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“The one thing that irks me is when people call it a SAFE note,” Carolynn Levy laughs. “It’s just SAFE and it’s not a note.” She gives me a look. This is clearly a common mistake. “We wrote it so it was different from the convertible note, to show that it was equity and not debt, that it was meant to be founder friendly, and philosophically in line with the entire process of raising early-stage capital.”

Levy is speaking to me from her earth-toned home in California and not from the famous citrus walls of the Y Combinator (YC) office, where she wrote the SAFE (Simple Agreement for Future Equity) in the winter of 2013. Still, she paints a vivid scene of the days in which the document — the five pages that have now become ubiquitous with raising early-stage venture capital in Silicon Valley — was penned.

Imagine: It’s December of 2013, a mild San Francisco winter. Levy, a UCLA and USF-educated lawyer, had been at YC for a little over a year, working on a two-person legal counsel team that included her husband Jon. Together, they would guide young startups through the complicated legal landscape for early-stage companies — getting incorporated, setting up the right structures to hire employees, fundraising.

Levy’s decision to join YC had been a long time in the making. She first encountered the accelerator in 2006, when a young founder by the name of Sam Altman was part of its initial batch and reached out to her for help with his first startup, Loopt. A few months later, Altman introduced Levy to Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston, two recent Cambridge immigrants who were running Y Combinator, a “small family business” that gave young startups enough money for rent and pizza so they could focus on getting their idea off the ground.

"PG [Paul Graham] would say to me, Clevy, we need to fix early-stage financing. If we do that, it will do wonders for the ecosystem," says Levy.

“I’d been working with them and loved what they did. Then, YC got health insurance so I decided to join full-time,” she laughs.

The venture funding landscape that Levy was dealing with was messy. Any legal innovation that had sprouted was like a green bud that had pushed its way through sidewalk cracks. The convertible note was one of these green buds: founders were learning that priced rounds — like seed rounds and Series As — took far too much time, effort, and money to coordinate while they were running their businesses. But they still needed money to grow, and sometimes, they needed a little stepping stone before they sat down to organize a full priced round.

Enter convertible notes. These were loans that founders could get from investors with the promise of issuing them shares later, either at a specific “maturity date” or the next time their startup raised a priced round, whichever came first. The notes gathered interest that was paid back, along with the principal, in the form of shares. Founders could use them to set different terms for different investors. And they were quick and easy to complete.

“It was really inventive,” says Levy. “The convertible notes had come from this structure that already existed, the bridge loan. Startup lawyers had pulled it out to have the convertible note act as its own thing for startups. It was great, so natural. And founders all over Silicon Valley were using them.”

But Levy still believed that there could be something better than promissory notes for founders to raise early money. She explains that while natural solutions can emerge on their own, they are sometimes an indicator for a better structure that can be built in their place. The added work that came with convertible notes — negotiating interest rates with investors, keeping an eye on maturity dates — almost negated their time-saving benefits.

The worst problem of all, says Levy, was a philosophical one. Convertible notes were debt and venture capital was based on equity. They just didn’t make sense together.

“Do you want to start your relationship off with your investor arguing whether interest on your convertible note should be 3% or 10%? Or overthinking about your maturity date and not your startup’s runway? We would see Excel sheets with maturity dates on them with different scenarios showing how much money a founder would have depending on when they converted. Did anyone need that hassle?”

“That is just not good for the ecosystem,” she says. “PG [Paul Graham] would say to me, Clevy, we need to fix early-stage financing. If we do that, it will do wonders for the ecosystem. PG was the inspiration for the SAFE. And I realized that now, I wasn’t at a law firm anymore, I was at YC, and this was something that I could do."

So Levy set herself to work to write the SAFE. First, Levy, Jon, and others like Kirsty Nathoo, YC’s first employee and now its CFO, parsed through the convertible note. They highlighted what they knew founders liked about it — being able to move fast, get money quickly, put off settling on major terms until they were ready, and setting different terms for different investors. Then, they outlined what they felt wasn’t working — the interest rates, the maturity date, the fact that the money was debt.

When Levy finally published the SAFE on YC's website, it was a slim five pages. It was first put into use in YC’s 2014 winter 

, which included Flexport, Cruise, and Abacus, $125K in a SAFE for 7% of each of these companies.

