Series A

“And, you know, the best rounds and the hottest companies in the valley now will not have one or two investors in them. They will have a good eight or nine or 10 because it's a network effect.”

“What makes a great Series A for me is someone who has also on top of that shown that they can learn and they can iterate to get to that. Because when you give Series A funding, it is still very, very high risk. And so what you're still backing is the ability o…”

“Normally we see companies, frankly, they do a couple of series A rounds, or they do you know, a bridge, something like that, because it's taking longer for those companies then to get to series B.”

“So at NMC, we're typically investing in the Series A round. So for us, that means a company that's got some initial traction, it's got customers, customers that are willing to pay, and that are demonstrably getting some kind of value or ROI out of the product,…”

“I could probably name you 10 VCs in London who can write a good Series A check and will do more than a couple of those a year, and that's a problem for the community, I think.”

“Ours would be for a SaaS business, for example we want to see a business that's, you know, doubling annual recurring revenue run rate year on year, at least approaching fast approaching, you know, a hundred thousand pounds a month in revenue or kind of about t…”

“There's so many seeds getting funded out there, but at the end of the day, the A's are still happening, and they're happening later in larger figures, but there's not that many more Series A deals getting funded.”

“Well, the reason we don't typically follow on is usually, especially in frothy times, the amount of information you get between the C and the A is not enough to know that this is a clear winner. So often, so the price increases dramatically, the prorata of our…”

“Late seeds, certainly in terms of value raised looking a little bit like Series A did maybe three, four years ago.”

“And so what you're finding is that that sort of seed extension becomes more and more necessary purely because series A rounds are being done now at two, three million dollars annual recurring revenue rather than one.”

“Our model is to take our pro rata in the follow on rounds, but we would never lead a series A or B or something like that given our size and our focus.”

“What we don't generally do, though, is look at C C primes, or C pluses, or second Cs, or C twos, or C Bs, from companies that aren't already in the portfolio. Cause generally that smacks of a company that went out to raise a series A and failed.”

“Seed rounds have really, really gotten a lot bigger in the in the last three or four years, to the point now where you have a pre-seed Round. So you might have a friends and family round of, you know, 25 to 50,000 dollars to get you off the ground. You then do…”

“Yeah, I mean, if we were, if there was a startup going out from one of our, going out for their Series A, and we didn't participate, that would look really bad.”

“Series A had actually only gone up, I believe, 1.4 X in that same period.”

“Yeah, and I think calling it C or series A or series B means nothing nowadays, because it really varies by geography.”

“On average at that time we did 30% growth month over month, so it was what triggered that series A.”

“The thing that I think matters the most in startups of getting from sort of seed stage to A is time. I've never met an entrepreneur who doesn't say, God, if I just had another six months, right? Because time's the thing that kind of bites you in the ass every …”

“That the bar is higher now to get your Series A.”

“I just think what used to be called Series A is now called SEED.”

“The standard series a was five million dollars on a five million dollar pre money valuation.”

“So almost the series A has become the fourth or fifth institutional round.”

“The companies that do either fit one of two characteristics. One is that they're off to the races, and people are dying to invest in them because of the quality of the team, or the opportunity, or the market. The second category, the one that I explain I spend…”

“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…”

“We remember, you know, having one of our Series A, You know, potential investors come by and had like our technical due diligence and this person had this huge technical background and we're sitting there shitting our pants thinking, oh my God, he's going to l…”

“Well, so for us and our platform, we focus on series A, and we tend to use what we call the right size fund, so we don't always do many funds that are over five hundred million. In fact, we've only done one historically.”

“One, since we're focusing on funds that are predominantly Series A exposure, many funds, when they get into the seven hundred billion dollar fund size, are not predominantly Series A. They're doing other stages.”

“If you look at the data, look back at all the companies that have been founded, and ask yourself, how many of the best companies that we're most proud of started out with a really huge Series A's? Very few of them have that dynamic. That doesn't mean it's not …”

“It's going to take me nine months to figure out or 12 months to figure out the key hypotheses I need right now. So let me add another, you know, nine to 12 months of runway onto that. So that puts you kind of into the range you mentioned, that kind of 20 to 24…”

“You can become obsessed with what you need to achieve for the next round. And, you know, every board meeting then becomes, well, what are the series A guys want? And you're not really building the business. You're building the deck for the series A.”

