Valar Atomics, a nuclear startup, is suing one of its own investors, Day One Ventures, over its ~$1B Series B.

Day One put in $1M at seed and $15M at the A. They own under 5%, but they have pro-rata, so they can buy into each new round to keep their stake.

The new lead wanted the whole round, so major investors got asked to waive. Everyone did except Day One. Their contract had a spring-back: if anyone who waived got an allocation anyway, everyone's rights came back.

One big insider was going to get one. So the day before closing, the majority voted the clause out.

Day One says they offered to give up most of their allocation and Valar wanted them to give up every future round instead.

I can see both sides. The lead wants to deploy the full check. But seed funds lose on most bets and pro-rata is how you double down on the one that works. If the majority can just delete the clause, I'm not sure what that right was worth.

Where do you land on this?

Hi,

I am a recent grad (one year out of bba from university of toronto) with like 2ish years of startup experience as an intern + have a very small side business (part time) right now, and I am looking for a founder's associate or similar role at an early stage (pre-seed to seed) startup. How should I get one?

I have tried cold emailing with a custom project (like making a non-dilutive funding map as a pdf and attaching it) and none of it worked. Not sure what to try. Please advice.

Is there anyway I can access these early stage founders who actually want a founder's associate type person? Where? How? (and do they even want one?) Is there any network/community of such early stage founders in Canada/US?

Thank you!

How do you decide what’s worth paying for when you’re bootstrapping?

I see a lot of founders looking for help with growing their business, but when it comes to paying for that help, the budget isn’t always there.

I get it. Money is tight, and you have to be intentional about where it goes. But you also can’t afford to stay stuck forever.

What are you actually spending money on right now? And if your business isn’t growing the way you want, what would make you willing to invest in getting help?

Is it a money issue, a trust issue, or a question of whether the help is worth the cost?

Quick note: English isn’t my first language, so I used AI to help me write this post in clear English. The situation, the details and the dilemma are all mine.

I’m the founder/CEO of a ~10-year-old, profitable legal-tech SaaS in Mexico (small team: tech lead, 4 devs, QA, plus an offshore dev team in India that we coordinate with mostly in writing, in English). I’ve been looking for a Senior PM for months and I’m stuck between two options.

Candidate A: the one who left

• Hired him in August after a long process. Strong profile: 6 years as Senior PM at a well-known fintech, technical background, C1 English. My tech lead picked him over the other finalists.
• In his 3 weeks he wrote our product methodology, which we still use.
• Then he quit for an outside offer paying 30 to 40% more. No performance or culture issues.
• A few weeks later he came back asking to return as a contractor (invoicing instead of payroll), which gives him more net income. My accountant says the tax side is fine. For me, the cost is a bit lower because I would pay less taxes.
• I told him: same role, same responsibilities, only the payment method changes.
• He drafted the contract himself. It came back slightly above that number, written as “the amount we agreed” (we hadn’t). It also includes a guaranteed annual bonus of 2 monthly fees even if no goals are set, accumulating time off, freedom to take other clients, confidentiality limited to 5 years, a liability cap, an automatic fee increase if tax law changes, and an option to move to payroll later with seniority recognized from the contract start.
• Every ambiguous point is resolved in his favor. Nothing outrageous on its own, but it feels like a pattern.

How I feel about A

• I’m uncomfortable, maybe a bit annoyed. The amount isn’t a big difference, but it’s not what we discussed, and it was presented as if we had agreed on it.
• He also wrote that he’ll work “with no fixed schedule.” I know that’s standard for contractors, but my gut says it’s more about his convenience than about following the law.
• My real fear is that he’s someone who will always be asking for more.
• Part of me still prefers him, because he’s the most capable option. But after he left once, I don’t think I’d feel at ease with him, and I can’t tell whether that’s a fair signal or just my ego.
• I haven’t talked to him about the draft yet. I keep putting it off.

