By Ali Afridi, Principal at Equal Ventures One of the startup hacks that I realized early in my tech journey was that VCs are an incredible resource for figuring out the best startups to join, especially at the earliest stages. In a world where >50k startups get started every year, and >10k raise seed rounds, it can be daunting for an individual to figure out which private companies are showing promising signals and starting to grow. However on the investment side, VCs have access to far more information, giving a guiding signal to some of those that may be most promising.