Different startup stages and what they mean for you

Yeah. We're here to talk about startup stages. Try to be as informative as possible. Obviously, you know, given my position here, I would love for you to consider working at a YC startup. Sounds like some of you are already at startups. But I'm gonna overview this the way that we talk about it, which actually aligns really well with what you're talking about.

And then if you know all this stuff, hopefully, you'll stick around, and there's some things to learn. If you don't know all this stuff, hopefully, you'll learn a little bit. So Seed, as we talk about it, is typically preproduct. Right? They don't have a product.

It's like your your your typical or your your your story of two people in a garage trying to build a thing and build a product, get customers. Obviously, it's prerevenue. We also talk about seed as, you know, 2,000,000 to 5,000,000 raised. Maybe you'd wanna find something even earlier than that, and YC has resources to do that. It's Paige and I.

But when companies raise money, $15,000,000, that's when we call them a seed round, and they're ready to hire. We'll talk about what it means to do a safe and an unpriced round and angel investors. Again, it's two to 10 people, really small, work with founders.

And the roles that they're typically hiring for are engineers, maybe ops people depending on the type of company, and they're looking for people who are more jack of all trades, who are flexible. Again, we're gonna go in each of these in detail. So I just wanna go an overview so you get a sense of where we're going with this.

Series A, not it is correlated and not always, know, definitely correlated with having product market fit. If you don't know a product market fit, we're gonna give you a very specific and recent definition of it. So product market fit, maybe maybe you haven't hit it, but it has reached as 5 or 20,000,000. It is a price ground that's important for your stock and your equity.

VCs, venture capitalists are involved. 10 to 50 people, you know, then you start bringing in mid level managers. You're not working with the founders as much, and that's just a slight distinction of how the company is growing. And maybe you're gonna be the mid level manager if you were there to seed. You know? A lot of people wanna be there earlier so they can have more of a leadership position.

Also, at series a, you might have go to market roles open, maybe recruiting roles open, and maybe some specialization. We'll go into each of those in more detail. Next is growth. So say you have product market fit and this thing is firing. We're gonna talk about what product market fit looks like, but you're at this point of market capture. You're trying to get more users. You're trying to grow.

You're going to bring in more more gunpowder, if you will, and that's like 50, a hundred million, BCD round. The VCs are definitely involved. Maybe maybe strategic investors if you're in a specific industry, you might need that.

50 to 500 people, scaling organizations, codifying departments, meaning that before it was a little, loosey goosey, and now you're trying to scale something to be an organization that's durable. And then the roles are ops, customer support, specialization. And then the last stage we talk about is scale. Like, it's really, really, really just market expansion. Maybe you're going international.

Maybe you're trying to find partnerships for, like, more user acquisitions. I have some examples to give around Twitter and Lyft. Maybe you're raising literally a half a billion dollars, a lot of institutional money, 500 plus people, prepping for an IPO, building out the exec team, redundancy.

The types of roles that are at those companies changes, and so that's why it's important to think that this is, you know, going to be a public company. And what does that look like if you guys work there? Hiring for everything and lots of specialization. So that's where we're going. That's the overview of this thing, and I almost like to give the overview.

Because if people are like, I know all this crap. I'm gonna go have my beer. That's fine too. Alright. So let's go into the seed. And if you have questions, definitely shoot it in the chat, and I'll see if I can circle back before the end.

We talk about seed companies a lot at YC because we are literally bringing on 200 to 250 companies, giving them half a million dollars, which is, like, maybe a quarter of their seed money. And we tell them to do three things. We tell them to do, number one, you have to make something people want, and that is hard. Right? How do you know what people want? How do know what market, what industry?

But they have to build something people want. The other thing they have to do in order to make something people want, and Mark and I have experienced this, so you gotta talk to your users. If you've never talked to users before, how do you know you're building something people want?

You're just, like, theoretically building something from some theoretical market, and that's where founders who don't talk to users and try to make something people want run out of money and die as a company, and do things that don't scale. You might have heard this. Have you guys all heard this? Raise your hand. Maybe you've seen this. Okay. No. Okay.

There some people who haven't. So these are, like, the principles of YC. And if you're ever gonna start a startup, you're gonna hear this over and over and over and over again. Like, make something people want, talk to users, and do things that don't scale. Let's make this more concrete by bringing in a fairly famous YC company called Airbnb. You know?

Before it was Airbnb, it used to be called airbedandbreakfast. com. Kind of a a mouthful, not that, like, Airbnb was taken as a domain. And while you all know it as this amazing app with hosts and platings and ways to, like, book book amazing place to to to spend the night. When it first started, this is the website.

