Down rounds carry a stigma, but they’re not always the end of a startup’s story.

Charles Hudson of Precursor Ventures shares an example of a company that survived a difficult fundraising process involving a down round and investor-friendly terms. It wasn’t easy, but making the hard financing decision ultimately gave the company a chance to keep building.

For founders, the lesson is simple: The best fundraising outcome isn’t always the highest valuation — it’s the one that keeps your business alive.

Get more of Hudson’s advice in the latest Build Mode podcast episode wherever you prefer your pods.

Do you fit into one of the trendiest founder archetypes?

Fundraising has always been competitive, but today’s market is especially tough for first-time founders. In the latest episode of our Build Mode podcast, Charles Hudson of Precursor Ventures breaks down the most popular founder archetypes right now: repeat founders with proven track records and exceptionally young technical founders.

That leaves experienced, first-time founders facing a higher bar, even when they have a compelling business idea. But there’s still hope! Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Open source AI is booming, according to Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue. The company has grown into something like a GitHub for AI in recent years, where AI builders can share and download open models and datasets, now used by roughly half the Fortune 500. Delangue has seen the same story play out again and again: companies start out on frontier APIs, but as they scale, the costs push them towards open source models.

On this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Rebecca Bellan talked to Delangue about why the open vs closed source fight matters in the wake of Anthropic’s halted Fable release, and why he’s worried about the possibility that a handful of big companies could end up controlling everything.

Chapters:

00:00 Intro

00:33 Breaking down open source growth data

04:34 What’s driving the open source resurgence

08:47 Who’s using Hugging Face, and how?

10:28 China overtakes the US in open model downloads

16:34 Safety, access, and the risk of AI power concentration

24:03 Hugging Face’s approach to legal risk

28:00 Turning down Nvidia

31:47 Underinvested opportunities: local AI, bio, robotics