Candidate B: the runner-up

• 9 years in product across 5 startups, strong with data and SQL, has done some specific scraping (very close to what we do). Comfortable with our pay range and says money isn’t what moves him, though one past job change was partly for money.
• He’s authentic: what he says in interviews matches what he writes, and he’s transparent about how he uses AI.
• My tech lead’s read: “he lacks authority.” When pushed back on, he gives in quickly. His follow-up with developers sounds more like tracking than driving.
• English: weak when speaking. His written test without tools had many errors (around B1). With ChatGPT the output was clean and professional. Our offshore coordination is mostly written.
• In both versions of the test he missed a key operational step that was the core of his own case study.
• He’s in another process and will follow up next week.

My dilemma

• On capability, A wins: zero ramp-up, authority with the team, real English.
• On trust, B wins: no maneuvering, plain payroll, no contractor-reclassification risk.
• My unease about A might be the most important data point here, or it might be noise. I can’t tell which.

Questions

1. Would you rehire someone who left after 3 weeks for money and came back negotiating hard? Is a self-serving contract draft a red flag or just normal negotiation?
2. How much should a founder’s gut feeling weigh when the stronger candidate on paper makes you uneasy?
3. How much does “lacks authority” matter for a PM working with a small team and an offshore dev team?
4. For written async coordination, is “B1 English plus AI tools” good enough in practice?
5. Is there an option I’m not seeing?

TL;DR: My Senior PM quit after 3 weeks for a 30 to 40% better offer. Now he wants to come back as a contractor, and the contract he drafted tilts every gray area in his favor (however, this new scenario is cheaper for me). On paper he's the stronger candidate, but I feel uneasy and a bit annoyed, and I'm afraid he'll always be asking for more. The alternative is a runner-up who is honest and easy to trust, but my tech lead says he lacks authority, and his written English is around B1 without AI tools. Proven capability vs. trust: which would you pick, and is there an option I'm missing?

Founder-led sales question. After a good demo call, prospective customers usually has to sell it internally to people who weren't on the call. What I usually see is people sending decks or a recording of a meeting, and i suspect nobody looks at it.

What do you leave behind that actually reviewed/shared? A short video? A one-pager?

I'm working on this problem for B2B teams, so I'm biased, but I'd like to hear what's working before I make too many assumptions.

I have AI ML background and decent automation skills, working as a Product Manager in my current company I have some good ensighs of business and their working.

Thinking of a platform where I can provide GTM, AI Automation/integration and business strategy (in marketing and lead aquisition etc) to small businesses/struggling startups.

Do yll think this has any realistic use case? Problem I think is startups might not even feel like taking help from someone else coz evryone feels they know well enough to sustain their business... thoughts?

I quit my job about a year ago to found a solo “startup” and I even have a couple people helping me, not formally working for me. However due to a sudden medical issue I’ve been drained of my savings. Its a hardware company not super industrial but we still need about $20k to build any mvp.

I’ve just about run out of money and am in credit card debt from medical bills. There is a settlement that I cant rely, but is a possibility in the future. But as of right now I’ve had to move back home and I am currently looking for a job.

I tried to get a regular job and they told me I was overqualified.

I believe in/want to continue my startup with everything in my bones, but I need some income to sustain me. The company is already registered and I’ve listed it on my resume, but as a secondary no founder role. (I wasn’t getting interviews with founder listed). I never outright lied in interviews but also didn’t divulge I was founder, it rarely even cane up.

The issue is will I be able to continue working on it while at another company. Theyre not a direct competitor but the companies I’m qualified/getting interviews for are so big that the definition is broad. My lawyer said they probably won’t come after me unless I make it big.. but isnt that the point.

He said to consult him after the fact but im getting anxious, I know big companies have moonlighting clauses and NY and California don’t enforce but I want to hear any advice from people who may have had a similar situation.

Will disclosing this in prior inventions make them rescind the offer?again not a direct competitor but who knows what they’ll try to claim. Can I even still work on it?