The website was actually more of a promotion for this IDSA design conference trying to get the attention of people who are flying in as designers and needed people places to stay. Right?

It wasn't the marketplace in the full sense or at least didn't come out that way, and they were doing something that was very specific, not scalable, but they knew that there was a pain point around the designers who were coming in and couldn't find places to stay. You know?

And the Airbnb founders tell the story certainly better than I do, but this is the MVP where it's a Google Map, a bunch of people who they hand reached out to to say, can we give you a a a an airbed? Or if you have an airbed and you're going to host someone and you could you know, the early elements of a marketplace.

But you can imagine if you are starting at an early stage company like Airbnb, you are iterating. You are doing things that are not scalable. You are, like, just slapping stuff together and hoping that there's something here, and maybe even then you'd be like, I don't even know if sleeping on air beds is going to be a thing. Right? Because it really comes down to this.

You know, these this is one of the longest tenured, Airbnbs of sleeping on someone's couch that has been on the platform maybe even the first, like, year or so.

And Brian tells this amazing story of he used to do things that don't scale and talk to users by staying at these people's houses, seeing what the experience was, and iterating from there and trying to figure out, like, how can we make it more personable, more attractive, what touches do they have, how can we improve the photography. Right?

That's what an early seed stage company looks like, and it is it is not scalable. It is talking to users, and it is trying to build something people want on both sides of the marketplace. Why do things that don't scale? That's a great question because a lot of times, your intuition is to immediately do something that scales and not talk to users.

But if you don't have product market fit, if you don't have something people want, you end up wasting all your time doing things that are scaling infrastructure, scaling, you know, your system for microservices. If you look at that Airbnb website, it's a really, really simple thing.

It's probably just HTML, you know, h you know, HTML two o, maybe jQuery if that even existed back then, and the minimum viable product, the MVP. If you do things that if you try to go and scale too early, you might think, okay. Well, I'm gonna build this in a microservices architecture.

I'm gonna, like, keep the users sharded away from the reservations, sharded away from, like, payments and all this other stuff, not a monolith. And that's, from a technical perspective, that causes two two problems. I'm sorry if I'm getting too techy. Number one, you're investing in infrastructure that is unimportant because there's no scale. There might not even be users.

You might need to iterate. Number two, by building out that infrastructure for this future scale that might actually happen, you're actually adding more complexity to the infrastructure, which means you move slower as a product and as a piece of software. Right? Yep.

Next question, is it, is it able resource efficiency because you'll eventually get scaling rather than defensibility or nonobvious scalable ideas? I'm gonna have think about what that means later.

So that's one reason why you don't wanna scale too early, and you've seen companies that do this and then end up in a quagmire of infrastructure but have never actually gotten customers or product market fit. Team, two to 10 people. It is really focused on product development, you know, getting something out there, iterating. Typically, the founders are PMs.

And even you know, Page and I talk to a lot of our founders. They'll come to us and be like, I wanna hire a PM right out of the gate. And Michael Seibel has said this. I've seen this. You do not want to be hiring as a founder, a PM. You are responsible for talking to user. You're responsible business. Do not outsource this.

And so if you have a product manager on the call and you're looking for PM roles, I would be wary of companies that are super early looking for PMs. Right? There is a place where that might make sense. Maybe it's a series a, and we'll talk a little bit about that.

But, you know, that's one one cautionary tale of, like, if you're if you're a PM and you're looking for roles and there's, a two person team looking for a PM, I'd be worried. Again, open roles, product development, I'm talking more about engineering, things that are really just building the product.

And operations has a question mark because early stage companies like DoorDash, Instacart that are operational in nature sometimes actually hire an operations person because they need to be packing boxes. They need to be shipping things. They need to be driving around, alongside the founders doing it. You know?

Even when I was at Lyft, you know, five or six years in, the founders were still driving, still taking rides, talking to customers. So there's no excuse for the founders not to do these things to really understand the customers, but they might hire an operations person here or there.

So if you're an operations person trying to get in the game in early stage startup, finding one where that resonance is there, very important.

The other thing that I don't have on here that I should have mentioned is that there are sometimes very specialized roles at these teams, particularly in engineering, if it's ML or ML or data science or something like that, if the company is very specific in that niche of ML or data science. Right?

