithmetic rather than anecdote.
Product
Finding the first ten customers who are not friends, and telling a signal apart from politeness.
Metrics
Which numbers describe a business and which ones merely flatter it.
Mentoring
How a review session is run so founders leave with a decision instead of encouragement.
The bias here
Two of them, stated openly. First, default alive beats default fundable: a company that controls its own timeline negotiates better than one that cannot. Second, distribution is usually the harder half. Engineering teams tend to underinvest in it because it is less legible than code.
Nothing here is investment, legal or tax advice. Instruments differ by jurisdiction, and the arithmetic below is illustrative rather than a template to sign.
A reasonable place to begin is which numbers actually describe a business — most disagreements about strategy turn out, on inspection, to be disagreements about what is being measured.