Do I try to raise from friends and family? I keep getting told against this?

What should I do to protect myself and my idea? I feel like I didn’t even get a shot to really even bring my idea to life.

hi everyone,

we’re working on a startup in the makeup and beauty space and want to add a virtual try-on feature to our app.

we have a developer, but none of us has worked much with ar before, so we’re still figuring out where to start.

looking for an sdk, or another solution, that is reasonably priced and has proper documentation that someone new to ar can follow.

main concern is the quality of the makeup rendering. since this is for beauty products, the texture, detailing and how smoothly the makeup sits on the face are quite important. we want it to look realistic and polished, rather than like a basic Instagram filter.

has anyone here integrated something similar into their app or saas recently? which solution did you go with, and how difficult was it to get a decent result?

would appreciate hearing about your experience, including anything that turned out to be more difficult or expensive than expected

I'm working on something in the AI app space and running into an interesting problem.

Developers can build apps, but so can founders, PMs, and even nontechnical people using AI tools now.

The challenge is figuring out who actually needs these apps enough to use them regularly, especially when it comes to sharing them with teams or clients.

For founders who've faced this, did you pick one very specific customer group early on, or experiment with different audiences until something clicked?

And how did you figure out who was willing to pay versus who just thought the idea was cool?

Would love to hear what actually worked.

Hello,

Is there anyone here who started their company in the US while on a H1b visa? How did y'all navigate the process of visa transfer and incorporation ?

I have read about the Jan2025 amendment and asked AI for legal. I am not sure how to proceed. I find lawyers who are specialized in incorporating or immigration, and keep getting referred around. I dont have much funds to spend a ton on legal unless I know the path is valid. I am looking for someone with similar experiences so I can be confident that I am not the only one.

Title fix: *Delaware

I've been working in early stage startups in the Bay area for 7 years now and currently working at my third one. And after several years of trying to make this product successful I think the writing is on the wall that this will be another failure.

I love startups for some reason and eventually want to start my own. But it's been an unhealthy cycle of stress and burnout trying to make something work only to not succeed and I think I need a break from it and get a regular job so I can focus on other things in life outside of the work grind.

That being said I feel like at this point in time I don't even know how to join a larger company because I don't know what position I would be qualified for. I've only ever worked in startups so I don't even know what the corporate world is like and this job market does not give me any real confidence.

I have a technical background but I've worked on all aspects of a business and worn every hat, but none of them to a capacity I would feel confident enough saying "I have years of experience" even if I went back to my engineering roots. Plus the burnout/depression is not doing me any favors.

Honestly I'm just looking for any advice in navigating this.

I’ve worked for this children’s clothing subscription as the only employee for 2 and a half years. The company crowd funded and then I think the founder got funds from his other ventures. The founder lives abroad in Morocco/london and I’ve never met him IRL, problems started with getting paid up to a month late or my insurance getting cancelled because he didn’t pay the employer premiums. But my boss, I haven’t heard from him since August 12th, and it is now October 12th. For the first time in months I’ve gotten my paychecks on time since I haven’t heard from him, so I’ve been ghosted but am still getting paid. I have clients who find me on linked in and message me for support to cancel their subscription almost weekly. I feel bad, these are families with babies that are getting charged anywhere from 50-200 bucks a month for the clothes. Does anyone have any idea what happens next? I’ve got a whole office of baby clothes, there’s tons of clients who are paying monthly, struggling to cancel or talk with their banks etc. oh also he wrote himself a recommendation letter on my behalf for his visa he had me sign. It’s such a strange situation to be in

Hey guys, I've been looking into online banks and fintech products for my tech startup. The idea is to keep our bank account as an alternative for expenses and revenue rather than being the main account. Anyways after some browsing, Mercury pops up a ton but there's some recent posts about sudden account freezes / stricter compliance hurdles. While I'm sure this is an issue that happens with most banking services I thought I'd better look for alternatives as well so I can compare myself.