And so, while most roles at startups or a lot of roles are, like, full stack, do a little bit of everything, jack of all trades, you'll find some resonance around companies if they're, like, specializing in ML or hardware or specific type of hardware that they need that specialization. Do you need to have PM experience to be a good founder PM?

It turns out that you don't always need to, but you have to want to do it and be able to pick it up. We have a lot of founders who are just really, really technical, and they have an idea that they might not have been a PM before. And so actually in going through YC, we teach them the things that we talked about, make something people want, talk to users, and they learn those things.

It turns out that we turn away founders who don't wanna do those things, who don't want to talk to users or make something people want and just wanna build whatever's in their head. Right? Because part of being a good founder is being adaptable, being able to learn, and willing to, to iterate because startups are never a linear path. That's a good question. Compensation at seed stage startups.

We're finding that base salary can come to 80 to 90% of thing, and there's a reason for that. Because despite what's happening in the market, there are there are so many startups. There's actually been an influx of capital into, into all stages of startups, and, it's a competitive place.

So if you're going to try to lowball anybody on the market, particularly engineers at seed stage companies, there's gonna be someone who's willing to pay more. You know? We actually tell our founders that if you are if you are losing out on founder on on people who are going through the interview process repeatedly, you're probably trying to lowball people.

And I was talking to someone two days ago, and that's what's happening. I'm just like, you're trying to hire someone off of Amazon. You're trying to hire someone from Bloomberg, and you keep losing. What are you offering? Yeah. That's way too low. Right? And so I say this also to you that you should expect to get paid 80 to 90.

Maybe that's not suitable for you. You know? And that's what we're gonna talk about the different stages. But base salary is around there. And then maybe the benefits are in place, which is not to say you won't get health care more than maybe they'll just give you more money to say, hey. Take care of health care until we have that HR person in place or until we figure it out.

We at YC tell our founders to give 10% to the first ten hires. That doesn't mean that they all get 1%. It really depends on where you're coming from. It depends on what the criticality of the role is. Engineers, because are so valuable, if you will, you know, they'll get two, two and a half.

If you're a founding engineer, maybe, like, 5% in a rare case where it's almost like you're you're a cofounder. At this point, you should expect stock options. If people don't know about stock options, it's basically a percentage of the company. The tricky thing here just to know is that when you get stock options, it's the option to buy into the value of the company.

You can buy it now or you can buy it later. The tricky thing is, number one, it's kind of unnatural for anyone who's never worked at a start up to be like, in order for me to work here, I have to pay you. Right? Because you're actually investing with your own money into the company. Because it's a stock option, you don't need to pay it, and you can buy it later.

The benefit of buying it earlier means that you're buying it at the value that it's currently at, and you're buying the value it's currently at. You're not making a profit right when you buy it. And if you do the thing in '83 b election, then your tax basis for that remains you know, you're not getting taxed on it. You're getting taxed on it as long term capital gains. You're buying this asset.

You're waiting two years and then four years, five years after a longer period. And then when you're able to sell it, you're selling it with a long term capital gain, which is a lower tax rate than if you don't buy it. And then, say, somewhere down the line, you know, five, ten years from now, you then exercise the stock.

You don't have to pay anything out of pocket because, hopefully, you bought it for 25¢. It's worth $25. It'll cover itself, but you're now paying a long term capital or short term capital gain, which is, like, you know, 40% tax rate. I'm not a tax specialist.

Talk to your tax expert, but just keep that in mind that when you're dealing with stock options, number one, you're paying the company because you're investing in the company. And number two, paying for it later means that you are going to be paying the long term capital gains rate.

And there's also this other risk of this thing called AMT, alternative minimum tax that you should look into, and, we can talk about later if it's helpful. But talk to your tax expert as necessary. This level of compensation seems great, but I have seen YC companies offering ridiculous lower salaries and equity than what you were suggesting.

I'm happy to chat with you specifically to see what you're seeing, you know, from named companies, but I'm curious because I'm trying to tell them this. And if they're trying to offer you something and you're not taking it, that means other people aren't too. And that's not in your best interest, and it's not in their best interest. And we need to be telling them that.

Usual vesting period is four years. So you have a tranche of stock, and then you get one quarter of it in one year, and then typically it's one month thereafter. You'll hear other variations of this in which it's like, I think Amazon and Snap do ten, twenty, 30, 40 percentage over four years. So you know? But typical is is, vesting over four years. I wanna start by why not join.

Although most of you seem to be pretty wired to, like, joining early stage startups, you wouldn't be here. Number one, you need financial security. Right? And so if it is, if you need to get paid a hundred or, you know, all cash right now and, you know, Netflix is known for not giving any equity and paying, like, some 450 to, like, $600,000 in cash.

