Nathan Latka
Founder and CEO, Founderpath. On 1 show, 2,516 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderhostexecutiveinvestorauthor@NathanLatka ↗LinkedIn ↗founderpath.com ↗
Nathan Latka founded Founderpath, a financing platform providing non-dilutive capital to bootstrapped SaaS companies, and built the GetLatka database. He hosts the Top Founders podcast, interviewing software CEOs on metrics and revenue, and authored How to Be a Capitalist Without Any Capital.
1shows
2,516appearances
674statements
148resolved
78supported
33contradicted
53%fully supported
58said about them ↓ Everything Nathan Latka said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Latka claims 99 percent of people on Earth are totally useless
“I think 99% of people on earth, they're totally useless. They don't think much, and they rely on other people.”
Latka deceptively lists unconfirmed speakers to sell conference tickets
“What it said, if you go look at that particular part, it said confirmed and invited. They have been either confirmed or invited. And what I will tell you, as sales come in and I have more money to play with, the likelihood that I actually confirm all of them i…”
Latka: Upfront service fees prevent SaaS churn and boost retention
“This is the counterpoint guys, the VC argument that you shouldn't sell services inside of your SAS. I would always argue the opposite, which is if you touch a SAS sale with a big upfront fee, like five K, they're just not going to turn your net dollar retentio…”
Latka: Bootstrappers will outlast and probably beat VC-backed competitors
“A bootstrapper who only spends what his customers pay him or her is sustainable. They will outlast the VC back competitor every time, and they will probably win every time.”
Latka: Raising capital validates salesmanship, not the business idea
“Raising capital does not validate an idea. It means you're a good salesperson.”
Latka: Selling SaaS lifetime plans is disingenuous and harms personal brand
“I have a big issue when people sell lifetime plans. I think it's cheap. I think it's a marketing tactic, and I think it's totally disingenuous and hurts your personal brand if and when you have to shut the company down or sell it.”
Latka: YC startups artificially inflate revenue by selling to each other
“The problem is when you go into due diligence with a YC company, their customer list is a bunch of other YC companies. So it's almost like a network marketing scheme where like they all buy each other's products to inflate the thing, but it doesn't make any se…”
Latka confirms some Heyo investors lost money in the exit
“So it is a 100% true that there were investors that got back less money than what they put in.”
Latka predicts he will run for US President and win in 2036
“I plan to run for president and win in 2036.”
Latka predicts he will run a $100B hedge fund
“I will run the world's largest hedge fund with a hundred billion dollars in assets under management.”
Latka avoids romantic relationships because they give others leverage over him
“This is one of the reasons, by the way, I don't have a relationship. It becomes very, if I have a relationship, it becomes obviously clear what I care about, whoever I'm with, right? And if people then know how to cater to whoever I'm with, it's actually a wea…”
Latka: Teachable raising at $30M valuation is the 'stupidest thing'
“And he's right now negotiating an equity round with a pre-money valuation at thirty million dollars, which is like the stupidest. In my opinion, I told him this on the show. I said, that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard.”
Latka says B2B buyer allegiance is dropping and AI churn is rising
“We are seeing less and less allegiance from B to B buyers to any software product. Churn is just generally higher with these AI tools.”
Latka: The most bankable software companies usually start as agencies
“The most successful software companies we see that are most underwritable, bankable, they usually launch an agency.”
Latka: Companies die once acquired by private equity firms
“Once the, once a private equity firm buys a company, it's, it dies.”
Latka: Founders leak their metrics on my podcast to induce acquisition bids
“I full disclosure have, I won't name them, but I have founders who call on my show specifically because they want a reason to share their numbers live where it looks like I'm beating it out of them, but really they want to share it because they want the market…”
Latka: An employer review site for rating employees is a billion-dollar business
“There's a billion dollar business in here. Someone's gotta just build that and go to town.”
Latka: A founder will build a billion-dollar business with one FTE
“Someone's going to build a billion dollar business and have one FTE as the founder and then a network of contractors.”
Latka: Modest early revenue hurts VC-backed startups more than zero revenue
“It's almost a problem that you have revenue because then people want to harp on you about how low the revenue is when really you should just eliminate the revenue and just focus on user and engagement growth”
Latka predicts a SaaS company will soon IPO with under 10 employees
“Greg, I say one day, I think very soon there's going to be someone that takes a company public with less than 10 FTEs, a SaaS company.”
Latka: Raising VC traps founders by blocking smaller lucrative acquisitions
“You're going to raise two million out of 10 pre. Whatever your buddies that you, but you take your buddy, your old boss's money, whatever. Great. Great for you. Then you're going to keep growing revenue and you're going to get a six million dollar acquisition …”
Latka: Raising capital turns founders into VC employees
“Raising capital is, in my opinion, is not something to be celebrated. You're diluting yourself and you're becoming more of essentially an employee, right? For your VCs and the board that you're building.”
