Congrats to @get_sphere on their $21m series A led by a16z! People...
Aaron Epstein@aaron_epstein
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Nov 22, 2025
~2 min read
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Congrats to @get_sphere on their $21m series A led by a16z!
People see the flashy headline, but @nrudder_ has one of the toughest stories of grit and determination I’ve seen at YC. Even people that believed in him in his last business left the company for dead.
People see the flashy headline, but @nrudder_ has one of the toughest stories of grit and determination I’ve seen at YC. Even people that believed in him in his last business left the company for dead.
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Nick and his cofounder applied with an edtech business that they grew to $300k+ revenue a year after YC. But they lost conviction that it would ever be huge after realizing that it wasn't going to be scalable, and they decided to pivot.
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That decision turned into months of pivot hell, trying all kinds of ideas that they had no expertise in. Eventually, Nick’s technical cofounder decided to leave, which led to the lowest point in Nick’s life.
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No technical cofounder, no idea, no personal money in the bank, no one on the team but Nick to figure it out. To make it worse, he and his wife found out they had high risk twins on the way that needed expensive care that health insurance refused to cover.
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I’ve seen companies with millions in the bank give up, and companies running on fumes with everything stacked against them keep going.
So I vividly remember an office hour where I asked Nick what he wanted to do, and without hesitation he said “oh I’m not giving up”. It wasn’t even an option.
So I vividly remember an office hour where I asked Nick what he wanted to do, and without hesitation he said “oh I’m not giving up”. It wasn’t even an option.
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He started putting together small wins to build momentum – finding a painful problem he had experience with, creating Figma prototypes to make first sales, and eventually an engineer to help build the product.
He even started closing big logo customers!
He even started closing big logo customers!
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Today, he’s built the leading AI native tax engine that can give the right tax treatment to any product anywhere it's sold, with huge customers like Deel, Lovable, and Replit.
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And now Nick’s story is an example I share with founders going through tough times to show that you can come back from anything if you want it enough and refuse to give up.
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Watch Nick’s full story here: youtu.be/L_UjKHUfN7E