It’s easy to picture how the SAFE went viral: Anyone familiar with startups knows that YC is certainly not a “family business” any more. The accelerator has invested in 3500+ startups and has a total valuation nearing $1T, with tech industry luminaries like Stripe, Airbnb, Coinbase, Twitch, and OpenSea getting their starts there.

A broad range of VCs would come to encounter the SAFE as these companies grew and raised more rounds. In their earliest stages, these companies would be trained to look to the SAFE whenever they thought about early-stage financing. The SAFE’s presence on the YC website made it easy to access for everyone, especially those looking to cut costs on lawyers. Startups that wanted to be like YC companies would use it; investors that wanted to invest like YC would use it.

Shortly after the SAFE was first released in the winter of 2014, 500 Startups followed up with the KISS (Keep it Simple Security) documents, which included an updated convertible note — it did not experience anything near the virality of the SAFE. 

And this virality was not something that Levy had expected at all.

“I guess it was foolish of me not to think it would be so big,” she says. “Suddenly, I was seeing SAFE rounds get bigger and bigger. Suddenly, it was more than just a bit of money before a Series A round. People were doing an entire round with SAFEs. These rounds could give multiple years of runway. The SAFE round was its own discrete thing.”

As SAFEs grew more popular, feedback streamed in. Take 

’s 2017 post on SAFEs, a follow-up to his original blog post criticizing convertible notes. It was not a good idea to push the terms of priced rounds down the line, he wrote. Founders could walk away with far less of their company than they anticipated. Investors would not know what they were signing up for. If founders weren’t careful, SAFEs could build up “like a house of cards” and go into effect all at once. Wilson described it as a “nightmare” and strongly urged that founders do priced rounds from day one.

“If hindsight was 20/20, we would have maybe started with the post-money SAFE to help people understand their ownership more easily," says Nathoo.

“After some time, we decided to look at the SAFE again,” says Levy, and although I don’t ask directly about the criticisms, she nods at me as if she already knows what I’m on about. “We first released it to fit with the behavior around the convertible note, because that was the behavior that was common at the time. Sign a document for the investment now, and decide the terms of the equity later down the line. But people were struggling with their ownership and it was hard to do the math.”

The year was 2018, and Levy’s legal team had grown. Multiple people contributed to the post-money SAFE. While pre-money SAFEs calculated company capitalization without the current SAFE round, making it difficult to understand how much equity investors owned and how much a founder would be diluted, post-money SAFEs calculated capitalization 

 the current SAFE round, making it easier to understand dilution and how much each investor owned. And if a founder had been diligent about tracking the numbers, they would know at all times — no matter how many SAFEs they raised — exactly how much of their company was theirs.

They took the pre-money SAFEs off the website and the new post-money SAFE became the new norm for YC, starting in 2018.

“If hindsight was 20/20, we would have maybe started with the post-money safe to help people understand their ownership more easily,” says Nathoo. "But at the time people were so used to the terms on the convertible note that it just wouldn’t have worked as well. It’s an iterative process, it’s never over, and it’s always incremental.”

To that end, as of winter 2022, Y Combinator started investing $375K in its startups using uncapped MFN SAFEs, in addition to their standard $125K for 7%. "Uncapped" means that investors have no guarantee of the price they’ll convert at when the next round hits and will settle on the same terms that startups grant to future SAFE investors; MFN (most favored nation) means that YC will take the terms of the lowest subsequent capped SAFE. 

One piece of feedback, however, is hard to solve, an existential question that cuts to the heart of the behavior of SAFEs and convertible notes. 

If these convertible securities — debt or equity — only turn into shares at certain conversion moments, what happens if a startup never raises venture capital again?

This wasn’t all speculation. Freelancer network 

 raised a single $1.4M seed round using convertible notes from investors including Andreessen Horowitz. But Toptal never raised another round, so even though it hit nearly $200M in revenue in 2018, investors never received any shares. There had been no liquidation moment. And, by the contracts, it was all fair and square.

Toptal had done what the note didn't anticipate: It had broken the social contracts of Silicon Valley, the type of thing that isn't really something you can write in a clause for. Toptal's story was often contrasted with 

's, which allegedly chose to raise a small equity round — despite claiming profitability — just to convert its investors' convertible notes into shares.