And if that's what you're coming from, maybe the startup is not gonna do it because you're gonna be pulling back, like, a hundred and 80, and that's that's a pretty big delta. Totally makes sense. You need structure. Again, startups are sometimes a lot, lot less. Things are iterating. Things are appearing. Things are changing.

If you need structure that I'm working on this for the next three months with clarity, startups are tip early stage seed startups are probably not where you wanna be. And if you hate uncertainty. Right? Everyone does not like ambiguity or or or uncertainty, and it's especially so with startups. You know, are you gonna be able to raise the next round? Are you gonna get customers?

It can be a roller coaster. And so if you want that certainty, then, you know, early stage, c stage startups, maybe using series a might not be for you. Why you might wanna join a startup? And there's a great talk by Justin Kahn who talks about these two things, why not and why. One is impact.

If you're at a larger company, maybe you're not, having as much impact in a way that is feasible or tangible to you. Ownership and trust. Maybe you like a small piece of something that's really large, versus at an early stage startup, seed or series a, you have a lot of ownership. You have a lot of trust. Learning opportunities.

You're you're just thrown in the kitchen sink, and you gotta figure out how to do it. You know? If you don't know how to use a new framework, you you gotta figure it out. New library. Gotta figure it out. And then, ideally, you're working with knowledgeable founders. You know?

We're seeing more and more founders who have worked at YC companies, have learned maybe through Gusto or through Instacart and then coming back and starting their own companies because they wanna do it. So we have some knowledgeable founders from there, Facebook, Google, coming in and, you know, starting the next round of companies. I go into more detail, and I can share this offline.

But, like, you know, this resonates from the conversations that we have with employees and people who are looking at startups where they get to build the foundations of the company, not just the software, but also, like, how should this organization look? How should we hire people? How should we interview?

People want an outsized impact, and wanna be in a place where if they didn't come into work, it felt like a bad thing. That's how I felt when I was early at Salesforce. Like, if I'm not here, the API is not gonna get built. These features aren't gonna get built. Whether or not that's true, I don't know. Probably not. But that's the type of person it takes to work in an early stage company.

Ownership trust, you know, feeling like you're part of the decision making process. Founders actually care about people's product opinions because they wanna be able to scale the ability to build product by making by letting and empowering employees, early stage employees to make decisions and to be treated like a peer. Right?

To be treated like someone that that you wanna work with, not just, like, being told to, like, to fix a widget every time. Learning opportunities and, you know, knowledgeable founders. I mentioned this a bit. Like, cofounders, you should be asking cofounders, like, what their experience is, what's what's, their their magic magic abilities.

If you wanna find seed stage companies, you can find them yourself on our platform. So here is a new filter that we added with company stage that defines these four things, series a, growth, scale, seed. You'll also note that we now have equity ranges.

We're encouraging our our founders to post equity ranges on the platform, because if it doesn't fit you, it's not what you're looking for, you know, we don't wanna waste your time. And then here's what the listing of companies looks like with jobs and so forth. And if any of you have questions or feedback, let me know.

These are questions to ask at seed stage companies, and I'd argue you should be thinking of these questions throughout your job search at any stage company. It just becomes more relevant when you're talking to seed stage companies because you're typically talking to the founders. Right?

And you're gonna get the honest answers, and you're also gonna use these questions to evaluate the founders and whether or not you wanna work there. The first one is what is your runway and burn rate? Right?

A lot of these, a lot of these companies that are that are that are having layoffs and unfortunately hitting the skids have not been looking at their runway and burn rate or were looking at their runway and burn rate in a the rosiest, glasses possible. Right? But, obviously, the market has pulled back a bit. Maybe, consumer spending or even enterprise spending has gone down.

The economy, you know, can't get lending, all those kinds of things. So, fundamentally, this question of what is your runway and burn rate is asking the founders how do they think about the business. What are the variables to the business? Those variables are how much money you've raised, how how much you're doing literally in revenue. Right? When that revenue runs out, what is your plan?

Is your plan to grow revenue? How much? By what point? What are your goals? As well as when are gonna raise a series a? U or series b, or whatever the next round of funding is. Right? You're just you're asking the question.

Maybe you don't need to know everything about it, but what you're really also asking is, like, how does the founder think about this as a solid business because they're the person who is gonna be thinking about this day and night, and you wanna be able to trust them and understand that they know their business, their product, their customers, and so forth. Right? So you should be able to ask that.

