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Playbooks
VEN PLAYBOOKSFrom the room

Playbooks from live sessions, not a content mill.

Recorded in working sessions with stage peers, advisors, experts, and operators. Founders ask the questions. New sessions get added. Each page names the session it came from.

Start with fundraisingHow this site is made

The playbooks

Raising Money SAFEs vs. priced rounds, term-sheet red flags, how seed VCs actually decide, your first angel check, pitch decks torn down live, venture debt, exit leverage, running the exit itself, and what to do when runway runs out. Eleven playbooks. Start with SAFEs vs. notes vs. priced rounds → Getting Customers Validate demand before you build, customer development as your sales funnel, a repeatable sales motion, pricing and packaging, first contracts, pilots that convert, enterprise selling, and turning conferences into customers. Nine playbooks. Start with Validate demand before you build → Equity & Legal Founder stock, vesting and the 83(b) deadline, option pools and advisor bands, patents for AI companies, founder immigration paths, and strategic partnerships and IP. Five playbooks. Start with Founder stock, vesting, and 83(b) → Marketing & PR DIY PR and the founder narrative, the AI-era marketing stack, marketing an AI product without saying AI, and GTM as a system of five questions. Four playbooks. Start with DIY PR → Building the Company Building your executive team, data moats and flywheels, surviving the SaaS repricing, pricing in the AI era, and why AI isn't making engineering 10x faster. Five playbooks. Start with the executive team →
Reference Every benchmark stated in a session with its date, a glossary in the practitioners' own terms, and the index of the sessions behind the site. Browse the benchmarks →

Not advice

Nothing on this site is legal, tax, or investment advice. It is a record of what experienced practitioners said in the room, synthesized for readability. Talk to your own counsel before acting on any of it.