It seems to be that, after a certain point, the utility and success of the SAFE really is contingent on a founder's worldview — how much effort they put into tracking dilution, how closely they read the document when they sign off on terms, and whether they keep their promises to investors, even when they don't have to. 

It's not easy to figure out the exact impact of the SAFE. Most startups do not share these details when they announce their funding rounds. Perhaps most eloquent about the SAFE's impact is Alex Danco, who describes SAFEs as a 

“When a founder and investor shake hands and agree to do a pre-seed round, they are both probably just assuming it will be a SAFE note…If SAFE notes did not exist, the startup and the investors would have to find a deal structure, and hammer out details for convertible debt or a small priced round. That takes communication, which is work; and it takes lawyers, which cost money. But if everyone agrees ahead of time to just meet up at the SAFE note, the cost of getting a deal done goes down, at a pretty critical moment in the startup’s early life.”

Levy says creating new, easy-to-understand documents hasn't been much of a focus for YC, although she tells me that she’s been curious about finding ways to improve mergers/acquisitions and venture debt. Nathoo mentions that she's been interested in making it easier for companies to flip from being LLCs to corporations, and finding ways to help founders and investors in different countries work together. 

It's not all up to YC anymore, Levy emphasizes. She cites others in the ecosystem that have followed suit, naming the NVCA, which released a set of 

, which include templatized documents for priced rounds, including voting agreements, term sheets, and stock purchase agreements.

“We really did put a lot of thought into the SAFE and talked to as many people as possible," says Levy. "I'm happy with it. If you ask me, in hindsight, I wouldn’t have changed a thing."

Levy shares how she wrote the five-page document that underpins much of early-stage venture capital today.

Carolynn Levy, inventor of the SAFE

Things were bad, and were about to get worse. John* could see the wear of recent weeks, the disappointment in the faces of his team. The men and women in the room with him at Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), NASA’s research and development center, had spent much of 1991 trying to save the Galileo spacecraft. Nothing was working.

NASA launched the probe two years earlier, with a goal of studying Jupiter and its mysterious moons of fire and ice. It had spent those two years soaring across the solar system, its enormous, umbrella-like high gain antenna in a stowed configuration to protect it from the Sun while the spacecraft swung by Venus. (In space, nothing separates you from solar radiation, and to be that close to a star is a rough business for a little robot.)

Until now, things seemed to have been going well. The Venus slingshot maneuver — in which the planet’s gravity hurled the spacecraft around the Sun — went off without a hitch. After a subsequent Earth gravity assist to build up more speed, Galileo was finally in a safe spot in space, 37M miles away from Earth. But when JPL engineers ordered the spacecraft to open the sixteen-foot antenna, the spacecraft reported that it could not.

Everyone on John’s team, gathered now in one of the lab’s myriad conference rooms, was well aware of the magnitude of the problem. The large antenna was an integral part of this mission. NASA spacecrafts are flying laboratories that carry precision scientific instruments. When building them, scientists spend years working out precisely what is and is not known about the destination, and what experiments might solve those mysteries.

Those experiments collect vast quantities of data, which must be transmitted back to Earth. To do so, it would need to use its giant high-gain antenna. The spacecraft had a second antenna about the size of a coffee can, of course, but it was only good for sending back very simple telemetry data (such as: “No, I cannot open the high gain antenna”).

Maybe there was water in those moons, too. And conceivably a lot of it — entire oceans. And where there is water, there might be life.

They had come so far, sacrificed so much to build this billion dollar spacecraft. There was no flying it back to Earth to repair. John needed his team to find their mojo, and fast, because NASA, the science community, indeed, the world, were all counting on them.

John stood, looking around the room at his team. Engineers young and old stared back. It would take one hell of a speech to get things back on track.

The story of Galileo began much, much earlier than that tense moment at JPL. When NASA’s two Voyager probes flew by Jupiter in 1979, they were supposed to find a few chunks of icy rock circling a swirling ball of hydrogen. At five times the distance of the Earth from the Sun, the Jovian system was too cold for anything all that interesting, aside from Jupiter itself.

What the Voyagers found, however, defied imagination.

Io, the closest large moon to Jupiter, was literally spilling its molten guts into space. Jupiter’s gravity and its interplay with other moons made Io the most volcanic moon in the solar system. Europa, the next moon out, was crystalline and colorful — the jewel of the Jovian system. And Ganymede and Callisto were bronze and speckled, like animal skins or hammered sheets of metal. The ice was there, yes, and the rock, as expected, but with that much gravity and heat, maybe there was water in those moons, too. And conceivably a lot of it — entire oceans. And where there is water, there might be life.

