Mercedes Bent

  • FMB 16: How much could I raise?

    This is one of the most common questions I hear from founders at the preseed and seed stages. Headlines constantly glorify $500M, $60M, and $27M seed rounds. But $500k and $2M are also super common. How can a founder know what they can raise? Fundraising can be an enigma, but I believe fundraising also has…

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  • NIM Innovation: A Lending Mental Model

    Foreword: I’ve long been a mentor of startups in the Entrepreneurship and VC class at Stanford. Recently I was hosting several GSB students from the class who were working on a lending startup, and we got to “whiteboarding.” Well, napkin writing. I shared my lending mental model with them and realized I’ve never encapsulated it…

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