40% of VC Money Went Into 8 Companies. Here's What That Means for You | Jake Yormak & Samir Bakhru

For our first-ever live taping of Inside Startup Funding: Unfiltered, I sat down in front of a room of founders with two people who see the funding market from opposite sides of the table — and got the version of the AI story that doesn't make it online. Not the headlines. The version happening inside pitch meetings, term sheet negotiations, and board decisions right now. If you are planning a seed or Series A in the next eighteen months, this conversation will change what you think a fundable company looks like.Jake Yormak and Samir Bakhru lay out why the bar has moved so far, so fast: roughly 40% of last year's venture dollars went into eight companies, only about 25 funds in the country can write a Series A check at today's sizes, and those funds are already committed. We get into the most dangerous assumption a founder can hold in 2026 — that zero to $1.5M ARR in eighteen months still earns a Series A — and what actually gets funded instead: enormous TAM, brutal speed, and a technical team that AI tools multiply rather than merely assist. We cover why moats have temporarily stopped mattering to investors, why companies are raising Series Bs six weeks after closing an A, why anti-poaching provisions are suddenly showing up in early-stage term sheets, and the honest conversation both of them now have to have in boardrooms with founders doing top-quartile work that would have been funded three years ago. We also spend real time on the part nobody posts about: how to recognize a slow bleed, when selling is the right answer, and why Jake pushes for a founder-and-employee carve-out even when his own fund takes the loss.Host — Helena Fogarty LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/helenafogarty/Guest — Jake Yormak, Story Ventures LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jake-yormak-b8232756/Guest — Samir Bakhru, Orrick LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/samirbakhru/SPONSORSOrrick — https://www.orrick.com/Aster AI — https://www.asterhq.com/