Sam, out of curiosity, what is the average raise for a post-demo-day YC company now-a-days? (if it's public).

I wonder this 500K benchmark is still something useful to investors in the valley. My guess would be that there end up being only a few YC companies each batch raising <500K and I doubt the amount raised ends up being a good predictor of success.

Interesting. For me, all but one that raised < $500k died.

Do you have any idea how startup fundraising works?

In the current climate what would you recommend the size of a seed round be? Clearly the answer is not "as much as you can get" right?

If you're trying to maximize your chances of raising a Series A (which may not be the ideal metric), then $600k+ is pretty good and $900k+ is great. (Based on this post: http://tomtunguz.com/seed-followon-rates/)