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Amber Atherton

Partner, Patron · 1 appearance on the record.

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founderinvestorexecutiveauthorentertainer@AmberAtherton ↗LinkedIn ↗amber-atherton.com ↗Wikipedia ↗

She founded the jewelry marketplace My Flash Trash as well as Zyper, a community software startup acquired by Discord in 2021. Today, she invests out of early-stage venture firm Patron and authored the book The Rise of Virtual Communities.

9statements → 3claims → 3claims resolved → 67%fully supported → 4.11/5average certainty → 1.78/5average debate potential →

2 supported 0 partly supported 1 contradicted how the 3 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

3 assertions · 2 opinions · 2 insights · 2 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 3 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 3 are resolved. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Amber argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Assertion Supported
Atherton: VC-funded female-founded startups grew from 410 in 2009 to 2,700
“There's a great, like, all-raised statistic that, 2009, 410 companies who had female founders got VC funding, whereas last 2019, 2700 companies got VC funding.”
Amber Atherton Dec 18, 2019 ▶ 37:46 Amber Atherton of Zyper and Iba Masood of TARA on Raising a Series A as a Female Founder · Y Combinator

Their most notable contradicted claim

Assertion Contradicted
Atherton: Forerunner Ventures led Zyper's $4M seed pre-Demo Day
“Forerunner Ventures led our seed pre-demo day, and that was exciting. So we raised four million then”
Amber Atherton Dec 18, 2019 ▶ 4:24 Amber Atherton of Zyper and Iba Masood of TARA on Raising a Series A as a Female Founder · Y Combinator

Expressed certainty vs assessment result

none yet certainty 1
none yet certainty 2
none yet certainty 3
100% certainty 4
0% certainty 5

weighted support: a fully supported claim counts one, a partly supported claim counts half. Each filled bar is clickable and opens exactly those claims; "none yet" means nothing said at that certainty level has resolved yet

Everything Amber Atherton said on the Y Combinator Startup Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Opinion
Atherton: Founders cannot blame missing term sheets on gender or race
“Like, if you have a great product and great traction, then you have a hot deal, and like, any other kind of justification as to why you're not getting term sheet is, you can't really say that. Like, you either have product market fit and a hot deal, and that's…”
Amber Atherton Dec 18, 2019 ▶ 34:27 Amber Atherton of Zyper and Iba Masood of TARA on Raising a Series A as a Female Founder · Y Combinator
Opinion
Atherton: Female founders pitch market sizes less aggressively than male peers
“I feel like the appetite for risk for a lot of female founders to really answer that question, you know, how big can this be is it's more realistic perhaps of like, okay, well, we have product market fit, the product's going to change a bit. So, Realistically,…”
Amber Atherton Dec 18, 2019 ▶ 39:52 Amber Atherton of Zyper and Iba Masood of TARA on Raising a Series A as a Female Founder · Y Combinator
Insight
Atherton: Founders should never fake competing term sheets to create urgency
“You can be tempted to say, oh, well, we have this other time sheet. We have this other offer, blah, blah, blah. Just don't ever do that because it's so small as a community and just be honest.”
Amber Atherton Dec 18, 2019 ▶ 17:08 Amber Atherton of Zyper and Iba Masood of TARA on Raising a Series A as a Female Founder · Y Combinator
Disclosure
Atherton: Zyper wrote its own investment memos to send to VCs
“What we did was kind of do the VC's jobs for them and Write, you know, a memo as to why you should invest in us. And that sort of went out, you know, with the deck after the first meeting.”
Amber Atherton Dec 18, 2019 ▶ 6:21 Amber Atherton of Zyper and Iba Masood of TARA on Raising a Series A as a Female Founder · Y Combinator
Insight
Atherton: Startups should negotiate legal fee caps during fundraising
“Negotiate a cap with your law firm to do the regals because it will go over and it will end up being 30 days or maybe even 60 days.”
Amber Atherton Dec 18, 2019 ▶ 20:26 Amber Atherton of Zyper and Iba Masood of TARA on Raising a Series A as a Female Founder · Y Combinator
Assertion Supported
Atherton: VC-funded female-founded startups grew from 410 in 2009 to 2,700
“There's a great, like, all-raised statistic that, 2009, 410 companies who had female founders got VC funding, whereas last 2019, 2700 companies got VC funding.”
Amber Atherton Dec 18, 2019 ▶ 37:46 Amber Atherton of Zyper and Iba Masood of TARA on Raising a Series A as a Female Founder · Y Combinator
Disclosure
Atherton: Zyper conducts board meetings only twice a year
“I think that we have, our cadence currently is twice a year.”
Amber Atherton Dec 18, 2019 ▶ 58:48 Amber Atherton of Zyper and Iba Masood of TARA on Raising a Series A as a Female Founder · Y Combinator
Assertion Supported
Atherton: Zyper raised $1.2M in London before applying to Y Combinator
“Started the company in 2017, and I raised raised 1.2 seed in London from a VC in London, and a lot of angels involved in that, great angels involved in that round two and then and then I applied to YC, and got in then.”
Amber Atherton Dec 18, 2019 ▶ 1:18 Amber Atherton of Zyper and Iba Masood of TARA on Raising a Series A as a Female Founder · Y Combinator
Assertion Contradicted
Atherton: Forerunner Ventures led Zyper's $4M seed pre-Demo Day
“Forerunner Ventures led our seed pre-demo day, and that was exciting. So we raised four million then”
Amber Atherton Dec 18, 2019 ▶ 4:24 Amber Atherton of Zyper and Iba Masood of TARA on Raising a Series A as a Female Founder · Y Combinator

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
Amber Atherton of Zyper and Iba Masood of TARA on Raising a Series A as a Female Founder · Dec 18, 2019 23m
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