“We do not think there's misalignment As long as there is absolute clarity with the founder prior to investing as to what constitutes success for the series A.”

“And what I'll say, at least through first fund and, you know, starting to get halfway through our second fund, is when we and our founders agree on those milestones and they hit those milestones, none of them have had problems raising an A round.”

“And the Sand Hill Road investors stopped doing this, and even though they called themselves As being in a series A business, they really aren't probably in a series B or the series C.”

“When we raised our series a for my last company and client air funded us, the entire pitch was I walked in, I put it on a whiteboard, five assumptions. I said, These are the five assumptions you have to a hundred percent believe in in order for this to be an i…”

“A seed company that maybe, you know, angel funded and has some sort of party round and there's no clear lead venture person has a much lower chance of getting to a series A than a company that has a lead seed fund behind it.”

“Generally, we say we stay out of seat extensions and during the A, we think the lead is going to be the signal anyway. So that's when we'll come back in.”

“So in my view, I don't think corporates are your best lead investor for a series A. If you do that, then I do think you run into those negative signaling issues when you go out to raise the series B, and people are asking sort of, why do you only have a strate…”

“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…”

“Between our series A and our series B, which is roughly 20 15 to 20 16, we saw our average project size go up from 15 or 20,000 to about a 150,000.”

“When you do an early stage investment, On average, we at least reserve an equal amount of capital. So if you put in an eight million dollar series A, one might reserve eight, 10, eleven million dollars, you know, for follow-on rounds to support the company as …”

“In advance of a Series A, you should be giving the pitch for about 40 hours of practice and rehearsal before you give it to the first investor.”

“So if you raise a pre-seed round of 500 K, you're almost certainly going to need At least another million to get to the series A.”

“And, you know, given that there is such a glut of seed money out there and so many companies being seed funded, yet this, you know, the number of Series A deals is effectively the same, if not lower year on year. What that means is, and I, this is the exact wo…”

“I believe that the reality is that you want as much runway as possible in order to have as much leverage when you get into that A round.”

“Companies that are founded by exciting entrepreneurs in intriguing spaces are able to raise A meaningful amount of cash before they launch, and then if they take off, you know, they often almost skip the traditional series A and go straight to a larger series …”

“I would say the same feedback that your seed investors gave you on the step up from the C to the A, we're seeing the A to the B. And I've got to imagine it's the same for every subsequent round. It's just, if you have something that's working, I just continue …”

“But we were not planning on raising a series B. We still had the vast majority of our series A in the bank, actually.”

“Well, I think it's around the Series A. I think when you're raising a Series A level amount of capital, I think that the investors have an understandable interest In governance and as a company is starting to mature and build out its organization and its manag…”

“I subscribe completely to the mentality that price does not matter at the Series A. At the Series A level, we as venture investors, anyone with more than a 25 or fifty million dollar fund should be looking for these outsized exits. They should be looking for c…”

“At the series A and series B, yeah, I will definitely be asking a lot more questions via email and oftentimes looking for some, threshold level of engagement or retention or growth or usage before I'll take a meeting.”

“Valuations at the Series A are banded, and I remember doing investments 10 years ago when a Series A was 10 pre, and now a Series A is 30 pre, and you just have to write bigger checks now to get to the same level of ownership, and that has a, has had a true im…”

“We want to focus on early stage, which is really truly series A and be the first partner to a great founder and then help them on that journey, which is typically a multi-year, if not a decade plus long journey.”

“The best advice we always give is when you're raising your A round of financing, what's the pitch that you're going to give at the B round and work backwards and say, okay, based on that, if I'm raising A today and I'm targeting 18 to 24 months to raise my B, …”

“When you're in the earliest stage, Data is one of many things. You know, the interesting thing about a Series A is that there is no one most important thing. There are many, many important things. And then the further and further you get along, the more and mo…”

“I think it's much easier to make really data informed decisions post series A. So if you're a series A investor, you're more likely to be able to make better data informed decisions.”