In 1981, after the two Voyager discoveries of a wonderland circling Jupiter, JPL engineers settled on a spacecraft design dedicated to the Jupiter system, studying the planet and its moons in exquisite detail. They would later name it Galileo.

Though Galileo could launch on just about any big rocket, the U.S. at the time had gone all-in on the Space Shuttle, and tied all its high priority missions to the “space truck” as a way of preserving its funding. So it would carry Galileo. JPL in Pasadena, California finished building the Jupiter probe in December 1985, and shipped it by truck to Cape Canaveral, Florida, for launch. The idea was to launch Galileo directly from Earth to Jupiter.

When the shuttle Challenger blew up the following month, however, the fleet was grounded, and NASA drove Galileo back to California, now to launch in 1989. JPL did a few upgrades to the spacecraft in the interim, and Galileo spent the rest of the time in storage waiting for its turn. Then, for the third time, technicians trucked it across the country. This time, it did leave Earth. But because the positions of the planets had changed in that time, Galileo could no longer launch directly to Jupiter. Instead, NASA would fly it to Venus to get a “gravity assist”; the planet would slingshot the spacecraft back to Earth for two further speed-building slingshots.

When engineers send a command to a spacecraft, they get back data on the nature of every part of the spacecraft. In the case of the high-gain antenna, it’s not that a blinking red light said, “STILL CLOSED!” Rather, they received telemetry stating that a screw mechanism that opened the parabolic antenna had not traveled the entire distance necessary to indicate an open antenna.

“The first question was: What does that mean?” John told me in an interview. Was the antenna open or not? There were no little cameras you could point at the dish. To determine how far it had opened, they tilted the spacecraft this way and that to see when it blocked an onboard sun detector, the same way a beachgoer might adjust an umbrella to block daylight. By doing this, with minimal math they could determine precisely how “open” the antenna was.

“As we made the turn, instead of just saying, ‘Okay, it's covered,’ the telemetry began saying, ‘It's covered, not covered, covered, not covered, covered, not covered.’ Corresponding to the rotation, speed, and rate of the spacecraft, it told us that the antenna was not symmetrically out,” he said.

In other words, one or more of the umbrella’s ribs were stuck. John speculated that pins got jammed during the multiple cross-country drives to and from Cape Canaveral. It could also have been that lubricant on the antenna ribs dried. The good news is that they could simply reverse the process, closing the antenna and reopening it, the same way closing an umbrella and reopening it will help it open properly. The bad news?

“We didn't have a reverse control on it,” said John. They had removed it, using its circuitry instead to install another instrument on the spacecraft. “They decided that the risk of the high gain antenna needing to be reversed was not very likely to happen.”

In the conference room that day, John’s team was despondent. Their job was to write commands to send to the spacecraft to try. So far, they had tried tilting the spacecraft repeatedly into the Sun’s full light, heating up the antenna ribs and hopefully loosening things up. But metallurgy from tens of millions of miles didn’t work. Then they tried doing the opposite: tilting the antenna away from the Sun, hoping that by freezing the antenna ribs, it might loosen things up. That, too, didn’t work. They considered spinning the spacecraft like crazy, hoping that centrifugal forces might open the antenna. No good. The team was ready to throw in the towel.

“You’ve got to believe we can do this,” he said. “JPL is really good at these sorts of things. We will solve it. So you can either be sad, depressed, and quit, or you can be part of something that could recover a mission. And you'll look back on this all your life, no matter which choice you make.”

It was true JPL was good at that sort of thing. No two missions NASA flew were alike. Every spacecraft was essentially built from nothing, engineered for the specifics of the body about to be explored. A spacecraft at Saturn, where the Sun was a mere dot in space, would have different needs than a spacecraft at Mercury, where the Sun would be enormous. And JPL had by then explored nearly every planet in the solar system. They had orbited Venus and landed spacecraft on Mars. The first American satellite in space? JPL. Solving hard problems was their entire purpose. The lab’s motto said it all: “Dare mighty things.”

John knew it, and John’s team knew it. And his team got to work.

