The Ledger
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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.”
Carpel: Founders can use Founderpath debt to buy personal real estate
“Unlock the wealth, take the money, and put that into other things. Again, the S&P 500 a commercial building, buy a house for your mom, buy a house for yourself all permissible and all doable with this product.”
Latka: Rolling Up Physical Businesses Using Software Data Is AI's Future
“We are looking for what we call ABC, and that's atoms plus bits plus capital. Bits is Carl. He has data that sits on top of the atoms. He knows what restaurants are performing, what hair salons are performing, and then you have the capital to then go fund the …”
Founderpath Conditioned Financing on Creating a New Management ESOP Pool
“We basically said, Hey, look, we'll fund the business with a million or million and a half or whatever it is. But at the funding date, we also need to see a board resolution that establishes a new, 1015, whatever it was ESOP pool and a chunk of that ESOP pool …”
Founderpath Sees Co-Founder Conflict in 95% of Diligenced Companies
“We diligence a lot of companies, and this happens like literally 90, 95% of the time is there's some kind of co-founder conflict like this”
Voxpopme Management Team Was Diluted to 8% to 15% Aggregate Equity
“We looked at the cap table and I sort of looked at how much equity those names had. And again, I don't know what the exact number was, but it was something I want to say it was like maybe something between like eight and maybe 15% of sort of like, this was the…”
Webb: Track Enterprise Valuation Instead of Monthly Cash Flow
“If you're going to build a business and you're looking to sell or just looking to build it, then too many founders are always going to look at their monthly revenue, what they're bringing in, what they're spending, what's left, what effort they're putting in. …”
Latka: Marketplace Success Depends on Feature Sequencing, Not Generating New Ideas
“When you sit on so much data, the hard problem is not, like, I didn't just give you some brand new idea you never thought of, you know about that idea, but the hard part and who wins marketplace is it's actually what do you decide to launch first, second, thir…”
Martin: Startups should scale vertically before moving to horizontal architecture
“Scale vertically for as long as you can, because it's way simpler. And scale horizontally when you absolutely need to.”
Martin: Add database indices early before tables exceed memory capacity
“I recommend doing this early and often because it gets harder and harder to add missing indices, the bigger tables get. As you start getting into the tens of millions, adding, you know, you basically have to be able to load the table into memory to add the ind…”
Martin: Microservices and horizontal scaling severely complicate developer environment setup
“So the developer experience got way more complicated, right? So like, you know, we have just like a TypeScript engineer who does front end, and suddenly just to set up his development environment you know, he's gotta understand how Kubernetes works, or, you kn…”
Latka: Founders use debt to buy back early equity at 1.5x returns
“This is the number one use case we see at founder path right now is, is our folks that raised a little bit going, man, I want to give those investors 1.5 X their money, but buy back 20% of my equity. And we fund it with obviously with debt.”
Carpel: Pipe's maximum financing term is 12 months
“I think Pipe's max term is 1212 months, right? So something like this, you may be able to get more like two, two, three years of financing.”
Benson: Founderpath lends up to 8x MRR versus Scaleworks at 4x MRR
“Scaleworks is at four XMRR, he's at eight XMRR.”
Latka: Founderpath raised $145M including $135M debt facility
“So like we just raised one hundred forty five million bucks, right? Which part was equity, but one hundred thirty five million is effectively a debt fund now. So we are lending off balance sheet.”
Latka: Founders should never sign debt deals requiring personal guarantees
“You shouldn't be signing any debt deals where the U as the founder for signing personal grant. We obviously don't ask about a founder path, but if anyone asks that you should run, there's too many other good options.”
Latka: FounderPath deployed $250M across 550 software companies
“I'm investing in my third fund. We've deployed two hundred and fifty million dollars into 550 software companies so far.”
Scholarship Owl took $300k in non-dilutive capital from FounderPath
“Last time we took 300,000 and we plan to take another a hundred to a 150,000 actually in the next few weeks.”
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.”
Larry Kim: $400K FounderPath loan and personal capital bridged pivot past $2M.
“Initially it was about a 400 K loan. You know, we had over a million in revenue, so that's, you know, 400 K is like, you know, less than 40% of a month's of ARR. And then I put an equal amount of capital in you know, just to gross that up a little bit and that…”
Martin: Founderpath processes 200M rows daily with four full-time engineers
“Three of those guys are actually contractors, so we have four full-time engineers, and we ingest about twenty million new rows of data per day, and every single day we have to rerun all the calculations on all of the data, so it's like, it's at like two hundre…”
Founderpath reached $75M ARR and 20,000 users with seven engineers in 2023
“So, in twenty-twenty-three, by this time we have three databases because as you'll see shortly, we, we've also split into microservices. Seven engineers, about 20,000 users, something like seventy-five million ARR”
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”
Martin: Founderpath Reached $19M ARR With Three Engineers in 2022
“So, anyway, twenty-twenty-two comes along, and we vertically scaled, right? We added a second server, but we didn't necessarily have to but we upsized Both of our servers and our database big time. We have three engineers at this point. We have about 5000 user…”
Martin: FounderPath Had $1M ARR and Two Engineers in 2021
“This is how it started, twenty-twenty-one. One server, one database, one engineer for half that year, two for the second half. We had, like, 1500 users, one million ARR, and we had absolutely no problems, right? Like, we just had one cloud server and one datab…”
Badger Mapping raised $6M in total debt to reach $5M ARR
“I think I've done, well, I think I've done about six million dollars in debt over the years on and off. You know, and moving it around right now. I have about 2.25 with you guys at founder path, as you know”
Carpel: SaaS financing platforms like FounderPath and Pipe do not require personal guarantees
“With Nathan's product, and pipe, and espresso, and lighter, as far as I know, almost every one of them do not have a personal guarantee.”
Carpel: Some non-dilutive lenders prohibit investing funds outside the business
“Some of them may not allow you to take out the money to put it into a commercial real estate investment, or to, Seed another VC you would like to, if you wanted to invest the money and back a friend starting another company, for example.”