So yeah would appreciate some recommendations from you guys. Other names that I see often is Ramp's banking and Relay so I'm looking into those right now. But honestly anything that you guys use for startup banking I'm incredibly open to. Pros and cons of what you're using would also be appreciated but honestly as long as you've not ran into any issues then I'll consider it and look into it more. Thanks everyone!

I'm relatively new to the scene, making only 1 startup that I'm still maintaining that is focused on a more freemium track. Looking to go a bit beyond, I tried checking for any avenues that have already paid products that are either too expensive or have their user base looking for an alternative. And, from what I've largely seen, these avenues are close to none. All of the ideas that I've had where in the first 10-15 minutes of searching I find nothing, I go and search again to find either a popular free or a ingrained paid product in its place. I have no idea how to approach this even though I like creating, though I'm feeling largely discouraged. Any and all advice would be appreciated!

Hey y'all, so I've been working on a b2b saas startup for like 6 months now, we just started getting customers about a month ago and have a 4 fig ARR.

The main thing I'm trying to figure out right now is that multiple different industries are interested in the product and theres a couple different features of the product that they each use so how can I manage all that and narrow down and make the right decision for where to focus all our time and energy.

There's also one use case that I think could be big and I want to explore it and spend time acquiring customers in that space while we're still early to see if that use case/industry has as much potential as I think it might.

Does it make sense to try and spend a certain amount of time doing sales for each use case/industry and based on those track other metrics on the customers we convert?

I don't want to commit to one use case/industry just yet without getting real data to support which is the best opportunity for us, but I'm curious what y'all think.

Thanks in advance!

I’m essentially a CPO: I’ve used Claude Code to build our entire product so far, and whilst it works, I’m sure there are gaps.

We are looking to hire our first technical talent, beginning with 3-month contract intern who can hopefully turn FT once we raise seed.

What should I be looking for?

Part of our reasoning is just pace of product release (as we operate as somewhat of a suite and release new products every few days), but also looking for someone to make our systems more robust / review the architecture I’ve implemented.

I don’t know what I don’t know; what skills should I look for given our specific scenario? Part of me thinks if product pace is the sole limiter, I’m better off just getting another Claude Max subscription.

My 2026 startup business plan:

Claude Code to build the product.

Codex to fix whatever I broke.

Gemini to research my billion-dollar market.

Vercel to launch my beautiful website.

Canva to make it look like an actual company.

Stripe to collect payments.

Google Analytics to watch myself visit the website 47 times.

Six months later, the only companies making money from my startup are the ones above.

Starting to think acquiring customers might be harder than building software.

Anyone else in the same boat? 😂

I was invited to an incubator to prepare founders for a live pitch competition later this month. The winner will receive a cheque (not huge) but also meet more investors by being invited to other networking opportunities. The competition is like a filtering process.

After two weeks, I’d like to summarize what I observed and share some of the most common feedback I gave and heard. We had other founders and investors attend the practice sessions.

Tip 1: show up to everything

Not gonna lie. I’m kind of appalled at how casual some founders took this. One even got disqualified because he wanted to show up for the last session only out of 4 opportunities.

We literally had the managing partner of a fund there along with multiple angel investors. The practices aren’t just practices. They’re mini networking events without all the noise and competition. You never know what might happen.

I know multiple founders that have received offers before a pitch event (not at this one that I know of) and a demo day because they practiced in front of the right people. Two YC founders I advised had it happen to them. I’m even considering investing in these founders myself because I’ve spent more time and gotten to know them.

Tip 2: less is more and show don’t tell

Most slides were jam packed with 8pt font and investors said they were distracted. The slides everybody liked had one sentence and the founder said the bullets that would have been on it originally verbally.

The managing partner said multiple times: the presentation slides I want to see live are different than the ones you send us to read by ourselves.

