Unlike most other years startups should be very wary of going down the YC/VC path.
There is so much money around courtesy of rolling funds, micro-VCs etc that it's almost certain that you will raise a decent sized seed round. But that money seems to be concentrated in the early stages so the competition for a Series A is significantly higher. Which means unless you hit product market fit, have incredible unit economics and lots of traction within the first 18 months you are going to die. Or you will just keep raising Seed+, Seed++ etc until you have no equity left.
And unfortunately there just isn't enough accurate data on what the conversion rate is going from Seed to Series A so it's hard for startups to make educated risk decisions.
More and more I think the smart path is to try to bootstrap your way for the first few years and then go for the Series A at which point you will have all of the leverage since you can simply say no since you are profitable.
There is so much money around courtesy of rolling funds, micro-VCs etc that it's almost certain that you will raise a decent sized seed round. But that money seems to be concentrated in the early stages so the competition for a Series A is significantly higher. Which means unless you hit product market fit, have incredible unit economics and lots of traction within the first 18 months you are going to die. Or you will just keep raising Seed+, Seed++ etc until you have no equity left.
And unfortunately there just isn't enough accurate data on what the conversion rate is going from Seed to Series A so it's hard for startups to make educated risk decisions.
More and more I think the smart path is to try to bootstrap your way for the first few years and then go for the Series A at which point you will have all of the leverage since you can simply say no since you are profitable.