THE NEW VALLEY

Summary from the TLDR Founders newsletter

Investment committees now pause weekly on AI companies with great revenue curves to ask what is truly unique, since every viral product has copycats. As one founder-investor put it, AI made it 10x easier to build a $10M ARR company but did not make it 10x easier to build a $1B one. A seed and Series A investor at FPV Ventures calls the stall zone the new valley, $5M to $25M in ARR. Carta found 15.4% of Q1 2022 seed companies reached a Series A within two years, down from 30.6% for 2018. The four ways out are talent M&A and seed-strapping, raising small, getting profitable fast, and keeping 80% of the company.