Startup Funding

Raising startup capital in smaller cities is harder than in prominent areas, like Silicon Valley. Strategies for fundraising must be tweaked to account for the different blend of investors on offer.

As a founder, how should you decide how to fund your start up and think about bootstrapping vs. venture capital? Each comes with advantages and limitations. A framework can help compare the two and decide how to get funding for a startup.

Anyone vaguely familiar with the venture capital industry knows that down rounds are bad news. But what exactly are they, and why do they occur? What alternatives do founders have to avoid a down round?

Toptal Finance Expert Bechara Kara runs through the crowdfunding market’s recent milestones, highlighting some of the shortcomings that can potentially threaten crowdfunding as a tool for democratizing finance, concluding with suggestions for a balanced approach in promoting its evolution.

Startup investors are not benevolent creatures, they’re looking for certain signals that help to persuade them to part with their money. This guide, written from an investor’s perspective, intends to help startups understand the key areas to focus on and emphasize when raising money.

Fundraising is hard to get right, which is why companies of all sorts often turn to fundraising experts for help and advice regarding the fundraising process. There is a multitude of different professional figures that help companies raise capital, but for startups and growth companies, the two figures most often encountered are fundraising consultants and broker-dealers. Who is right for which endeavor?

Popular rhetoric states that you need a team to found a startup. But what if you don’t have the desire or the right co-founders to start a new venture in a team? Contrary to popular belief, there are many successful solo ventures. This guide presents some tactics for solo entrepreneurs to follow when starting a solo venture.

LTV:CAC analysis is one of the most important exercises startup founders must go through to evaluate their business’ prospects and raise external funding. It is, however, frequently misunderstood and misinterpreted. In this article, Toptal Finance Expert Ryan Downie runs through a practical tutorial of how to perform LTV:CAC analysis correctly, and how it should be adapted and interpreted depending on the business model or sector in question.

Convertible notes have become an increasingly popular and common method for raising capital by startups, but how well do founders truly understand the implications of going down this route? In this article, Toptal Finance Expert Jeffrey Briggs outlines the basics of convertible note structures, and runs through the pros and cons of using them to raise money for new entrepreneurial ventures.