New funding opportunities for startups and where the interests of VCs go?

Cool topic, Nika!

I don’t see it as black-and-white either, despite how social media loves to frame it. Both models have their upsides. It really comes down to what kind of game you want to play.

If you want full control and to build on your own terms, bootstrapping is the obvious choice. But if you’re aiming for a billion-dollar company, it’s way, way harder to get there without VC backing.

On the flip side, if your goal is to make a solid $1M ARR (or less) and not deal with external pressure or deadlines, bootstrapping starts to look a lot more attractive. At the end of the day, it all comes down to your vision and goals.

For me, VCs bring a few key things to the table:

1. Discipline : you can’t just disappear for a year and expect things to be fine. You have to move fast and deliver.

2. Network : they open doors to people, opportunities, and channels you probably wouldn’t reach on your own.

3. And building on that, distribution : one mention from the fund or a media contact they work with can put you everywhere overnight.

Bootstrapping makes more sense if you want to build a profitable business but don’t necessarily care about changing the world or building something groundbreaking. In that case, playing the VC game might actually be a bad fit, since the rules won’t align with what you want.

Looking ahead, I think funding will shift more toward hardware. Software is getting easier and easier to build, which means your moat needs to exist in the real world too. Software will become more of a lead magnet or an add-on to the core product. And right now, hardware isn’t something you can just hand off to tools like Claude Code or Cursor and have it built for you. Software’s not going anywhere, but the barrier to building it is way lower than it used to be.

Even before AI was that mainstream, VC was broken, for very early stage and builders.
I was in Station F, and for a bunch of successful founders that raise very fast sooo many others loose a looot of precious time and their mind, trying to fundraise, and never do.
The thing is VCs favorite game is “Don’t Say Yes or No”, this is because they want to keep the opportunity to invest in case you suddenly get a big investor, without risking their money.

My go to recommendation to early founders, if you want to raise, create some Fomo by doing something impressive in a short time and/or only apply to VCs that in their process give a clear Yes/No answer ideally fast. I believe that's why accelerators like YC win. I have a list that I usually share.

I would love to see or build something similar to what was YC in the early days, invest a small amount of money (10k$) where this amount is significant.

I help entrepreneurs in emerging countries, they are building interesting stuff, some of them was in Producthunt recently, in top positions, and they are solving dealing with problems VCs in SF can't understand. Some of the situations we solved recently: " I can't do this feature because I code from my phone", "I can't charge client because I can't have stripe", "I can't afford servers (20$)", "Builders automating AI tools sign up to avoid paying".

I honestly believe the next generation of unicorns will come from everywhere, not only US, and the VC world is not able to understand them.