seed investing

“Over the last six years, what we've seen is that, you know, seed investing has really essentially become the new, you know, series A round of financing for the companies.”

“The VC is trying to do seed. You know, you see so much failure there, right? You see, it's just a different game.”

“It's been really valuable for me to go from seed investing to more traditional venture investing at the Series A stage, taking board seats, because I like to think it's a much different ballgame, Series A and Series B, and taking board seats and the commitment…”

“And then around oh eight seed investing started to institutionalize driven by capital efficiencies from open source and cloud computing platforms like AWS and the distribution channels like the app stores and social networks.”

“I believe that angel investing, seed investing is a completely different thing than venture capital. I don't think it's part of venture capital. I think that it's a different type of asset, which has different needs and requirements and has a different perform…”

“The challenge of doing really early stage seed investing out of a billion dollar fund. And a very large platform.”

“If they do the work, they're going to be great. And if they don't do the work, they're going to fail.”

“When I think about what is seed investing really, it's not investing in a business because it's not a business yet. In fact, evaluating it as a business will give you precisely the wrong answer most of the time.”

“And my guess, and I haven't modeled this, but my guess is, as with all of these things, there will be a subset of these funds where it works. Because they catch the five companies that they can continue to plow money into and end up putting five hundred millio…”

“What is seed investing is a smart person in a generally interesting area. That's it. There's no need to overthink it because they're going to zig and zag in ways that you can't predict.”

“The skill set required to invest at seed is utterly different, different and probably completely incompatible with the idea of being a good growth or public market investor. The reason why is at the end of the day, Seed companies have no financial metrics.”

“I don't think there's such a thing as like, De-risked seed. Like you should be betting on companies that in a success scenario can be wildly, wildly successful and worth a, you know, incredible amount of capital and want, you know, to own a percentage of those…”

“The macro change in the environment impacts our prior investments much more so than our future investments.”

“My view when I say Seed is dead is that I think the factory model of Seed, which supported massive scaling of it, is dead. And we're kind of back to where we have been historically, which is Seed is a bespoke It's a bespoke thing. Some people can do it well. I…”

“When I look at our seed portfolio over a long period of time now, my own personal investing longer, you know, the seed deals that have mattered have always been the ones that were hardest to package. They were not on the factory line. The places we've made ser…”

“And my bigger concern is that I think those are deadish in seed. Right. Owning one percent is, is still good. One percent of forty billion is good, but that's the classic seed that I think we're griping about. Like, can we do trade desks today?”

“I believe that the outliers usually start out at a low price, because they're outliers. Because they're non-consensus and right. People tend to believe that the world is divided between low price deals with low upside and high price deals with high upside. I d…”

“On balance, I don't think reserves and follow ons, I think it actually hurts seed investing and it hurts seed investing in two ways. One is it depresses DPI.”

“And the cost of omission at seed is so much more expensive than the cost of commission. And if you say no to the wrong company, you blow your returns. If you say yes to the wrong company, it's a rounding error in your model.”

“At the end of the day, what is seed investing? Is a smart person in a generally interesting area. That's it. There's no need to overthink it, because they're gonna zig and zag in ways that you can't predict.”

“Seed investing is systemically broken today.”

“For seed investing to really make sense, the next round should be three X to justify the risk. And for A or B, it's gotta be two X, or you should just wait.”

“And I think it's the worst for seed because Everyone each year wants to be a seed investor even more. It's the, everyone, you know, what, you know, Jake Paul, Jake Logan, whatever, which are the Jake's you know, it's not just the chain smokers anymore, and Jar…”

“There was an arbitrage. There was a real arbitrage because the risk premium at the seed stage was way overstated. That has changed completely.”

“When I started, my model was I'm actually paying twice my entry price. That's how I model. Now it's four X. Now I'm playing, now I'm paying, I'm going to suffer 75% dilution, and it's not, and that really means my entry price is four X what it looks like on, b…”

“Nine billion doesn't clear the bar for seed investing in 2026.”