How this site is made

LAST REVIEWED 2026-10LIVING DOCUMENT

Practitioners said this out loud, in working sessions, while founders asked questions. Securities attorneys walked through term sheets. Fund GPs explained how they decide. Operators who built and sold companies described what worked, dated, in their own words.

We turned those conversations into playbooks. Each page answers one question a founder asks, in the order you hit them.

How to read this site

Every playbook has the same shape:

1. TL;DR. The decision, in a few lines. If you read nothing else, read this.
2. The playbook — steps, decision tables, and benchmarks synthesized across sessions.
3. From the room — verbatim quotes from the sessions, so you can hear how practitioners talk about it.
4. Numbers — the concrete figures mentioned in the room: costs, equity bands, timelines.

How we handle sources

Quotes are real and verbatim, drawn from recorded sessions with the speakers’ approval. We identify speakers by role and experience rather than name — the point is the substance, not the name-drop. Published works, public data sources, and standard documents (YC’s SAFE, NVCA model docs, Carta benchmark data) are cited by name.

Every page carries a last reviewed date. SAFE caps, legal costs, and immigration rules move. Treat an older page as a starting point.

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.

Editorial responsibility

VEN prepares and publishes these playbooks, built on recorded FounderNexus practitioner sessions. The session speakers are sources; they are not presented as the authors of the finished articles. Source sections identify their roles, the session periods, and the perspectives each page combines. The session index connects those sources to the playbooks.

We use AI to help organize and draft material from the transcripts. Editorial templates and checklists translate the discussion into practical tools and are identified as synthesis, rather than attributed as a speaker’s exact words. A suggested approach is not presented as a measured customer result. Private participant and customer details are excluded from new session summaries.

An article’s updated date records a significant edit to the published page. Its session dates describe when the source discussions happened; the two can differ. We retain the original dates and context of figures from the room rather than presenting them as current market benchmarks. New sessions add evidence and can qualify earlier advice.

Where this comes from

These playbooks began in FounderNexus working sessions. The conversations continue in VEN, our operational support community for leadership teams of venture-backed companies. This site is the public record. New sessions add to these pages.