Office Hours: Reader Questions
This is the first open Q&A I have run on this Substack.
Stanford GSB Professor on Startups & Investors
Office hours with Stanford Professor Ilya Strebulaev. Data-driven VC rankings, Stanford frameworks, and field notes for founders raising capital and investors deploying it.
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Latest posts
The 2026 Venture Ranking: The Top 50 Biotech VC Firms
Pre-release for founding members
Inside the Investment Committee: How VCs Actually Make Decisions
What you’ll learn: How investment memos work, why most VCs skip DCF entirely, and the evidence that unanimity is quietly destroying fund returns.
Jockey or Horse? The Oldest Debate in Venture Capital
What you’ll learn: Whether investors really bet on the team or the business: what they say, what they do, and what the evidence shows.
Charts of the Month: Who Founds Unicorns — and Who Funds Them
Israel’s outsized pipeline; teams of three that met at work; Google in, PayPal out, OpenAI next; the gender gap that compounds — plus a look at the investors
Office hours on VC and startups, open to everyone
Twelve questions on venture capital — why VCs push for growth, what makes a founder fundable, how to tell skill from luck, and what to do if you are one of the 199 startups out of 200 that will never
Applying to Y Combinator This Week: How to Get Through the Filter
YC’s Fall 2026 batch closes to on-time applications on July 27. Here is what my research (and YC’s own advice) on funnels, cold pitches, and the first two minutes says about getting through
The Deal Funnel: Why VCs Say No to 99 Out of 100 Startups
How investors source deals, the funnel that filters a hundred opportunities down to one investment, and why the odds are stacked against founders. VC 101: Investor Decision Making — Part 1 of 6.
The Making of a Unicorn Founder Is Changing
Most unicorn founding teams trace back to a shared workplace — and the employers those teams come from have changed.
The Best US Universities for Unicorn Founders
Which universities are most likely to “produce” a unicorn founder?