Latka: First sales hires almost never outsell the founder
“A lot of founders make the first sales hire, they make the assumption that that first sales hire should sell more than the founder, and it's almost never the case, because the founder knows the product, the founder has an unfair advantage, because customers al…”
The other half of the tape: Nathan Latka's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 2 times in 2 episodes across the shows. 56 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Nathan Lackey 1Kevin Moenne-Loccoz 1
Statements about Nathan Latka, by other people (56)
Mobilewalla monitored swing state polling locations in real-time for campaign teams
“What we did for this particular party, who spent way less on, feet on the street than the other party, we were monitoring every polling booth, every polling location in a certain number of states, And we were telling the ground team who showed up to vote and w…”
Andrew Warner reveals Latka made under $100,000 from the Heyo acquisition
“And you got less than a 100,000 dollars from it.”
Founders and employees should always take secondary liquidity, Buhrdorf argues
“No, man, you should always take money off the table. What are you talking about?”
Mealy refuses to share internal metrics, citing a 'competitive intelligence' team
“And we have a competitive intelligence team and we understand how that information gets out. And we've chosen to keep a lot of that private. We're not Interested in debuting a lot of that on the public front. We're not really gonna expose that kind of informat…”
Vandenberg: Chili Piper sees CAC payback in about one month
“Yeah, that's right. We're getting paid back in about a month, yeah. About a month.”
CleverTap achieves over 30% free-to-paid conversion within 12 months
“It's north of 30%, and it's actually, people get addicted to it once they see it, right, and they just want to do more.”
PestShare raised its $28M Series A at a $100M valuation
“Yeah, we said a hundred million dollar valuation. You're right on the nose.”
Chanty excludes affiliate payouts from its $3M revenue, says Dimitro Okunyev
“No, no, that's just this 30% cut that we got for ourselves. The rest are going out of us. So, I mean, we don't even see this money.”
Maruthavanan: 85% of SaaS Startups Never Cross $1M ARR
“85% of the SaaS startups that start out do not cross a million dollar in ARR? This is statistics from Nathan's Database that he puts together where he tracks the entire SaaS universe. There are about 32,499 startups as of yesterday. And out of them, about 4766…”
Pipe and Stripe offered $200K; Nathan Latka's site offered $2.2M
“And then, you know, pipe.com and Stripe Capital and some of these others, they were willing to lend me maybe 200,000 dollars. Plug my shit into Nathan's site, and it came back, like, 2.2 million.”
Fuller: FreightWaves SaaS revenue exceeds that of its rumored acquirers
“Our SaaS business is actually bigger than some of the companies that you mentioned that would acquire us.”
Sulekha predicts $40M to $50M revenue upon 2023 US events recovery
“So that market has come to a complete freeze. So we are expecting that in the year, 20, 23 was when we will get get that market back. And once we get that market back, we'll be able to hint the numbers that you're talking about.”
Merged Tricentis and QASymphony entity targets $80M to $100M ARR
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, we're gonna be in that 80 to a hundred range.”
Stevenson: Chatmatic will generate $25k to $45k monthly from renewals
“I would say that in, in any sort of projection that we've run, I'm probably more along the lines of a 25 to 45,000 a month when it comes to them, for them to actually recur, like, for them to actually continue on and to upgrade, because a lot of people I mean,…”
Coupa priced its IPO at a unicorn valuation, avoiding a down round
“No, no, no. That's not our good either. We were somewhere in that same neighborhood. It was just like roughly unicorn kind of thing. And we entered in at the same place and then it went up to I don't know, 1.7 billion or something. And it's, so it's been aroun…”
Bean: Fresh Lime targets a $4M to $5M run rate by 2017
“Our revenue this year is pretty low. I mean, we'll do about two 50 next year by this time, I mean, we'll have a, Probably a, I don't know, a four or five million dollar run rate. I mean, we'll grow that much next year”
Webb: Tudodesk Sold for a Seven-Figure Sum Over $1 Million
“Yeah.
It's like, yeah, seven figure number.
It's over the million.
Yes, Nathan.”
Britton: Suzy's 2021 Series D valued the company at 10x ARR
“It was closer to about three hundred million of post money. We had a 10 X valuation. We had a 10 X valuation, which is a healthy multiple because we didn't get above our skis. A lot of, we had term sheets with higher multiples. I'm happy that we took The 10 X …”
Akhtar: Founderpath provided CyberSmart $1.5M during a Q3 cash crunch
“We spoke to Nathan and the founder path team that actually ended up giving us like one and a half million dollars when we really, really need it.”
FounderPath saw 80x demand spikes in an hour after media appearances
“Every time we would, you know, we'd have, like, Nathan would be on TV, or, like, he would get, like, a TechCrunch article, and all of a sudden we would have, like, 80 times the demand for one hour that we had before”
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
Top Founders 2
2024 1 mention in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Nathan's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| TOP FOUNDERSLEDGER | Founder and CEO, Founderpathhost | 2516 | 674 | 53% 78/148 | full record on Top Founders → |