seed fund

“A lot of seed funds today, a lot of our peer group, a lot of whom I respect very much they really look like series B funds in terms of where their average dollar goes in. They may be starting very early, but their average dollar is weighted towards series B.”

“And as a result of that, we have an unbelievably high win rate against the top venture firms in the industry and almost always win head to head against the seed funds because typically we're competing with, you know, two guys and a dog and we're bringing an ar…”

“As all these funds are trying to grow up and everyone was trying to be a lead investor, they're putting themselves in deeper and deeper competition with one another.”

“I think a lot of people don't realize that most of their funds are actually much later Right. So if you have a seed fund that makes its initial 200,000 to 500,000 dollar bet and seed round, and then follows on all the way through, if you do that math, probably…”

“And at the time that we started in 2010, you know, there were relatively few seed funds here in the New York area and the Boston area. Fast forward to today, you know, 2017, there's obviously been a proliferation of seed investors.”

“If you own 10% of a company that exits for a hundred, hundred fifty billion dollars with a 40, 50, 60, seventy-five million dollar fund, you can still return a meaningful portion of that fund with a, you know, a 102 hundred million dollar exit. Obviously, the …”

“The moment a fund is managing more than 10 or twenty million dollars in capital, it's unlikely that it's purely in the seed business. It's at least bleeding into the series A business.”

“I think consolidation is, is the future. I don't see a lot of first time or second time funds raising their next fund. And it may not be a function of who they are, but rather a very different macro environment and a general understanding by LPs that we just d…”

“In this world, we don't have Results yet. So everything people look at are proxies for real results. And the proxies in seed are who follows your deals? How much money is put behind those deals? Can you continually do that? Can you intercept the good deals?”

“This group of people right now, they're voting with their feet, and they're bypassing seed.”

“And I think, to be honest, like one of the challenges that the existing seed funds face is that because of the large fund-sized From these multi-stage firms, then they can very quickly write a check with very little diligence, or they can do it based on existi…”

“So I do find that once a company starts to gain some momentum and some heat, it is more difficult for a seed fund to compete with one of the sort of top tier multi-stage funds.”

“I think what I am seeing though, is the time between those seed rounds in the series A's getting compressed. And as a result, I think founders are actually choosing to, in certain cases, bypass seed funds that can only diverse seed rounds and really go target,…”

“We do, because if you think about seed funds, a lot of them, they have amazing returns, but a lot of that is more TVPI, total value, and they may not have gotten a lot of liquidity, because they're in these great companies, and they continue to accrete in valu…”

“Samir Khadji from First Republic Bank in the US is an active observer of the early stage market, and he said that 70 or 80% of the seed funds that he spoke to had six to 12 months of life for most of their portfolio companies.”

“SPVs are much harder to raise now, and so your ability to protect not just your winners, But also your companies that are struggling and need to get from point A to point B to maybe someday be a winner, it's going to be much harder.”

“This does not prove you are a good seed investor, but it merely shows you have access to series B and series C investments. These are very different things, and actually can only serve to discredit you often, as it shows a little bit of naivety.”

“You are not a good enough picker at seed to only have 15 investments. You need a large enough level of diversification, and 30 is generally considered large enough when you run the maths.”

“We have 60% reserve in a seed fund to follow on.”

“We're currently investing out of our fifth fund. In fact, we have two. We have a seed fund, and we have a opportunity fund. The seed fund is a hundred and thirty-five million. The opportunity fund is sixty-five million.”

“Say if you have a fifty million dollar fund size, you've got forty million investable, you want to do seed today with the average seed being three to four, you can't lead seed rounds with that and have enough diversification. You got twenty two million dollar …”

“I actually don't think it's new. At least it's not new for second time founders, right? It's not new.”

“But on the math of it, we just underwrite a series A fund to a three X and C to a five X, and you just look at what the numbers line up at, and you say, okay, so given the ownership and given the AUM, what needs to be true to return the fund one time, half a t…”

“Some seed funds won't be able to raise another fund given the vintage we just left. We're hearing that from LPs”

“Our seed funds are sixty million dollars in size and we write first and last check. To new teams. No follow-on investments out of the seed funds.”

“Really in today's world, you're going to suffer 50% dilution on the way to IPO. That core seed fund that you struggled to get 12% of, you know, it could be six by the IPO.”

“He's probably deploys more capital than most seed funds, I would say, every year.”

“I actually think that they've come in with such efficiency that actually they've made it so much harder for the existing pure seed players. They've increased price. They've increased supply. I think you will see returns significantly denigrate. We all saw five…”

“Generally when I meet a founder at a seed stage, I'll tell him or her, I'll underwrite the entire round. So there's no financing risk, but We should split it into three sleeves. One sleeve is for index, one sleeve is for a seed fund, and the third sleeve is fo…”

“Fund returners, you need four or five good fund, good companies. If we sell four companies at two hundred fifty million dollars each, right, we can return a fund. If we sell 10 companies at a hundred million each, like, nobody cares about that, we can return a…”

“Rearview mirror on this, you can't build a fund on this. Rearview mirror, you can think about that one that you missed, and they're one or two in a generation. There are these generational companies, or maybe there is one a year, and if you're in that company,…”

“You can make money on the buy, and you can make money on the sell. And what most people don't understand is that the seed funds are actually better positioned to make money on the sell than anybody. Better, better positioned than the multi-stage by a wide marg…”

“The lesson for us is like, this hard work stuff, you need to be well capitalized to be able to do, and some, sometimes it's not our place. Like, even if we could do the work, we don't have the capital base to be able to do these things.”

“Because actually when you take away fees, you've got 40 of investable, and when you think about the average seed round today being three to five million dollars, if you want to lead it and take real ownership like they say they do, there's no way that you're g…”

“I'm not sure it says something systemic about seed versus non seed. I just think it says extraordinarily good picking from a very connected investor who just You know, most of whose stuff is working really well at a much higher level and to go from, you know, …”

“I think you mega platforms are destroying seed. Time and time again, I see 10 on 50, and it is not good for the company, and you beat us. Like, to be clear, you beat the seed funds, because you just come in and buy it. I get it. We do three on 15, you guys com…”

“How much better is the YC locked in return than a seed fund at the same stage? They basically have roughly a two X advantage. If you say to yourself, you know, if I look at the deals they do, if you, and then if you extrapolate based on the published hit rates…”

“When you have limited reserves from a Cedar smaller fund, you put it all in your fastest growing companies. Like, a hundred fucking percent. There's only one criterion. Triple digits growth, you know, double digits per month, that's it.”

“We have a three hundred million dollar seed fund eight hundred million venture fund, and one and a half billion gross fund.”

“Their numbers are better than 90% of seed fund numbers on their growth growth vehicle.”