The Vanishing Sub $5M Round

Hey y’all — here’s today at a glance:

🔗 Houck’s Picks

My favorite finds of the week.

Fundraising

• Waseem Khan on bootstrap vs. VC vs. revenue-based financing (Link)

• Sara Anjum’s most important fundraising step for deeptech founders (Link)

Growth

• Chris Pisarski shares one thing to get much better at sales (Link)

• Jeremy Haynes on how to build $1M/month funnels in 2026 (Link)

ICYMI

• Liberate yourself from self-doubt with this 5 step guide (Link)*

• Mike Chambers gives advice to anyone thinking about starting a company (Link)

• Andrew Gazdecki on the best thing you can do for your future exit (Link)

• Rubén Domínguez Ibar on Ben Horowitz’s “The Struggle” (Link)

• Jimmy Kim on how people are better at telling you what they don’t want (Link)

• Tech trends to watch in 2026 according to VCs (Link)

💡 Opportunity: Automated Music Copyright Clearance Platform

In college and for a little bit after, I worked as a DJ. I still do it for fun sometimes (peep my last mix).

One thing any DJ can tell you is that the music industry is intense about copyright. If you make a two hour mix and one track gets flagged by one label, the whole thing comes down.

I get it, honestly. Music is a tough asset to own because it’s so easy to distribute, copy, and devalue. They have to protect their investments.

But DJs are a bad market — most don’t make a lot, they tend to find ways to get by, and have a low willingness to pay because the actual stakes are pretty low.

But wedding videographers have high stakes. They’re capturing some of life’s most important moments for many. And they build their businesses on referrals, so delivering a good experience is important.

They can’t afford to have their clients’ wedding videos get taken down for copyright, but they also want to make sure they use the right, memorable song(s) in the videos they create.

An LLM-based agent that works on their behalf to clear copyright concerns via micro-licensing deals (that would be low ROI on the time it takes a human to negotiate) would allow them to create more compelling videos without risk.

🧠 Framework: The 1,000 People Framework

Trying to build a product for millions is impossible.

If an opportunity is that common, it’s already likely been solved for by another product.

The products that are eventually used by millions get there because the market grew quickly, not because it started out that big.

Instead, start with a small market. This framework from Greg Isenberg can help:

1. Picture 1,000 people who have unique similarities

2. Build personas to understand them

3. Ask what they’ll pay for every year

4. Map out how to reach all 1,000

It’s not about your TAM, it’s about your clarity.

📈 Trend: The Vanishing Sub $5M Round

Seed rounds have been growing in size for years, even as MVPs and initial growth strategies have gotten cheaper to execute on.

Why is that?

The truth is that capital markets have moved upstream.

Large, multi-stage funds have increasingly started writing earlier stage checks in the hope of better returns. For them, a larger bet is actually what’s required to make it worth their time.

And founders are more than happy to take more mooney, especially if it comes from reputable names who can help them out in future rounds too.

You can see where this is going.

Startups get overcapitalized before proving the fundamentals of their market, and they get pressure to scale before they’re ready.

This is rational behavior, though, in what’s becoming a twisted market dynamic.

💬 Quote: Hire For Jobs You Know How To Do

If you can’t understand something, it’s hard to know if the person you’re paying to do is worth what you’re paying or not.

This is essentially where the old idea of not hiring for a role you haven’t first tried to do yourself comes from.

Even in a case where the business may have a growing need, if you and no one else on the team can honestly assess someone’s aptitude and, eventually, performance then you’re setting yourself up to make a bad decision.

Maybe you’ll get lucky…

I get it though — when you’re growing fast you have to hire fast sometimes. I know, I know, we say hire slow and fire fast. But life doesn’t always give us the flexibility for that.

But, in those cases, loop someone else from your network into your interview loop. Even if they don’t work for you. Just having a voice in the hiring committee room who you trust and who actually knows the role and what’s required to do well in it will be huge.

How We Can Help

Advertise in this newsletter to get in front of 65,000+ founders.