The Financials

Illustration: Morning Brew Inc., Photo: Julia Collins

Some startups view attracting investors and landing a big fundraising round as a goal in and of itself. But for Julia Collins, building a company backed by hundreds of millions of dollars in outside validation taught her that more money and faster growth aren’t always signs that a business is working.

“When you raise a lot and you’re growing quickly, it can be very challenging to slow down and to criticize and investigate what’s not working,” Collins told Founder Brew.

Collins knows from experience. As a child, her entrepreneurial parents included her in discussions about capital raises, pitches, personnel decisions, and problems they were trying to solve. As an adult, she went from being the first employee at Mexicue, a Mexican fusion restaurant that grew from a lone food truck into a buzzy chain, to co-founding Zume, a robotics-powered pizza startup that raised $445 million before shutting down in 2023. Zume’s 2018 valuation at $2.2 billion cemented Collins as the first Black woman to co-found a unicorn company.

Those experiences shaped how Collins thinks about the metrics founders use to judge whether they’re building a good business

Today, she’s the founder of Planet FWD, a sustainability startup. This time, Collins isn’t shying away from outside funding—Planet FWD raised a $10 million Series A in 2022—but she has a clearer sense of which signals matter to her, and which ones can be misleading.

How should founders think about how much capital to raise, rather than simply how much capital they should raise?

There’s a misperception that being a venture-backed entrepreneur means you work for yourself. You absolutely do not. You work for your board and you work for the service of your employees. Raising outside capital creates a very different path for you.

So the first is: “Should I raise capital?” The second is: “At what pace do I want to grow my business?” Because that’ll determine what kind of capital I should raise. Venture capital is jet fuel. You shouldn’t put jet fuel in a Honda Civic. When you put jet fuel in a Honda Civic, all you create is suffering.

I’ve had experiences of turning down a term sheet that was at a higher valuation for a bit more money, because I knew that another investor was a better fit for what I needed. I did that at Planet FWD.

Read more about Julia Collins’s journey to unicorn status.—JH

      

Sponsored By Capital One Business

It turns out a halfpipe can change your whole world.

Spohn Ranch started out as a project in founder Aaron Spohn’s backyard in Los Angeles and grew into an award-winning wheel sports design-build firm. It’s now spread globally, culminating in hundreds of cutting-edge creations.

Their three decades of municipal skatepark projects span 40+ states, 15+ countries, and a variety of corporate clients. Spohn Ranch’s skatepark designers and builders mastered a broad range of techniques specific to creating the highest-quality wheel-focused terrain possible.

The Capital One Venture X Business card helps them create expense reports, manage vendor transactions, and track expenditures for all their projects across the US. Plus, it provides seamless travel management, like setting travel policies and tracking travel costs in real time.

Help build your calling.

Founder Guidance

Illustration: Morning Brew Inc., Photo: Pitch Roast Live

Want to test your pitching skills? New York City comedian Noah Obstfeld has a challenge for you at his Shark Tank-comedy-roast mashup show, Pitch Roast Live.

“Come in, take a plunge in the ice-cold water. Every other dive after that is going to be a lot easier,” Obstfeld told Founder Brew. “I’ve heard from founders afterward—the scary investor Zoom call or live pitch in front of an audience is not nearly as difficult.”

Pitch Roast Live asks founders to pitch their business for five minutes with slides in front of a crowd—and a panel of three comedians and one investor. The onstage judges make jokes about the company and then crown a winning founder at the end of the night. Anchored monthly in New York, the show will also travel to San Francisco, Austin, Dallas, and Miami.

But this is not a free-for-all. Creator and host Obstfeld, who worked in finance before becoming a full-time comedian, has road tested the format since December 2024 to find the right balance between the comedy and business bonafides.

First, he specifically asks the investor to bring hard questions, as if they were really investing. “I don’t want them to be nice just because it’s a comedy show,” he added.

Read more about one comedian’s tips for founders going on stage.—DL

      

Instinct, a firm developing personal AI agents for day-to-day tasks, raised $1 billion in a round from Sequoia Capital, Benchmark Capital, and Coatue. (Reuters)

OpenEvidence, dubbed “ChatGPT for Doctors,” raised $250 million in a recent round, including an investment from Andreessen Horowitz. (Business Insider)

Enterprise security startup Island raised $400 million in a round led by Evolution Equity Partners. The Dallas-based company has already signed up Pfizer, Chipotle, and American Airlines as clients. (CNBC)

A finance platform for small businesses to access capital and coaching, Mona, raised $3.5 million from Alumni Ventures, Wisdom Ventures, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and Mastercard’s Strive USA Innovation Fund. The round was led by Sheryl Sandberg’s venture fund, Sandberg Bernthal Venture Partners. (Forbes)

Sponsored By Capital One Business

A backyard business. A three-decade legacy: Spohn Ranch is a 100-person business designing skate parks across the US. What they don’t sweat anymore are expense reports, vendor charges, or spending limits. The Capital One Venture X Business card handles all of it, from flagging double charges to tracking employee spending limits. Earn double miles on every purchase.

Stat: 11. That’s the age one British founder started a brick-and-mortar store to sell sensory toys from the TikTok Shop. (The Economist)

Quote: “I started that company because I was married and I had to support the family somehow. And I’d also noticed that it was impossible to get good climbing clothes.” —Yvon Chouinard, founder of Patagonia (Outside Magazine)

Read: After her grandfather was scammed by an AI voice pretending to be his kidnapped brother, founder Tarini Padmanabhuni started a company to unmask deepfakes. (TechCrunch)

^{*A message from our sponsor.}