Birdseye View
Welcome to The Haven Newsletter – your weekly read on how modern businesses run their finances. We’ll share practical breakdowns of the numbers that matter, the stories behind them, and how Haven helps founders gain time and financial clarity.
Because too many founders fly blind when it comes to their finances.
The Menu
🪖 What’s New at Haven
QSBS - The $10M Tax Free exit
The 2nd edition of Tax Code University is up! The newest chapter is a deep dive on QSBS. It breaks down one of the most powerful (and misunderstood) tax breaks in startup world. Check it out here!Volca x Haven Case Study
Volca, an AI powered payroll and compensation platform built for HVAC, plumbing and electrical companies got their books cleaned up in under 60 days. Co-founder and CEO, Brendan Kazanjian now spends a total of 0 hours on manual bookkeeping.
Haven Presents - Startup Finances Live Q&A
Next week, on Monday 11/17 at 1:30pm ET, Haven will be hosting a LinkedIn Live event with exited founder Quinn Underwood, and Haven’s own Daniel Laufer, CPA. Quinn sold his previous company, Autumn AI, to Qualtrics, and now working on a new startup, Ferris AI.
In the session, we’ll be covering the biggest financial mistakes founders make (and how to avoid them), what Quinn learned from building and selling his last company, and the tax + accounting fundamentals Daniel wishes every startup understood from day one.
📈 The State of Startup Finance
Jack Dorsey, funds Divine, a reboot of Vine, and miraculously includes a video archive of 100,000+ original videos on Vine! (TechCrunch)
AI developer tools are. . . well you already know. Inception Labs emerged from stealth with a $50 million seed round led by Menlo Ventures, backed by Nvidia and Microsoft, to pioneer diffusion-based models for code and text generation.
Crypto infrastructure saw a surge in late-stage bets this week, with Ripple securing $500M in funding at a $40B valuation (Crunchbase News)
📚 Hit the Books
The $10M Tax Free Exit
There aren’t many tax rules that materially change a founder’s life. QSBS is one of them.
It can erase up to $10M in federal taxes at exit.
But there’s a catch: you only get it if your company is structured the right way from day one.
If your company is (or will be) a C-Corp, understanding QSBS early is the difference between keeping your upside or handing millions to the IRS.
💪 Quick Hits
Stat of the Week: Cursor just raised $2.3 billion in its latest round — nearly tripling its valuation to ~$29.3 billion in five months.(Trading View).
CFO Corner: Citi CFO, Mark Mason, said every business unit within Citi has identified at least five AI use-cases. Only time will tell how realistic these actually are 😏 (Fortune)
Tool Tip: Haven’s AR engine unlocks cash fast — delivering a 95% on-time collection rate and a 30-day DSO.
Faster AR services are just a click away. Talk with someone from our team to see how we can help your business get paid faster so you can stop chasing invoices!
🔈 Weekly Limelight
Congratulations to the team at Graymatter Labs for closing their $1.3M seed round!
🚉 Commuter Content
Because everything is content now, and we wanna share the best of it with you.
TBPN’s rage bait on rage baiting was kind of an all-timer. Kudos to Jordi Hays, and John Coogan for sticking to their guns on this one.
Shameless plug: Here’s the breakdown on how Haven went from 0 to 3M in revenue in less than 12 months (Hint: It has nothing to do with rage baiting 😉)
🧾 From the Control Room
That’s all for this week.
We’ll be back next time with more ways to keep your books (and your business) in sync.
In the mean time, Haven Blog is firing. Check it out for weekly updates on all things startup finance.