This whole thread is leaving me very confused. Series A is the first priced round. You're saying only a small percentage of tech companies raise a priced round?
But for software, and my impression is that it is even more like this in most other industries, a huge amount of tech ventures never receive any funding. Many of these are never even properly incorporated and may not be included in datasets. Then, for the ones that do raise seed money, usually with SAFEs, 50-60% of them would fail before raising a significant priced round (series A).
The overall point being, there’s a lot of risk between starting a company and raising a sizeable priced round for most people.
Are we talking about just YC-style internet/app startups? Two of my startups have been deep tech where you can't do shit without a Series A, and the third was crypto in the start of that boom where VCs were begging to lead your Series A. So maybe I just work in a vastly different field.
Yeah deep-tech (which I am also in) plays on a different scale when it comes to funding rounds, simply because of how expensive hardware is and how big the headcount gets to just make MVPs.
My friends in software startups balk at the sheer burn rate and funding rounds at mine. $100mm for a Series A is unheard of in software.
Thank you Thiel for setting the bar so high (the famous, "you need $1billion in total capital to successfully pull off hardware startups" quote).
