Blog
Welcome to the Startup Pinball Machine
It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you go about it can make all the difference.
Two Markets, One Reset: A Healthier Model for Startup Funding
In the first quarter of 2026, investors poured roughly $297 billion into about 6,000 startups globally — up around 150% quarter over quarter and year over year. That single quarter accounted for nearly 70% of all venture capital spending in 2025, and topped every full-year total before 2018. By any conventional reading, venture capital is back, and bigger than it has ever been.
But the headlines obscure another story. Of that $297 billion, $239 billion — 81% of total global venture funding — went to AI. Just four companies — OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, and Waymo — collectively raised $186 billion, or 64% of global venture investment in the quarter. Four of the five largest venture rounds ever recorded closed in Q1 2026. And U.S.-based companies captured 83% of global venture capital, with the BayArea absorbing the lion's share of the AI flows.
Step back to the full year prior, and the same pattern shows up at the macro level. Of roughly $425 billion deployed globally in 2025, $211 billion — nearly half — went to AI, and five companies alone captured $84 billion, or 20% of all global venture capital deployed that year. Megarounds of $500 million and more captured a third of all global funding. Seed deal counts, meanwhile, kept declining.
What PE Deals Just Told Founders About the Next Five Years
Net Revenue Retention is the math that asks: take the customers you had a year ago, what are they paying you today? If it's more, you have negative churn — your existing book grows even if you never sign another logo. Gross Retention strips out the expansion and just asks how many dollars stayed. One tells you about your growth engine. The other tells you whether your bucket leaks.
The old playbook said NRR of 110% was great. The 2026 reality is that 120% is table stakes for a premium exit. If your pricing model can't mathematically produce expansion — flat per-company subscriptions, no seats, no usage tiers, no module attach — you've capped your ceiling before you've even started climbing.
Fix this at Series A. Retrofitting expansion later is brutal.
Patterns of Early-Stage VC Exuberance
Every founder dreams of closing that first significant funding round. The champagne pops, the press releases go out, and everyone believes they're building the next unicorn. But here's what nobody talks about: this moment of celebration often marks the beginning of a dangerous blind spot that will doom 80% of these companies.
We've watched this pattern play out dozens of times. Let us show you how it happens—and more importantly, how to spot it before it's too late.
The Entrepreneurship Ecosystem Trampoline: Why Upstate NY's Scattered Startup Support Keeps Entrepreneurs Grounded
The entrepreneurship support ecosystem in Upstate New York represents a significant public and private investment. But investment alone doesn't guarantee outcomes. Without coordination, standardization, and growth-stage support, even the most well-intentioned programs risk creating fragmentation rather than the cohesive infrastructure needed to compete with established innovation hubs.
Until these springs are properly anchored, Upstate NY's entrepreneurs will keep bouncing—sometimes finding support, sometimes falling through gaps, but rarely achieving the height needed to attract the serious capital that builds transformative companies.
The abundance of organizations isn't the problem. The lack of coordination and consistency is. It's time to anchor the trampoline properly, so Upstate's entrepreneurs can finally jump high enough to reach the moon.
Reflections post NY State Innovation Summit 2025 Rochester
We attended the New York State Innovation Summit in Rochester at the end of October, organized by FuzeHub and supported by the Empire State Development's Division of Science, Technology and Innovation. With over 500 participants, the energy was palpable—entrepreneurs, investors, university leaders, and government officials all partnering to build something meaningful in Upstate New York.
We've been to many startup events on both coasts, and what strikes us most about Upstate NY is the collaboration. Partnerships run seamlessly between state government, universities, investors, and entrepreneurship support organizations. There's a genuine sense of community here that feels different from the competitive intensity I've experienced elsewhere.
But we couldn't leave Rochester without confronting the elephant in the room: the striking disparities between the Upstate NY and Bay Area startup ecosystems.