“Their fund size are triple the size they were, I don't know, seven years ago. And they want to wait until they can write a 12 to fifteen million dollar check in the Series A, but that means the bar is higher.”

“We do talk about market size, but we surely don't think it's the most important thing at a Series A.”

“Our goal has been to invest three or four hundred million dollars a year. Again, we do both venture and growth equity, so that seems like a lot of money, but many of those are large checks and later stage companies. Fully half of it is your classic five to twe…”

“When I entered the venture market, Series A's were done anywhere between five and ten million dollar pre-money valuation. Now you're seeing them get into 20 to 50 to 60.”

“If we're wrong by 20 or 30% on price in a seed in a series A company, it doesn't matter that much. If we're off by 50% on price, it does matter. And a hundred percent of price matters more.”

“I think building ownership after your first check is probably hard as a seed investor because series A, series B is just so competitive and the idea of increasing ownership in those rounds feels like a false hope most of the time or adverse selection.”

“There'll be some people that they're not formally leading a round, and they're not taking a board seat, but they just want to go between an A and a B, and a bridge round will be converted into some kind of new branding, where it's just like a top-up round or s…”

“Investors kind of set the tone. And sometimes the implied conversation there is, what do you need to do? You need to do A, B, and C in order to raise your seed bounce. You need to do D, E, and F to raise your series A. And I think that's just a really wrong wa…”

“The advice that I hear is for enterprise software founders, you need to get to one million dollars in ARR to raise a Series A. I think an enterprise software company that has a great product is going to have no Capital before certain financial milestones.”

“If you take in a multi-stage fund at seed, they are not incented to price you up at the A because they're already in and they've got their ownership.”

“We had a series A close, all the docs were done, had this big billionaire investor who was leading the round, and he just called me, like, on December 23rd and said, hey, I'm not going to send a wire, and that was the end of that company.”

“It's a lot easier to invest in seed in series B than it is to invest in A, and there's a reason for that, and that's because a lot of the companies I work with are deep tech companies, or they're engineering driven, and there is little traction at the A, so th…”

“For now, what we're generally saying is if the Series A Is getting done and it's getting done at a price that we feel like is reasonable for the business, which most of them are, by the way, that's 80, 90%. Then a hundred percent of the time we're going to par…”

“When we raised the Series B, I think we've spent a million dollars in the Series A, so, so, you know, I guess we haven't really deployed the capital very much.”

“But if I look at our, even the early round series A, like Ilya Fushman showed up at our office, you know, for people here at WeWork, but like he wanted to see the other people. He wanted to talk to people. So like, you know, he did a very good diligence and th…”

“This was at a stage of the company where we had revenues and cost, but, like, in terms of, like, nailing it down, like, we did not have an accounting function, we did not have anything.”

“What's interesting, what you're saying, though, is valuations have jumped, as we all know, and also the amount of capital the A firm is putting in. So where the A round three years ago should be six at 24, it's now 20 at 80, like you're saying.”

“Most Series A investments today, there is revenue. There is ARR. There is a product. There are customers to talk to, and so that means you have data”

“Again, I'm very well-known for saying that, you know, markets in general, they tend to look like barbells, especially in stress. And I think this time is no different is that the super high quality teams and businesses will continue to be able to raise on very…”

“Of course, if Sequoia or Excel or Andreessen or Lightspeed has two years of data and they don't preempt the A, of course it's a problem. Of course it's a bad signal. So that was a problem, and that exists today.”

“As you start to get very late stage and raising money from, you know, New York investors and mutual funds, they're going to be a bit closer to judging you like public investments. And so the accuracy and the forecast and those things are becoming more importan…”

“Proper growth function is series A and beyond, right? And that's like typically the advice you would give, like series A beyond, you have users, you have things that you want to start to actually grow.”

“Is a lot of, let's say a lot of the like multi-stage funds, typically historically leading series A's, they used to have an ownership threshold of. 20% minimum. And now they have a lower ownership threshold, 15.”

