Peter Walker
@PeterJ_Walker
Head of Insights @Cartainc | New data on startups out multiple times per week
How much do VC-backed founders ACTUALLY OWN of their companies over time? Might be less than you expect. The median ownership for the founding team after a Series A sits at 36.1%, according to our study of over 14,000 US startups. The full report has much more data broken out…
18 months between venture rounds is not the right expectation. These days the median is over 2 years, even for many AI companies. Non-AI, it's even longer. Plan accordingly!
I’ve joined Cognition to continue to work on the future of software engineering. I was employee #2 at Windsurf and have worked on AI+code for years. There’s never been a more exciting time and place for it than now at Cognition. I had a place at Google DeepMind as part of the…
Carta saved 3,500+ hours a month with internally built AI agents. Not by automating busywork, but by scaling complex judgment. Our second essay on @firstround Applied Intelligence explores exactly how they did this, in a crazy amount of detail.
Private companies staying private longer than ever. Startup founders are signing up for a decade (maybe 1.5 decades) AFTER seed. Fund managers expecting to wrap things up in the standard 10-yr fund lifecycle will be disappointed.
Raising Series A is great - but it doesn't guarantee anything. Only ~50% or so of Series A companies end up raising Series B. Over 1,000 startups on Carta that raised Series A in 2021 are stuck at A today. What happens to the VC-backed cos from before AI times?
.@ScottWu46 speaks the truth
“There's an unspoken covenant that as a founder, you go down with the ship. For better or worse, it's changed a bit over the last year and I think it's disappointing, to be honest.” Enough said. This show is everything and more on: - What really happened behind the scenes -…
Do seed fund GPs feel this way? Kinda feel like seed is a thrilling estuary these days
~10 yrs ago it felt like Silicon Valley had this really vibrant seed fund ecosystem, that felt just as important as the multi-stage venture firms Now, that feels totally dead Partially because a whole generation of top-tier companies just completely skipped that step in raising
From @nmasc_ 's story on Windsurf - the Cognition save really was not planned. Meaning the 200 or so employees that didn't make the Google gravy train were rightfully pissed off.
Soft landing for Windsurf employees - bonus points for the clear communication around all employees receiving equity acceleration, etc.
It’s a privilege to welcome Windsurf to Cognition. Here are more details in the note I sent to our Cognition team this morning: Team, As discussed during our all-hands, we are acquiring Windsurf. We have now signed a definitive agreement and we couldn’t be more excited. Here’s…
Per usual, @benthompson nails it. Whatever the ultimate outcome on the Windsurf deal, this is materially stinkier for the ecosystem as a whole, Removing a backstop makes startup life even more risky on the employee side Snippet from Stratechery newsletter, go subscribe
Spot on from @benthompson today The breaking of the tech social contract means the value proposition of working at a startup has gone way, way down
If Jordi is right (and he usually is), Windsurf employees got totally hosed. Hall of shame deal, hope it’s a stain on windsurf execs.
Here is most of what I’ve gathered on the Windsurf / Google Deal The founders and dozens of engineers are going to Google. This group, along with the preferred shareholders will be sharing the $2.4B headline number. The exact split is unknown but investors are making some money…
Either the windsurf execs made sure the employees that aren’t going to Google are all good - or they didn’t. And if they didn’t, it’s pretty scummy.
I have gotten a bunch of conflicting DMs so far. Going to leave the digging to capital J Journalists and we will discuss it all on Monday’s show. I so far don’t have a reason to believe that the employees were “screwed” although it seems that this outcome is worse for most of the…
Nvm got more details since posting this and it sounds a lot worse than I originally thought