Chapter 1: How is venture funding changing for AI-native startups?
About half of all venture funding is going to AI native startups now. So that means like the world of everything else, which used to be 100% of the world, is now 50% of the world. We've seen 10% more solo founders than we had five years ago. And while that doesn't seem like a huge number, it's actually like a fairly seismic change. And that is entirely because of AI. deal count is down.
It's at a six year low. So the number of companies that are getting funding is significantly down. But the amount of funding that's going to sort of the chosen companies is incredibly high. The number of companies that are getting to a billion dollars in revenue startups in two or three years versus that's starting to become more of a norm as opposed to it being seven to ten years.
Chapter 2: What trends are emerging with solo founders in the startup landscape?
AI slop, it might seem like it's at the moment, you know, gets attention, but it's actually quite brand destructive.
So over the past decade, the startup story has felt very familiar. Build fast, raise often, hire aggressively, and assume the next round or the IPO is right around the corner. But the data now says that era may be over. Welcome, humans, to the Neuron AI Explained. I'm Corey Knowles here, as always, with Grant Harvey. How are you today, man?
Doing good. Doing good. Excited for this one. One of the reasons I'm excited is because we're talking to Carta. And Carta is one of those really interesting companies I've known a lot about for a while. And it's been really cool to see their rise to the moment where they're at now.
In fact, according to them, some interesting data at our last look at it, we'll see what our guest has to say about this. But startup seed deals are actually down 39% from their 2022 peak. But here's what's wild about that. The total dollars invested stayed roughly the same. So that means bigger checks are going to fewer companies.
Nicole Baer is the chief marketing officer at Carta, where she leads brand, demand, and go-to-market across Carta's platform for companies, venture funds, and private capital.
Carta manages equity for tens of thousands of startups and thousands of venture funds, giving it one of the most comprehensive views into how the private market is actually behaving, or not just how people think it's behaving.
Nicole, welcome to The Neuron. Yes. Thank you. So nice to be here.
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Chapter 3: How is the timeline for startups to reach billion-dollar valuations evolving?
Excellent. It's good to have you. We're excited about this chat.
Me too. So, Nicole, before we jump into the data, could you just give our listeners a quick background on you and what Carta does, as well as how you started at the company?
Yeah, so hello, Nicole Baer. I've been in this marketing game for about 25 years, almost exclusively in tech. Never really wanted to be anywhere else. I've held leadership roles at Logitech, Zendesk, Aon Hewitt, now Carta. I'm also a two-time founder of marketing advisory firm. So I've been sort of on the in-house side of the front as well as the agency side for a few decades now.
So everything that's happening in AI is incredibly interesting to me as well.
That's awesome. That's awesome. Well, the last data we saw was the state of the startup 2025 report. And it said that the ecosystem is moving at two speeds. What does that actually mean? And what does the data show now?
Yeah. I think what it's referring to is sort of the non-AI world of startups and the AI world of startups. And about half of all venture funding is going to AI native startups now. So that means like the world of everything else, which used to be 100% of the world, is now 50% of the world. And so it's a very different landscape than it's been in the past.
Yeah.
And really at all stages, whether it's seed all the way up through later stages, we're seeing more fundraising going to AI native companies compared to non-AI companies.
Okay. Well, you know, everyone's talking right now about how AI is really dominating the venture funding space. What are you actually seeing in the numbers? How much capital is flowing to AI companies versus everything else right now?
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Chapter 4: What challenges do non-AI companies face in securing funding?
Is it just?
Yeah, I mean, it's the crazy work culture. And, you know, everyone in the Bay Area knows what this this is. But essentially, it's that the AI companies, they feel so much pressure that they need to start delivering product and market and they need to scale because the next AI startup is like right on their heels. And that the loss of a few hours or that's the 996, the loss of a few hours or a day
could actually make the difference between making it or not making it as a startup. So the sense of the urgency and intensity right now for AI startups is very real.
I would say it really feels that way from the angle of people who are covering it every day in the news end. Yeah. That just the sheer volume, like Grant and I read AI news All day, all night, all weekend. It's just what we do. It's sad, actually. It is. It sounds kind of pathetic, but it is what it is. And the truth is, we both even feel behind quite regularly.
And I can't imagine how behind and out of date an average person feels right now trying to follow this, let alone leading a company.
Yeah. Well, the good news is you can use AI for that and have them summarize all the news. That's what I do.
No, no, no.
It's true. We do too.
It's true. Why do you think the revenue picture has compressed so dramatically? What is it specifically that makes revenue generation so much easier now? And it's okay if you don't know, but I would love to know your guess. Yeah.
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Chapter 5: How is AI impacting marketing strategies for startups?
Yeah. We actually had a question about that. What are you feeling as a CMO? Are you pro using AI in your marketing language or anti? You are?
Oh, sorry. In my organization, yes. In my language, not really. Okay. Yeah. For that reason.
We've read studies about this and I'm trying to get the word out about it. It's like, stop saying AI. Like people don't like, like the vast majority of people don't like it. They like the benefits that it brings, but they don't really care that it's AI or not. They just would rather have a tool that works.
