What's Crowded and What's Underserved
I still read funding flows out of habit, a leftover from years of raising money myself. That instinct has made the AI wave more interesting to watch than anything has been in a long time. What I am seeing is a familiar pattern at a scale I have not seen before. The money is pouring in, and it is pouring into a few places while running right past others.
Startup Lessons, Seen From Inside a Bank
Distance changes how you read your own history. With some years between me and the startup chapter, and a stretch on the other side of the table inside a bank, a lot of what used to feel like friction or bad timing looks different now. Some of the walls I spent energy resenting turned out to be the actual shape of the business. Here is what I would tell the version of me who was building back then.
The Other Side of the Bank Run
I've been thinking about the SVB collapse from the startup side. The banking analysis has been thorough. Duration mismatch, concentrated deposits, digital bank run. But there's another story that hits closer to home. The story of the founders who spent that weekend not knowing if they could pay their teams.
The math, the narrative, and the gap between them
The first time I sat down with a VC to talk about a raise, I assumed there was some formula behind the valuation number. Some model that spit out what the company was worth. There wasn't. The number on a term sheet is a lot less scientific than most people think, and figuring out how it actually gets set was one of the more useful things I learned raising money.
The Basics Before Reading a Bank's Books
I've been wanting to dig into bank financial statements, but I kept realizing I was fuzzy on some basics. I've worked with financial statements before, built projections for investors, reviewed monthly P&Ls, tracked cash burn. But that was a while ago, and I never had formal accounting training. So before jumping into bank-specific financials, I wanted to ground the fundamentals.
Lessons from Both Sides of the Table
I used to think banks were just slow. When I was pitching mobile payments to bankers years ago, I couldn't understand why they didn't see what seemed obvious to me. Working inside a bank, I've had to revisit some of those assumptions.
