Introducing Standard Capital with Dalton Caldwell and Paul Buchheit

One of our big priorities is we just don't want to waste your time. So, we're only going to interview companies where we think there's at least a reasonable chance that we might want to fund them. And then really we just dig in on how good is this founder? How big can the idea get? And actually that's one of our big focuses is we're interested in companies that are going to be or have the potential to be historically significant companies that could be worth a hundred billion or even a trillion dollars.

This is something that we always taught founders at YC, which is you want to minimize the amount of time you spend fundraising because when you're fundraising you're not actually creating any value. You're not talking to users. You're not making sales. You're not growing. It's net negative. And so part of the way we constructed demo day at YC, of course, you know as well as me, is to just compact fundraising into a very small window of time. And it's tremendously successful. This is one of the reasons YC works is that demo day works well at taking a year worth of fundraising and squeezing it into two weeks. And that's tremendously valuable for the startups in many ways. We're trying to do this same thing for Series A's, which is compacting what is normally a multi-month process into effectively one or two weeks to get a decision. That's super helpful to founders in a lot of ways. It's kind of fascinating that you can still innovate on a fundraising process.

You know, the reality is that Series A hasn't changed since the '90s. It's the same product that it's been all along. The reason, I think, is just that investors haven't been forced to change until now.

As many founders know, the really only job of a board member or the most important job is to fire the founder. If we're just helping you, we actually don't need a board seat to help you. And obviously, one thing we've learned through the many years is that founders actually don't like being fired. So we think that'll be a big feature.

We did market research. Yeah.

Yeah. Exactly. So it's been long enough now that people don't even realize this but 20 years ago when YC was being started it was normal to give up a board seat and actually raising a seed round was a huge hassle because you need to find a lead investor, you need to gather them all together, and a founder could easily spend months gathering it up and then such as yourself end up actually losing a board seat as well as relatively high dilution. So our belief is right now Series A is kind of in the same place where a seed round was 20 years ago where it's a slow painful process, takes too much equity and you give up a board seat. So the same thing we did 20 years ago of changing how seed funding works to where now no one gives up a board seat and you actually just go out and raise on your own terms.

Yeah. So back in probably 2012, I would say I started doing group office hours at YC. And honestly, the original motivation was just I found regular office hours a little bit lonely. And so I thought, well, why not just get together a bunch of startups and maybe a couple of partners and do it all at once. And it worked far better than I had anticipated. And the reason for that is actually that founders love helping each other. And so when you have a group of let's say six startups together and you're talking about what are your biggest challenges, what are you focused on? Very often if one founder has a problem, two other founders in the same group will have solutions. And so it kind of just magically works. And of course, these are very ambitious people and they all want to help each other out, but they all also want to be the best. And so there's a kind of virtuous competition where everyone is kind of encouraging each other to level up.