Founder profiles, fundraising, and the inside life of small companies. Term sheets, deal flow, and the partner meetings that almost happened.
Though a record $242 billion in AI venture funding in Q1 2026 suggests founders have the leverage, the complex deal structures being negotiated reveal a more nuanced battle for boardroom control as valuations soar past $900 billion.
From SiFive's $3.65 billion chip-design round to Anthropic's massive shadow funding, late-stage AI and infrastructure deals concentrate capital among hedge funds and strategic giants, leaving less room for early-stage backers.
From a photographer's kitchen in Antarctica to a San Francisco startup office, the real startup culture experiment isn't about where people sit but who gets to decide when and where they work.
As venture fundraising fell 35% in 2025 and institutional money crowded into top-tier firms, emerging managers were forced to rewrite the fund-formation playbook.
April's $56 billion venture haul masks a deepening split, as AI and infrastructure companies like Integrant race from Series A to pre-IPO in under a year, leaving later funds and loose pitches crowded out by structural risk.
Operating cadence, from weekly standups to quarterly board decks and unspoken agreements, keeps small teams of 10 to 60 aligned even when founders stop showing up.
From participation caps to compounding liquidation preferences, term sheets are growing teeth again as the era of founder-friendly money recedes.
Keel’s radical operating cadence of a single weekly 45-minute all-hands meeting cut churn over 18 months, but the resulting quiet now reveals fissures in team alignment.
As structured deals with liquidation preferences, participation caps, and ratchet protections proliferate across startup funding rounds, press releases keep silent on the fine print that decides founder dilution and investor payouts.
Q1 2026 shattered venture capital records with $122B deployed, but the spoils went exclusively to AI founders as deal count hit a five-year low and non-AI startups faced creeping liquidation preferences and a new era of founder power imbalance.
Venture term sheets in 2026 feature participation caps, MFN ratchets, and liquidation preferences that are more creative—and more punitive—than in a decade, redrawing cap tables for years even as capital flows.
Cooley's Q1 2026 data shows that structured terms like multiple liquidation preferences and participation caps are now standard in venture capital, as investors protect against downside risk in a wave of down rounds.
Secondary offers doubling a company’s valuation in weeks show the traditional funding ladder has collapsed into a single continuous price-discovery event.
In the kitchen of a flat in Camden, on a Sunday morning in October 2024, a founder told her co-founder she was leaving. Eighteen months later she was back, and the company had launched the product the original disagreement was about.
The $122B headline is the Series-AI-9. The term sheet behind it includes a 3x participation cap most coverage has skipped, and one anti-dilution provision that will shape every venture round in the category for the next year.
Series A median is $42M post. Three rounds in April closed at five times that, and the term sheets share a feature. The one that did not close at $200M is the more interesting story.
Five stories. Four minutes. Zero hot takes. Sent at 7:00 a.m. local time, every weekday.