And we tell our founders to be very transparent with what this is because anything less than transparency is both just being a jerk and also, being disingenuous. Right? You want to know that they know who their customers are, who they're selling into, who's paying for this thing, and really have a good sense of where there might be product market fit.

And the answer is not always a we have product market fit, based on your appetite for risk. It might be like we're really early, and we're trying to figure that. We have these two prototypes. We have these two demos, and that should factor into the risk equation of how much compensation, how much equity that you're gonna be getting.

But these customers, you need to know your customers or at least who your prospective customers are, and that's a question that you should absolutely be asking. What insights do you have that others don't? Look.

There's a million different softwares out there and many competing in the same market, and you ideally want founders who have an insight or have knowledge about the industry or the space or have learned something unique or novel in starting their startup that gives them an advantage. And in fact, we ask this of them on their YC application. We interview for this.

We wanna know how much they're thinking about it. So, you should be asking these questions. And if they don't have a great answer or they're giving you handwavy answers, that's not a good situation to be in either. You should be able to ask at any stage, how do you evaluate your stock options?

And we tell our founders to go into gross detail about how much it's worth, even if it's not worth very much at all, how much it could grow, but also that this thing could go to zero. Right? It just is what it is. And, again, you wanna be as full transparent full transparency from the founders. And if they're not giving that to you, you should have cause for concern.

And lastly, what can I learn by working here and working with you? You know, ideally, we all want to be learning stuff on the job. I don't know any job in which you, like, wanna stop learning. So you probably wanna be working with people who have something to share or to, learn from. And I I look at this from all types of companies, small or large.

If you look at the founders and their background, whether it's in sales like Salesforce, whether it's in, like, design, whether it's design like Twitter or whether or not it's it's operational like the founders of Lyft, right, you're gonna learn a lot about that industry, and you're gonna learn a lot about the founders in that space because that's where they're specialists, and that's where they're gonna go deep.

And by looking at the founders and understanding, okay. Well, that's how the business probably is run. And do I jive with that? And is there stuff here that I'm gonna learn by working here with you? Questions there? There's a question about how many years of experience are YC and non YC startups looking for within DS and ML roles?

For early, early, early stage, if you wanna join some like, we've had some, like, Turing was one, Postera was one. They're looking for DS and ML people who are probably, like, five to ten years of experience. Typically, early hires are pretty experienced. There are anomalies when they hire people who are, like, fresh out of college. So there's a range.

But, typically, if you're looking for DS and ML at really, really early stage companies, they want someone with experience who's built models, who maybe built models and built infrastructure, almost like a full stack data science person. Alright. So that's a so that's a quick wrap on seed stage, and we'll have q and a afterwards. Now let's transition a bit to series a.

In series a, as we mentioned earlier, is, like, product market fit? We always talk about product market fit as Marc Andreessen defined product market fit, which is the customers are buying the product just as fast as you can make it. Usage is growing just as fast as you can add more service. Like, this is, like, where scale becomes, like, throwing more service and scaling this thing.

Money from customers is piling up in your company's checking account. That's very important. You're making a business. You're not just, like, giving a thing away for free and running red and going out of business, and and you're hiring sales and customer support staff as fast as you can.

Not all series a companies have this, but if you define product market fit here, it's somewhere in this space where either you have it or you're right before having it, and that's why the investors might be starting to invest. Michael Seibel, who is a partner here at, at YC and one of the founders at Twitch, has this kind of corollary, which is like people, I.

E, founders, act like product market fit, the term, is flexibly defined, but it's not. You know, they use it as if it's, like, saying green or blue or yellow and just calling them all orange. You know, calling, oh, I I've talked to a couple people, and there's product market fit, or we have two customers, and there's product market fit, we have a backlog of LOI, there's product market fit.

Those things are not product market fit. There's no one selling. There's nothing burning. And so be sure that when you're asking those questions of who are your customers, what's your run rate, what's your burn rate, that they're answering very specific, clear, crystal crystal clearly what they define product market fit and whether or not you jive with it. Right?

Product market fit happens after you build something that people want. It's it's product market fit happens after you build something people don't want. It's when users are using your product in an explosive and destructive way. He uses this example at Twitch in which, like, it feels like you're just trying to get people to use it. You're just trying to get people, to stream.

And, like, that was, he said, was a sisyphusian pass just rolling a ball uphill, and the amount of things that you had to do as a streamer early on with, like, ODS and having a video camera and getting any of this stuff to work because it's even before laptops had video cameras was just impossible.