Even better where the slides had one big image showing the concept that made people curious while the founder connected the dots and created an aha! Moment. But don’t use video (unless you want everyone to stop and watch it) because that was even more distracting.

Here’s a power move I taught one team that went really well: I told them to bring props as proof. So they brought these big silver and copper bars that came from their recycling solution. They handed them out to the crowd first and they should do the same with the judges.

Tip 3: don’t bash the competition

A founder tried this and it bombed. It’s kind of like going on a date only to hear them trash their exes the whole time. Might be true but it’s not the time or place. You’d rather acknowledge what you’re learning from them and say you know something they don’t.

Tip 4: ask for investment

This also surprised me. I think some founders had imposter syndrome. The same way founders forget to ask for the close when doing founder led sales. And when an angel investor asked “are you raising?” They hesitated and didn’t have a clear answer. I interrupted them and told all the founders the answer should always be “we’re always raising and more than happy to talk.” It doesnt mean you have to take money in the current round. But you’d rather have and not need than need and not have.

While we’re here, I like to share how much we’ve raised so far and even have committed, unless there’s a good reason not to. It creates FOMO especially at a pitch competition.

Tip 5: create the vibes

One angel said to the founders, “I invest based on the team and vibes.” He explained that domain expertise is important but the founders enthusiasm and energy separate the top founders.

You don’t have to be a master TED Talk presenter. But at least show the passion and swagger that you’re the team that wins.

Tip 6: tell customer stories

If you’ve heard of the heroes journey then you know that you’re not the hero. The customer is. You’re the guide that solves the customer problem and if you tell that story, investors love it.

One founder started with a customer with a problem and by the end showed how the problem was a real customer and how their life changed. Angels in the audience were like, “where do I sign?” I expect this founder to win the competition.

I could think of a bunch more but these were the most common while not repeating the same old advice. The moral of the story is don’t sleep on pitch competitions. If anything they’re good practice.

Hope this helps and if you’re pitching investors, wishing you the best. Go get ‘em.

So I have this dilemma. We are two co-founders. However, we want to make it the case that when I accepted to YC, only one stays on the board till the first institutional priced-equity or something like that, then the second founder joins. Is this an accepted practice, and common ? I checked this blog post "splitting-equity-among-founders" on YC, and it mentions by the end that a CEO only on the board initially before major funding is recommended.

I am really interested to hear the different views on this.

Hi, so I am developing this product, and it needs bigger GPU than the one I have. It also needs a bigger vram than the one I have. The product has a landing page, and I am interested to know of any programs I can apply to either for reduction in price or for providing some limited GPU compute for such early-stage startups's needs. Thank you

We're planning our migration off Pulley and looking for alternatives. So far, we are reviewing options like Mantle, Cake and Altshare. The last one I couldn't find much independent feedback from founders online.

Has anyone here actually completed an onboarding with them?

I'm a high school sophomore with a startup idea that I believe solves a real problem. I'm good at a lot of things, but coding unfortunately isn't one of them. So I've come to Reddit to ask for help from fellow high schoolers. I would fund the whole project, and you would be a cofounder. MUST know how to code. Lmk if you're interested.

Hi – Currently in stealth, boot strapped, and planning to do a public beta launch for my SaaS/Dev platform. Primary users are data engineers and semi-tech-skilled business users.

Full vision of the application has 6 different models, each solving one problem in the full cycle.  Module "A" is built—MVP/beta ready. 2 modules are wireframed and functional. 3/6 modules are just concepts now.

Contemplating the right strategy for  the first beta release: (1) include all 6 models -1 functional and 5 with a home page describing the capability and value created.

OR 

(2) Disable/Hide all future modules/road map and only focus on "A" that is in beta.

Options: (1) Give the whole scope of value chain, builds confidence in the vision, and drives investor interest. But it could be too much information and can dilute the impact of module “A". 

Options (2) Might sound like a one-trick pony. And might sound weak without a road maps

What strategy would you pick? And is there anything I’m missing to consider?