“So I think it's happening and that never used to happen. You wouldn't have like a tier one fund taking Eight percent ownership in a Series A. But that's happening.”

“A is the toughest round to get multiple people into because there's typically a lead investor, typically a single one.”

“Particularly second half of last year, all of the series A's in our portfolio, like we were doing them at the price that, you know, we invest that, and then they were getting done at the hundred to 125 range.”

“So when we did our series A, the company was two of us. Rohan was doing all the engineering. I was doing all the pixels and we would collaborate a lot on product. It was just us.”

“Six months after the series A, the company was still probably like seven of us, eight of us.”

“So there's gonna be a bottleneck at, in terms of how many firms can actually do that at a very successful level. And this is sort of Series A really adding value at the Series A level. So I think when, the more the scattershot philosophy can be later rounds pr…”

“We are we are going to run whether you like it or not, the same model for a long time. And I think what that does is it aligns us with founders who are also going to build their business for a long time. We are consistent. We're not going to suddenly be a Seri…”

“And over that 19 or 18 to 22 period, you went to basically a hundred. Hundred percent of companies that raised the seed got an A. Maybe it was 90, 95.”

“We're just going to stay to our swim lane and just do Series A.”

“And when we fund them at Series A, we say, you know, here's enough capital for 24, 36 months post our investment. And let's be honest, if you can't raise capital after that point, you probably aren't building a viable business.”

“Pre-seed and seed, they're buoyed and we don't see that changing. We actually still see that staying the same and the valuation staying the same, maybe a little bit of compression, But we're not going to see at the same rate of series A, series B and onwards, …”

“And so what you have is you have pre-seed and seed, they're buoyed. And we don't see that changing. We actually still see that staying the same and the valuation staying the same, maybe a little bit of compression, but we're not going to see it the same rate o…”

“What we're seeing in our data is that only the companies that Actually have credible traction are raising now. So even if you put aside adverse selection, meaning the set of companies are raising from insiders and insiders are leading the rounds that we're def…”

“I think the A is where the elbows are sharpest. Seed, you get a lot of people coming together. Growth, you get a number of people coming together.”

“Series A is the best place to invest today in cloud and SaaS, right?”

“I don't think any founders are listening to these terrific insights on Twitter, and I don't think that they are ratcheting back their valuation expectations, and I think very few are worried that when they do their seed at 30 post, that that will impact an A, …”

“Narrative is going to stop at the seed when it used to flow through to the series A and even into the series B. So I think the trend is you can raise on narrative at seed, and then it's results starting in series A.”

“You will have 20 to 30% failure between seed and A. You will have 20 to 30% failure between A and B.”

“And if pricing doesn't correct at the earliest stage you're going to have a lot of no bids, you know, at the Series A because they wouldn't have gone far enough, fast enough for a Series A investor to come in and say they've earned their way into a significant…”

“I think that's why Series A is actually the most attractive place to be investing right now, because actually many of them have been significantly de-risked, but because of the markets today, the price inflection is actually significantly lower and less than i…”

“I actually think being overpriced at seed is actually a bigger problem than most entrepreneurs realize, particularly as the market's adjusting, right? It's a very hard time To raise Series A in general, and it's a harder time if you're already priced where som…”

“The price inflection between seed and Series A has actually never been smaller. Yet the de-risking that has occurred in that chasm has never been greater.”

“I think Series A is actually the best risk to reward insertion point in venture stay.”

“We had a couple of weeks to fix it, or we were in trouble, and we fixed it.”

“So I think in seed, that's probably more doable than in series A, for instance, right?”

“We very, we do very little seed investing. And the reason is we take conflicts very seriously, meaning we invest in one company per category. And if, you know, if we go too early, like that's sort of our bet in the category. And so I do very, you know, I, so w…”

“Our core vision is we just want to invest in the best founders, building the best companies that are going to be category, category defining. And I think you can do that through a very traditional venture model of, can we get a check into the series A and can …”

“And at some point, you got to decide, and you have to decide pretty early because nobody has ever raised an A or I would think a B doing both. You just would spread yourself far too thin attempting to do both.”

