# Startups / How small firms become large ones Canonical URL: https://shipslides.com/d/catalog-business-startups Raw viewer URL: https://content.shipslides.com/d/catalog-business-startups/raw Category: Business Slides: 13 Updated: 2026-05-17T20:56:02.174Z Tags: catalog, business, startups ## Summary Funding stages, growth metrics, and the hard parts — an honest tour of how the modern startup ecosystem actually works. Key sections include: STARTUPS / How small firms become large ones.; A startup is a temporary organization searching for a repeatable, scalable business model.; Pre‑seed → seed → A → B → C+ → exit; Pre‑seed & seed: idea, founders, conviction.; Series A: product‑market fit — or you don’t raise it.; Series B and beyond: scale the thing that already works.; Unit economics: LTV , CAC , and the payback period.; The pirate funnel: five stages of customer life.; The graveyard: most startups die.; Network effects: each user makes the product more valuable for the next.. ## Slide Outline 1. STARTUPS / How small firms become large ones. 2. A startup is a temporary organization searching for a repeatable, scalable business model. 3. Pre‑seed → seed → A → B → C+ → exit 4. Pre‑seed & seed: idea, founders, conviction. 5. Series A: product‑market fit — or you don’t raise it. 6. Series B and beyond: scale the thing that already works. 7. Unit economics: LTV , CAC , and the payback period. 8. The pirate funnel: five stages of customer life. 9. The graveyard: most startups die. 10. Network effects: each user makes the product more valuable for the next. 11. Modes of exit: most are quieter than you’d think. 12. Most success is many small good decisions , over years. 13. If you want to go deeper. ## Slide Transcript ### Slide 1: STARTUPS/ How small firms become large ones. - VOL. 01 // ECOSYSTEMS & CAPITAL - Funding stages, growth metrics, and the hard parts — an honest tour of how the modern startup ecosystem actually works. - A 13‑SLIDE FIELD GUIDE - PRESS → TO BEGIN ### Slide 2: A startup is a temporary organization searching for a repeatable, scalable business model. - 01 — Definition - Not a small business. Not a project. A search party. The whole point is to find — quickly — what works, then turn the dial up until it doesn’t. - Temporary - It ends - Either by becoming a real company, getting acquired, or shutting down. The startup phase isn’t forever. - Repeatable - It works again - One lucky sale isn’t a business. The model has to fire reliably, week after week, customer after customer. - Scalable - It grows non‑linearly - Doubling revenue shouldn’t require doubling cost. That gap is where venture returns live. ### Slide 3: Pre‑seed → seed → A → B → C+ → exit - 02 — Funding stages - Each round buys roughly 18–24 months of runway. The ladder is less about money than about graduating: each stage demands you’ve answered the previous stage’s question. ### Slide 4: Pre‑seed & seed: idea, founders, conviction. - 03 — The earliest money - At this stage there’s usually no revenue and barely a product. Investors are pricing the founders, the market, and the bet that the two belong together. - Founder‑market fit. Why you, why now, why this. - Lean prototype. Something working, even if ugly. - First 10 users who love it. Not 10,000 who tolerate it. - $0.5–3M - Typical seed round size for a tech startup in 2025. - 18 mo - Runway it’s expected to buy you before raising again. - 2–3 - Cofounders is the median — complementary skills, high trust. ### Slide 5: Series A: product‑market fit — or you don’t raise it. - $5–15M - Round size for a typical Series A. - ~$25M - Median post‑money valuation in venture today. - ~30% - Of seed‑funded startups make it to a Series A. - 04 — Graduation round - Series A is the round where romance ends and arithmetic begins. Investors want signal that customers come, stay, pay, and tell their friends. - Repeatable revenue. A working sales motion, not heroics. - Retention curves that flatten. Users keep using it. - A market large enough to deserve a venture‑scale outcome. ### Slide 6: Series B and beyond: scale the thing that already works. - 05 — Putting fuel on the fire - By Series B, the question changes from “does this work?” to “how big can it get?” Capital goes into hiring, geographic expansion, and category leadership. - 10× - Headcount - Engineering, GTM, support, ops — org design becomes the founder’s real job. - 3–5× - Markets - New geographies, new segments, new product lines built on the same wedge. - $50M+ - Round size - Series C+ rounds turn into growth‑stage capital with sharply different expectations. - The danger here is subtle: with money in the bank and growth on the dashboard, it’s easy to mistake speed for direction. Most late‑stage failures are companies that scaled the wrong thing very efficiently. ### Slide 7: Unit economics: LTV, CAC, and the payback period. - 06 — The math that has to work - If a single customer doesn’t pay back more