Like many moonshots, their big dreams didn’t work out. In the end, the high gain antenna never opened. Instead, the engineers came up with a different strategy. What could they do with that other coffee can antenna, the little one for the telemetry? An array of three powerful antennas on Earth talked to spacecraft millions of miles away. Was there some way to crank up its sensitivity? There was. First, rather than talk to any single antenna of three, as usual, what if they pointed two antennas at Galileo? They could combine and clean up the data received and pull more signal from the noise. They also upgraded the dish hardware for better reception.

Meanwhile, they rewrote the software on Galileo — literally upgraded its entire computer core from the other side of the solar system — to use super high compression algorithms. And they cranked up the coffee can antenna’s output. They found a way to transmit 1,000 bits per second — six times faster than its previous best. They would lose a third of the mission’s science, but a kilobit was enough: the mission would be saved.

Because of their efforts, Galileo discovered that Ganymede has its own internal magnetic field — the only moon in the solar system to do so. They discovered the nature of the powerful, 330 mile per hour permanent winds that swept across Jupiter’s atmosphere. (For comparison, these winds, unchanged for centuries, are more powerful that the most powerful tornado to ever strike on Earth).

Most critically, Galileo discovered that beneath Europa’s ice shell is, indeed, an ocean bearing three times more liquid saltwater than can be found on the planet Earth. In that ocean are all the ingredients necessary for life. Not just microbes, but complex life. There might be fish down there. There might be sea monsters. In 2024, NASA will launch its next spacecraft to the Jupiter system: Europa Clipper. And it will answer whether, indeed, Europa is habitable.

If one day scientists find life, nothing — not biology, not astronomy, not philosophy or religion — will ever be the same again. And even though Galileo didn’t achieve its mission as intended, it did, indeed achieve something incredibly important.

The astronauts of Apollo 13 never landed on the moon, but the capsule’s amazing rescue transformed NASA engineering culture evermore. Ernest Shackleton never reached the South Pole, but the fact that after losing his ship and all hope of rescue from Antarctica in 1915, he somehow led his men on a 19-month escape from the ice — without losing a single member of his team. Sometimes in the course of exploration, hindsight reveals that the mission objective is far less important than the fact of the mission itself.

And with Galileo, NASA engineers were reminded that as long as they can talk to a spacecraft, they can solve any problem, no matter how seemingly-insurmountable. What makes a moonshot a success isn’t always landing on the moon. Sometimes, it is the marshaling and measurement of tenacity and ingenuity. It’s not always about what happened when the plans worked; it’s about what happened when everything went wrong.

*A pseudonym; because of the sensitivity of his current position at the laboratory, John requested not to be identified.

A 1991 Jupiter mission that went awry shows us that what makes a moonshot a success isn’t always landing on the moon.

Lessons from a failed Jupiter probe

In 1496, Cardinal Raffaello Riario of San Giorgio purchased a statue named 

from art dealer Baldassare del Milanese. Milanese promised that this statue was an aged work of ancient antiquity. The only issue was that this was a blatant lie. The statue had actually been sculpted earlier that year by an unknown 21-year-old by the name of Michelangelo. Yes, the Michelangelo of the Sistine Chapel, of the David statue, got his start in art with a lie. He had crafted the statue by copying another artist’s style and then aging it with an acidic earth.

When the Cardinal discovered the deceit, he demanded his money back from the dealer. He would’ve been well within his rights to prosecute young Michelangelo. Instead, he recognized that talent inherent in the fabrication and insisted on becoming the artist’s first patron. Michelangelo went on to be — well, he went on to be Michelangelo.

A little bit of overenthusiastic chest-thumping isn’t the end of the world. All moonshots — atmosphere-escaping, science-pushing, mind-expanding, technology companies — are fiction at the start. They are a fool’s hope, a reality-distorting belief that world-changing progress is imminent and probable. In the startup game, you could argue that fraud is just truth’s hand called too early.

But these fibs create an inherent tension. The promises a startup makes in its early stages to investors despite having no evidence it can deliver (fun fraud) are very different from the false results it might be pressured to give to investors and consumers later down the line (incriminating fraud). The role that early-stage investors play is to be able to determine which of these two “frauds” is actually being committed.

