The ultimate list of resources for building and scaling billion-dollar companies 🦄

1,500+ pages of knowledge, data and advice to launch & scale your next unicorn startup in 2025 🚀

👋 Hey, Linas here! Welcome to a special issue of my daily newsletter. Each day I focus on 3 stories that are making a difference in the financial technology space. Coupled with things worth watching & most important money movements, it’s the only newsletter you need for all things when Finance meets Tech. If you’re reading this for the first time, it’s a brilliant opportunity to join a community of 300k+ FinTech leaders:

Let's be honest - building a startup isn't just hard. It's a relentless marathon through uncertain terrain, where even brilliant ideas can falter without the right guidance.

You've felt it. Those sleepless nights wrestling with market uncertainties. The constant pressure to make perfect decisions with imperfect information. The nagging question: Am I missing something crucial?

After a decade in the trenches - analyzing, building, and scaling startups across continents - I've distilled the essence of what truly moves the needle. Not theory. Not wishful thinking. But battle-tested insights from those who've walked the path before you.

I've compiled the most powerful startup insights into a comprehensive playbook: 1,500+ pages of concentrated wisdom from top accelerators, investors, venture capitalists, and seasoned operators.

It's designed to be an invaluable compass for every entrepreneur and business leader ready to navigate the challenging yet rewarding journey ahead.

Here’s what you will find inside:

• A brilliant guide on how to properly do seed fundraising.

• The ultimate guide to fundraising for first-time founders.

• The fundraising wisdom that helped founders raise $18B in capital.

• The best pitch deck template from the backers of Apple, Airbnb, Nubank, Stripe, etc.

• A list of top AI companies in 2024 and exclusively curated 30+ pitch decks these startups used to raise money (from $1M to $300M, from FinTech & Finance to HealthTech, Sales, AI Assistants, & more!).

• The step-by-step founder’s guide to financial modeling so you can raise more money from VCs.

• The data behind scaling a B2B SaaS business (54-page deep dive into what strength looks like at all stages of growth – from first revenue to IPO & beyond).

• The best template for cohort analyses so you can easily know & understand how you’re doing in terms of churn, customer lifetime, and customer lifetime value.

• 900-page deck of vital venture and startup insights invaluable for all startup and VC ecosystem builders (valuations, fundraising, exits, etc.).

• A guide to venture capital term sheets that teach you how investments can be structured, the typical terms and terminology used in a term sheet, and the broader investment process.

• A 64-page study to master how venture capitalists make decisions (so you could better understand what VCs do and why they have been successful).

• A guide to implementing employee equity programs, including country-specific considerations across Europe and other jurisdictions, how to determine appropriate grant sizes, manage the ESOP pool over time, communicate equity value to employees, and present to boards, among other things.

• A guide to Founder’s Compensation 2.0 that covers the latest data with key market trends and changes, salary benchmarks from Pre-seed to Series B+, when and how much founders should pay themselves, the impact of funding rounds on compensation, etc.

• Option planning tool based on data from over 20,000 option grants across 1,650+ US and European startups. The tool provides detailed frameworks for salary ranges ($65K-$185K), equity allocation, and tax implications across 20+ countries, with specific guidance for tech vs non-tech roles and different company stages.

• 5 essential M&A templates so you can unlock the tools top companies use to ensure successful mergers and acquisitions.

Ready to build and scale your billion-dollar startup? Let’s go:

Y-Combinator Guide To Seed Fundraising

What’s inside:

1. Why Raise Money?

2. When to Raise Money How Much to Raise?

3. Financing Options Convertible Debt Safe Equity

4. Valuation: What is my company worth?

5. Investors: Angels & Venture Capitalists

6. Crowdfunding

7. Meeting Investors

8. Negotiating and Closing the Deal

9. Negotiations

10. Documents You Need

11. How Does VC Fundraising Work?

12. A Brief Glossary of Key Terms

Credit: Y-Combinator

The Ultimate Guide to Fundraising for First-time Founders

What’s inside:

1. How the fundraising process actually works

2. The essential ingredients of a killer pitch deck

3. Building relationships with investors

4. How to pitch to investors

5. Steps to take once an investor verbally commits

6. Bonus resources: email scripts, templates, and a cheat sheet of the entire book.

Credit: Tam Pham & Hustle Fund VC

The Fundraising Wisdom That Helped Founders Raise $18B in Capital

What’s inside:

• Timing Your Fundraise (how to align market timing with company momentum & optimal and suboptimal periods for raising)

• Strategic Investor Selection (the 10/90 rule for founder expectations & how to choose and approach the right partners)

• Generating Scarcity (creating effective race dynamics & managing investor batches for maximum leverage)

• Pitch Optimization (building a compelling narrative, avoiding common pitfalls & establishing credibility)

• Rehearsal Strategy (systematic practice framework & mastering natural delivery)

Credit: First Round Capital

The Ultimate Pitch Deck Template by Sequoia Capital

What’s inside: Sequoia is one of the best Venture Capital funds in history, with investments in companies like Apple, Airbnb, Instagram, Nvidia, and Stripe, among many others. This template is their recommended blueprint for founders seeking to secure funding.

Credit: Sequoia Capital

Top AI Startups of 2024 & Their Pitch Decks

What’s inside:

• 100+ (the list is being updated) AI companies that have raised funding this year so far.

• VCs that were leading the round and how much capital they deployed.

• Brief description of the company and its primary region of focus.

• Exclusively curated 30+ pitch decks these startups used to raise money (from $1M to $300M, from FinTech & Finance to HealthTech, Sales, AI Assistants, & more!)

Credit: Linas Beliūnas