But when it finally clicked, people were streaming so much that their servers were on fire, that they were, you know, paying more at AWS costs than they actually had in the bank. Like, it was arguably you know, are they making money?

Maybe not at that point, but it was very clear that there was that they had built something that people want, that that this thing was now trying to stop the proverbial, boulder from rolling downhill and crushing everything in its way. And so that's, like, the destructive force of actually hitting product market fit. So we define the series a as, like, product market fit.

You're really close to that. You've raised 5 to $20,000,000. It's still an investment in building product and driving adoption, and so you wanna get it in more people's hands. Maybe there are a few customers that you have that shows that, like, look. There's a hundred million dollar oh, sorry. A hundred thousand dollar annual contract. You're doing, like, you know, 3,000,000 ARR, and it could grow.

Is that product market fit? You're pretty close. And the question for you is, like, trying to figure out whether or not that's true, and we'll give some tips on how to do that. Venture capital is usually invested or involved. Maybe you heard Sequoia and Andreessen.

I wouldn't use those names I wouldn't use those names just alone to say this company has product market fit or that I should join because of that. And sometimes founders will put you in touch with with people at Andreessen and Sequoia to to sell you.

And that's good data and good information, but you have to use your own judgment, your own signals, your own criteria of what you wanna join and what matters to you. The other thing about fundraising at a 5 to 20,000,000 series a is that it's a price round. So if maybe Andres Derskoye has put in $10,000,000, had a $50,000,000 valuation, that means that they now own 20% of the company. Right?

And so there's actually a fixed price per share. And so if you're given an offer with a certain number of, shares, then you can actually learn what that's worth even if it's funding money early on. Or if you were the early stage seed company and then they raised a series a, you can actually price what that's worth. And we'll show an example of that that might be like, okay.

Now you see why people join series a, seed stage companies. Sorry. I'm repeating myself because my nose keeps itching. This is TMI. And we eventually end up editing this thing. So I, like, repeat myself without my hand dinging my face. TMI. Sorry.

Okay. So that's the price round. What does the team look like at that stage? 10 to 50 people, really focused on building product just like they were at the seed stage, but you're really trying to find product market fit or grow what you have as part of market fit to, you know, to to grow the the user base and grow sales.

That's where you start hiring go to market experts, recruitings, maybe specialists, maybe customer support too, but definitely go to market. You know, early stage Salesforce was just like, what are the two things that matter? Building a product and selling it. And I find that to be for most most companies, particularly in b to b.

So your early hires are gonna be all engineers to build a thing and, salespeople. Salespeople, by the way, at these early stage companies don't look like your order taking kind of like, hey. Who wants it? Line up, and then I'll, like, negotiate a good offer.

Early stage startup salespeople have a really good insight of product, want to talk to customers, aren't just disqualifying, aren't just being like, okay. You don't meet these qualifications. You're not a prospect. Get rid of it. They're really sitting there with customers, understanding the pain points, and trying to figure out where the gap is and bringing that feedback back into product.

One of Salesforce's early salespeople, a guy named Drew, was delightful to work at. And I had always, like, been wary of salespeople, but he would come back with really great product feedback, which would help him because he's, you know, in my ear about what we should be willing. And then we prioritize it, but also helps us understand what is actually happening out there in the market. Alright.

Compensation. Again, it's about 80 to 90% of base salary. You can have health and dental, and it's gonna be closing in on market rates by series, you know, what we call growth. It is very it's like at salary for, for for the market. Equity, you're still doing stock options.

If you do the math, I don't know if this math is a % correct, but, like, 20 point two five, so a quarter percent of $50,000,000 might be 250 k. I feel like that's off. But, you know, that's where, again, you get to the point where it's a priced per share, and you could back into how much that you have this company.

Again, it is funny money early stage with a four year vesting schedule similar to before. We have a number of series a companies in our portfolio.

It's crazy, this market right now, because while on the one hand, there are layoffs and there's a lot of companies having, stutter steps, we are seeing a lot of series a companies or a lot of companies in the past couple of batches raise their series a or announce their series a, and, you can use the tool like you saw before. Yeah. It's a 25 k. Sorry about that. Yeah. It didn't make sense.

I think I was just I was messing with the numbers earlier. But there are a number of series a companies. You can use our tool. And if you reach out to us and series a is more of where you need to be, shoot us a note, and then we can try to help you find them if the tool doesn't work. And the tool sometimes doesn't work.