This latest technology cycle has highlighted that tension more than ever before. Theranos exposed thousands to faulty health information, WeWork was an office building of cards, and FTX appears to have misused user funds for their hedge fund. It’s not that we haven’t seen 

in recent times. Miracles like Moderna’s COVID vaccine, SpaceX’s reusable rockets, and OpenAI’s artificial intelligence have scaled rapidly and made a widespread impact on the world during the same bull run.

And, to be fair, failure is part of the startup game. Many great companies, run by ethical people, just haven’t worked out. When investors give a startup capital, they are funding a series of experiments to determine whether a company can be successful. Sometimes, those experiments result in failure. That’s alright and to be expected.

And yet, the failed moonshots stick out. They rattle around in our narratives of startup history, make it easy to reject any big new ideas, and — without many successes to look to — keep the business models of moonshots opaque. These failures have left behind a difficult question in their wake: Why can’t we find, fund, and support moonshots better?

Capital is a heat-seeking missile looking for the most attractive return in the least risky ways. Even though venture capital 

VC math is well known: The average VC invests in 20 companies per fund. Within that 20, roughly two will end up being smashing successes. The rest will typically go to zero. VC strategy is built around grand slams with huge returns, not base hits.

Most importantly, grand slams can be found in 

A software startup is, of course, hard and risky, but it is exponentially easier than trying to create some sort of scientific advancement. At this point, the path to building a $1B B2B SaaS startup is a playbook that is well understood and documented. Customers give you a bunch of cash up front and you don’t have to recognize that revenue for months. The gross margins will be over 80% and the free cash flow is almost always positive. It’s an appealing magnet for anyone looking for a grand slam.

Compare that to building something world-changing and unprecedented like an anti-aging startup. A startup like that will not have a clear business model, will experience significant regulatory hurdles, and — most crucially— will actually need to invent the thing. Why would a VC choose to fund a moonshot when investing in B2B SaaS is a much easier path to 3X cash-on-cash returns?

show interest in moonshots? At first glance, there seems to be many reasons why their bets have failed. In the case of Theranos, the investors were neither healthcare VCs nor blue-chip funds. Even though WeWork was backed by more notable funds, including Benchmark, the primary sinner was the Softbank Vision Fund, which kept pumping money into the cash-burning extravagance of Adam Neumann. And in the case of FTX, basically every single fund on God’s green earth invested but none of them took a board seat. So many funds were interested that competition drove away the ability of investors to ask for governance rights. All of FTX’s fraud could’ve been prevented with a little oversight.

When young Steve Jobs sold his first run of 50 Apple computers, the company hadn’t even put anything together. They had no parts, no production line, no manuals. All they had was a hacky prototype that they showed off in computer club meetings. But he sold the product anyway. He went on to completely redefine our relationship with computers.

There are still some merits to moonshot fibs. Big dreams are audacious and they help companies at their earliest stages paint a picture of where they’ll be — if you just believe in them.

These fibs might even open the door for disrupters — those who would not have been conventionally allowed to do something if they followed a traditional path of safe, small promises.

It seems likely that we’re entering a cooling period within the technology sector. My guess is that many tourist funds will retreat, and VCs will become demanding of board seats and due diligence rights. And maybe there will be less blatant fraud over the next few years.

However, there is almost something spiritual about the pursuit of a new frontier. A true moonshot dramatically improves the human condition. And venture capital should not lose sight of funding these moonshots.

Perhaps the next question that needs to be answered is: What does a moonshot VC fund actually look like?

Failed moonshots stick out. Why can’t we find, fund, and support moonshots better?

Why we can’t fund moonshots

Op-eds and essays

At Mercury, we believe the arts have more in common with business than meets the eye. The best artists and entrepreneurs build and iterate on things with skill, creativity, and care.

 — a tradition that dates back centuries and still manages to forge a connection between people.

So we searched high and low for potters who could make the perfect handmade ceramic tea cups for some of the entrepreneurs we’re lucky to have as customers. The nine companies represented in this project come from a diverse range of industries and stages — ecommerce to fintech, pre-launch to Series B. We spent months on the search, enlisting the help of “pottery consultant” 

 and scrolling endlessly through Instagram. Each potter has a brand or visual connection (sometimes both) to the company they’re creating for. And each potter grapples with the business of their pottery differently — as potter Kenny Sing says, “all artists, at least in the beginning, struggle to find the balance between how much it costs to make their art and how much to sell it for.”

is Mercury’s first pottery collection and we’re excited to share it with the world. Join us to get a handle on the shapes, ridges, and grooves shared by both founders and potters.

