Venture Math
Session 03 / 11  ·  Fall 2026
The numbers that matter most are the ones nobody shares.
This course reveals them.
Using Carta’s proprietary data on 40,000+ startups, we’ll take a data-driven tour through the startup lifecycle—from co-founder equity splits to IPO—exposing the benchmarks founders won’t share and the math investors won’t explain.
Mercedes Bent
Mercedes
Bent
Co-Founder, Premise VC ·
Former Partner, Lightspeed Venture Partners
Mercedes is the co-founder and Managing Partner at Premise Ventures, a $100M pre/seed VC firm. She previously led investments at Lightspeed for 6 years and was named one of 9 rising stars in venture capital by the Wall Street Journal. Her investments include Exa, Cowboy Space Corp, Janitor AI, Moonlake, Hyperspill, Arcade.dev, and many more agentic AI companies. She has been featured by CNBC, Bloomberg, Business Insider, Wall Street Journal, and others. She holds two graduate degrees from Stanford, completed her undergraduate studies at Harvard, and lives in San Francisco with her family and dog.
Lorenzo Barberis Canonico
Hosted by Lorenzo Barberis Canonico,
President of Cassandra Labs
03 Series A & The Institutional Transition
The step-up from first-money-in seed to Series A: seed backs a team and a thesis on almost no data, while the A prices real traction — a higher bar, a board seat, and a new level of rigor
01 The Series A bar, and how hard it is to clear
02 How long it takes to get there
03 Bridges on the way to the A
04 Is the A even worth it
Date
Sept 16
Time
4:30 – 6:30pm
Location
Chou Hall N100
Register & full schedule
hilarious-droplet-6be.notion.site/
Venture-Math