seed investor

“And I think the smartest seed investors are investing in, in the founder's ability to use the seed capital to really figure out the answers to some really hard questions that have never previously been answered and make a lot of mistakes along the way, but lea…”

“I just think that you know, they're kind of doing what seed investors were kind of meant to do when this whole thing started.”

“The job of a seed investor is to invest in a company before product market fit, and try to take the company to the other side of product market fit and into sort of early validation and early growth.”

“Now I would say that that pace has calmed down, and we're probably all at that pace, meaning that you're not meeting a company and giving them a term sheet the next day, but you're making sure that you really have a good relationship with this team, that you'v…”

“I feel that right now it feels like a calmer, more realistic time, at least for me, and I would argue my, the, you know, the other seed investors than it did two years ago when I joined Freestyle.”

“And it turns out many seed investors, if you ask them, if they come on your show and say, hey, seed investor, do you inside bridge your companies? Almost every one of them is going to tell you categorically, no, that's something we don't do.”

“Turns out there were not a ton of people doing this kind of early stage seed investing who were willing to do the work or even could do the work. Because they just hadn't been founders before. They hadn't been makers or doers before.”

“For the entrepreneur, you do have to really think about the signaling risk of that being a seed investor, of a firm that also leads A's being a seed investor. What if they decide not to compete for the A? Then is that a bad signal to everyone else? I think gen…”

“I think before YC came along, a lot of seed investors way overplayed their leverage over founders and would break term sheets, renegotiate deals, weak confidential information. And then YC was a powerful enough force to say, you can't do this or there will be …”

“The simplest outcome on the seed stage is that this business gets the next round. And so you have to understand what the incentive is for the investor, what the incentive is for yourself, which is obviously building a great business. I'm assuming if you're a f…”

“If your competency is seeded, And then you follow on an A or B. You don't really have the competency as a manager to assess whether that's a good A deal, whether that's a good B deal. So part of what you need to do as a manager is outsource that decision to th…”

“What happens is, here, here's the waterfall, right? Okay, public markets multiples correct, and you're, let's say you're like a mutual fund, and you do pre-IPO rounds, and companies aren't trading at 30 times revenue anymore, they're trading at seven times, an…”

“I just don't think you can make money in seed investing in hot seed startups. I don't think you can.”

“And then the pre-seed category was created because seed, seed investors weren't taking as much risk. And now the pre-seed investors aren't taking as much risk, which is why I'm saying let's do inception investing.”

“I don't think there's a seed investor that you can find who is figured out how to be right 10 times more often than another seed investor.”

“I think that there's no point in even as a seed investor selling before a billion. It's not enough money.”

“In the seed market most seed investors are using signaling as part of an objection to work with a multi-stage fund.”

“I will also say that any seed investor competing with a multi-stage firm will go very, very out of their way to instill this Wild fear in the founder's mind about like the risk of that.”

“I think you've got to assume now over two thirds dilution from seed if you don't do pro rata to IPO two thirds.”

“I actually think given a choice, you should have different investors for the C and the A because you just get two firms instead of one. They bring different things.”

“I don't believe liquidation preferences matter. I don't believe they're a big deal, despite what they are next. But my liquidation preference has always been, and I put it in quotes, not true, knowing the founder would never quit. That's my protection as a see…”

“As a seed investor, I used to think my real entry price was twice what it looked because of dilution. Right now I'm thinking it's four times.”