I'm focused on technology, people, and systems — that's the common thread. Mostly, I solve problems. I'm the most general definition of an engineer. I solve problems so that I don't have the problem afterwards.

 is on a mission to scale natural carbon capture through reforestation. They’re aiding with everything from 

 that help organizations track reforestation efforts.

When asked about his day-to-day work, founder Yishan Wong says that tackling climate change is the largest problem humans have had to solve. The scale of this problem influences how he runs his business. “Half of my job is putting the right people in the right jobs and the other half is getting lots of data to make decisions,” he says.

 completed the tea cup for Terraformation, using a mixture of both wild and reclaimed clay (versus synthetic or unrecycled.) She incorporated an illustration of 

, one of the plants that Terraformation grows on their pilot site in Hawaii, on her 

 style tea cup. Amanda’s love of pottery comes from her love of food, which she considers the primordial source of connection between humans and the environment.

Making and using handmade pottery is the medium I've chosen for talking about the connection humans have with our natural environment. Pottery can say a million, zillion things. Pottery can sometimes get roped into the craft field instead of the art field. But I don't think that line actually exists.

I got into technology as a way of leveraging impact. I've always been less interested in software on a theoretical level. I wanted to build stuff. It became a form of self-expression. I didn't expect that I would actually be a founder; in some ways, that was an accident.

Founded by Siqi Chen and Arya Asemanfar, 

 wants to give every startup leader access to financial data and insights. According to Siqi, the obfuscation of finances is “a grand conspiracy” that makes it hard for regular employees to understand business finances.

When Siqi started his first company, he kept a job at the time to pay the bills. “Frankly, the things I've made often haven’t been commercially popular or long-lasting because I build for myself,” he says. Today he is an investor in several companies, including 

, and continues to find ways to give back to the founder community.

’s teacup shows the Runway logo — a natural fit because his pottery often involves bright colorblock — and features his signature, two-finger handle (which he continues to improve on). His inspiration comes from his father, an artist whose postmodern paintings were very “clean,” “geometric,” and “sculptural.” When asked if he considers himself a founder, he says that “this, for me, really came out of personal enjoyment. I had to find a way to keep doing it and to generate enough income from it, so that I could quit my other job.”

Even now, thirty years later, I look at my work and see things that bother me. It tells me what I want to try next week. My handles are still changing. I love the fact that I can come into the studio and spend the time making whatever I feel like making.

I want creators to be able to have full control over their work and the tools to make it happen. NFTs open up avenues for creators to benefit from their work directly through royalties.

Founded by Ilya Komolkin, Alexei Falin, and Alex Salnikov, 

 is an NFT marketplace that has over 2M users and saw over 

Salnikov believes that NFTs and web3 center openness and community, so his team prioritizes community-friendly features. For instance, Rarible’s multi-chain 

 make it easier for users to connect with one another. One of their goals this year is to enable communities to have their own, tailor-made platforms for NFT trading.

 worked on the Rarible teacup and saucer set. Sing often merges tech and art and likes that his work can be experienced both physically (as a usable, handheld cup) and digitally (as pictures and videos). He runs 

 and many of his works feature animation which he crafts with the help of software. The block imagery on the saucer and the chain shape of the animation are a nod to the blockchain technology behind NFTs.

All art is expensive to do, which is why you see a lot of entrepreneurs in any art. A lot of people fall in love with their art, and to sustain it, you have to figure out how to sell it. You can only give your mom so many free pieces.

Mercury’s first pottery collection challenges potters to zero in on an unlikely form of inspiration: the intrepid startup.

Startups through the hands of potters

. Mercury offers banking* for startups — at any size or stage. Founders can access banking, credit cards, treasury, venture debt, and more, and manage their businesses with confidence. Launched in 2019, Mercury is trusted by more than 80,000 startups. 

*Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group and Evolve Bank & Trust, Members FDIC.

The founder of Stability AI’s vision for open source AI, and the many challenges that come with it.

Emad Mostaque, unleashing AI

Startupy’s founder shares her playbook on growing slow, from turning down opportunities to choosing to focus on product over growth.

Sari Azout's guide to building slow

Despite the events of the past year, Tim Beiko still believes in seeing Ethereum to its ultimate form: a protocol for human coordination.