I feel like it's jazz hands. And, you know, I think some of it was... That's funny. Some of it was for a while. I think there was some, you know, like earlier into this era that we've embarked upon, you would command more of a premium if you put AI in, you know, whatever. That was proven. But I think that's on the wane. And again, I feel like it feels a little pedantic. We talk about...
When we talk about AI in Carta products, we talk about it more from an agent standpoint and from a workflow standpoint, as opposed to just generically AI.
Yeah. Well, it kind of watered it down over the course of a couple of years, too. Like, we went through this phase where everything was suddenly an AI tool when they bolted a chatbot on the side. That's right. Always a chatbot. And then last year, everything was an agent, even if it wasn't an agent. Right, right. I think that's kind of turned around to bite folks a little bit. Yes.
I think so. And, you know, I'm very like as a as a buyer of AI enabled products and MarTech, you know, I'm I generally am wary if there's too much talk about something being AI enabled in the way that they're pitching it to me, because that that to me oftentimes will suggest that it is like bolted on to the product.
Yeah.
And that, I think, is one of the big sea changes that we're going to see is that sort of old guard martech, you know, that is, I believe, is going to start to be replaced by a native martech. Because there's so much more that you can do in those tools. They solve specific problems like so much better than tools that are like these big sort of, you know, heavy martech.
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Chapter 6: What does the current equity landscape look like for early employees?
Because why, why wouldn't, why would you not sort of, I mean, that's, I guess the, that's the, why would, why would they not have ads? So it's just a question of how that gets rolled out. I think they're starting to roll it out. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. And we'll see how it looks and how it turns out and how it's received. I'm curious to see what the approach is and what it's going to feel like. Yeah, 100%.
What's the coolest thing you've seen from a marketing perspective where you're like, wow, like you were blown away by how they use the tools that are available today for your domain?
So many things. Really hard to choose. Well, let me start with something that I'm so proud of that my team has done. So we have a couple of internal champions on our team around building in Claude, building in Gemini. And there's this woman, Ryan, on my team, Cesar on the PMM team. They're both product marketers.
And they've become leaders for the whole organization around how you can really tackle big problems using AI. And one of the things that we were very interested in doing is thinking more about marketing and sales orchestration.
Um, in terms of like, what happens after, so we, you know, someone is a lead for us and they talk to a salesperson, they get a demo, like what's, what really, like, how does that conversation go? And how should we think about how we structure the next conversation that happens?
And instead of that being sort of what it used, what it would have been in the past, like you might've maybe listened to some calls. It would have been a little anecdotal. You have talked to salespeople, um, Instead, they did this massive analysis of all of our chorus calls with this core audience. They looked at Salesforce data.
We looked at essentially any surface where we could glean information around the how these discovery calls tend to progress into deeper sales conversations to understand what kind of assets we should be applying to those conversations. What kind of technical person do we need to have in those calls or not?
And they did this beautiful Claude analysis that basically outlined for us specific with like a degree of precision that was pretty insane. This basically is 80% of what happens in your first call always. Wow. And here on the margins, this is how... These are what the margins look like. And it was phenomenally insightful. And I'm very proud of my team for doing work like this.
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Chapter 7: How are AI tools transforming the roles of marketers?
Yeah. You always, I mean, if you're really interested in a company's financials, you got to read how they're. Breaking it down. How they're describing the way they calculate certain things.
Nicole, is there anything that you wanted to touch on that we haven't touched on? We can kind of spin it as a question.
You know, I think one thing, and I get this question a lot from like when I go do speaking from young professionals, like what kind of job should I pursue? Because that's going to be AI proof. And it's a hard thing to answer. But what I tell them about marketing jobs from my point of view is that AI allows marketers the freedom to do higher order work than we've been able to do in the past.
I think that does create challenges for early entry marketers because a lot of that work would have been the kind of work that we now have AI do for us. But coming in with those AI skills is what kind of gets you past that initial barrier when you're very early on that you're coming in with an AI skill set.
So I emphasize to marketers, AI is not the death of marketing by any stretch of the imagination. It frees us up to do the kind of work that marketers want to do, which is creative. And by creative, I don't mean capital C creative necessarily, although that's also true.
I mean, the kind of work that we do at our core in marketing, whether we're an analyst or we're truly a creative, like our job is to create in marketing. And I don't think AI changes that at all. In fact, I think it empowers that work. But that means that all marketers need to have an AI skill set. Um, and so, you know, it's something we interview for, um, at Carta.
Like I expect every candidate coming in to be able to tell me how they use AI and how they've done so meaningfully in their, in their roles. And I think that's sort of the right way for, uh, for, for folks that are concerned about, I really wanted to go into marketing and now how am I going to do this? Because you can use Gen AI to do all the things. It's like, well, not really.
Right. You still need a person to prompt it. Right. At the end of the day.
You still need a person for sure. And you still need like the texture and the texture and taste level. Yeah. Of a person who's a professional that it's very difficult for Jenny to nail.
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Chapter 8: What insights can we gain about the future of startups from this discussion?
I love it. So awesome. Yeah, that's amazing.
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