than they cost to acquire, no amount of fundraising fixes it — you’re burning capital to lose money faster. - LTV - Lifetime value - What one customer pays you, in total, before they churn. - CAC - Customer acquisition cost - Sales + marketing spend divided by customers gained. - 3:1 - Healthy ratio - LTV to CAC. Below this, growth is expensive. Above this, it compounds. - Payback period — how many months until a customer earns back their CAC — is the underrated metric. Under 12 months, you can self‑fund growth. Over 24, you’re permanently dependent on outside capital. ### Slide 8: The pirate funnel: five stages of customer life. - 07 — AARRR - Dave McClure’s framework. Each stage is a leak. Plug them in order — activation before retention, retention before revenue — or you fill a bucket with a hole in it. - Awareness. They’ve heard of you. - Activation. They had a first good experience. - Retention. They came back without you nagging. - Revenue. They paid you money. - Referral. They told someone else. ### Slide 9: The graveyard: most startups die. - 08 — The honest part - 90% - Of startups fail in their first decade. - 42% - Of those failures cite “no market need” as the primary cause. - 29% - Run out of cash — usually as a symptom of the first. - The other recurring killers: the wrong cofounding team, getting outcompeted, pricing problems, and product flaws. Almost no startup dies of one cause — the post‑mortem usually shows several diseases at once. - Reason 01 - No market need - The most common, most preventable, most painful cause of death. - Reason 02 - Ran out of cash - Spend grew faster than revenue while the next round wasn’t teed up. - Reason 03 - Wrong team - Mismatched skills, broken trust, or founders who couldn’t scale into managers. ### Slide 10: Network effects: each user makes the product more valuable for the next. - 09 — The power law - A phone is useless if you’re the only person with one. A marketplace is useless with one side. The best startups bake this loop into the product itself, then watch growth bend upward. - Direct. More users → more value (phones, social). - Two‑sided. More buyers attract sellers, and back (marketplaces). - Data. More usage trains a better product (search, ML). ### Slide 11: Modes of exit: most are quieter than you’d think. - 10 — The way out - For founders and investors, “exit” means a liquidity event — turning equity into cash. Despite the headlines, the IPO is the rarest of the three doors. - ~90% - Acquisition - Bought, not listed - The dominant exit. A larger company absorbs the team, tech, or customer book. - <1% - IPO - Public markets - Loud and rare. Demands real revenue, real governance, and real predictability. - Zombie / lifestyle - Profitable, not venture‑scale - The startup turns into a sturdy small business. Great for founders, awkward for VCs. - Worth saying plainly: a healthy lifestyle business that pays its founders well for a decade is a beautiful outcome. It just isn’t the outcome a venture fund underwrote. ### Slide 12: Most success is many small good decisions, over years. - 11 — The boring truth - The myth is the eureka moment. The reality is six years of choosing the slightly better hire, the slightly clearer spec, the slightly more honest conversation with a customer. Compounding does the rest. - Show up - Most founders quit. Persistence is itself a moat. - Talk to users - Weekly, forever. The best ideas are downstream of conversations. - Ship - Velocity beats elegance. Fast cycles compound into a better product. - Hire slow - The wrong early hire can sink a company. The right one can save it. - “Startups don’t win because of one big idea. They win because the founders are still there in year six, still iterating, while everyone else got bored.” ### Slide 13: If you want to go deeper. - 12 — Further reading - Two of the highest‑signal sources on the modern startup ecosystem — both free, both legendary. Start here. - YOUTUBE / LECTURES - How to Start a Startup — YC’s Stanford CS183F lectures - Twenty hours of lectures from Sam Altman, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, and others. Still the best free curriculum on the subject. - youtube.com/results?how+to+start+a+startup+yc → - YOUTUBE / ESSAYS - Paul Graham startup essays - Audio readings and discussions of essays like “Do Things That Don’t Scale,” “How to Get Startup Ideas,” and “Default Alive or Default Dead.” - youtube.com/results?paul+graham+startup+essays → - END OF DECK // STARTUPS / How small firms become large ones ## Related Decks - [Behavioral Economics — When agents are human](https://shipslides.com/d/catalog-business-behavioral-econ) - [BRAND / How meaning gets attached to things](https://shipslides.com/d/catalog-business-brand-history) - [The Modern Corporation — Annual Report](https://shipslides.com/d/catalog-business-corporations) - [Disruption / Why incumbents lose](https://shipslides.com/d/catalog-business-disruption)