“In our series A, we're way oversubscribed. We actually have, we raised our series A over a year ago and we haven't even started spending it. So we had far more investors who wanted to invest than we had you know, capital to sell them. And so I gave our employe…”

“We actually have, we raised our series A over a year ago and we haven't even started spending it.”

“My very first Series A, I got, you know, I got benchmarked to agree to, you know, I think it was maybe eight percent or something.”

“At the Series A, less than 12 is a, it's almost like you're probably being too efficient. Like, we could probably, like, try to grow faster. 12 to 15 is really good. 15 to 20 is fine. It's kind of like, that's fine for now. We'll have to work on it later. Abov…”

“Wiz, when they raised their Series A at a five hundred million dollar valuation, had zero in ARR.”

“It's an important proxy for product market fit, but I always start with who's the founder and what's the market. And then I go to ARR as a secondary consideration.”

“If you know too much, because the crazy ideas are crazy, right? Like they, You can out think yourself from any good series A by overthink. I've done it myself. I've seen other people do it. And I think knowing too much can actually be dangerous.”

“You know, I think I'm seeing deals in the market that are 30 to forty million dollars Series A's, and I think one thing you have seen or I've observed in the industry Is that A's that would have been fifteen million, you know, five years ago could be 30 to for…”

“Well when I did the Series A of Airbnb. Sixty million. Post.”

“Usually what I find is that it's like, it's just like the quality of the company at that stage and how they've executed against the milestones that they set forth that determines like the series a success rather than say like the whimsical taste of the multi-s…”

“Carter just announced that Series A's are down 81%.”

“Seed is easy because it's Walt Disney versus Jerry Maguire. Walt Disney is tell me the story. There's lots of people that tell a good story and come from great companies. And then Jerry Maguire is show me the money. And there's actually very few people who are…”

“At the A and B stage, what we've observed is this. The going in probability of a five X plus winner, our mental model, remember I said it's 30, yeah, 20% chance of that outcome. If after two years the company has done what we said it would do roughly in terms …”

“I would have not raised as big of a series A looking back. I think it was too much dilution.”

“Series A at the time was actually very big for European standards at the time so it was somewhere around fourteen million. As a total of Series A, like I think like 30, thirty five million pre-money.”

“I think Series A is the worst place to be investing today. Obviously we do Series A. Not promoting ourselves. It's a very truthful exposure. It's like, hey, the price inflection point is so high, often three to five X, and the company progression is often less…”

“I'm clearly gonna Lose the deals that I want to lose, and if I win them, it's probably not the ones that I want.”

“Series A is the worst place to be investing. Company progression is minimal. Price is four to five X, the seed price. And we're paying a 150 to 200 X ARR with little signs of product market fit.”

“I just did a Series A where the company had, like, ten million dollars of ARR when I invested in it.”

“The worst place to be investing is Series A. You either need to be pre-seed or pre-IPO today. To make money.”

“And, you know, at the A, it's 40, 50% of total deals. The interesting, it climbs steadily, and by the C, it's about 80%. In other words, they, let's call it the Rory hard to beat mental list. By the time you get to the C, 80% of the time, one of, they have one…”

“You couldn't do the Series A of OpenAI and do the Series A of Anthropic. That would be stupid. I would assume one of the CEOs would stop you.”

“I look at Series A today, dude, and I think it's the worst place to be investing, and so I'd love your thoughts on this. You know, we have 200 XAROs, 150 XAROs, there's very little company progression from the seed round, but there's a very steep price increas…”

“And I say that Series A is the hardest place to be investing right now. Because essentially you have a million in revenue, very little signs of product market fit, honestly, at a million in revenue. You're paying a hundred to 200 XAR and it's incredibly compet…”

“If you're just constantly stepping to the plate and trying to, you know, I can see at the series A that this is going to be a hundred billion dollar exit, you will just overswing and you will fail.”

“They've basically gone and they deploy fifteen million dollar checks almost as an option and a lead lead generation for the next run. And the strategy is obviously to have an index at the A of every single good A company and then double down on the ones that t…”

“My takeaway is, honestly, you can't do early, and you're going to kill me, Rory, with less than a billion if you're going to compete to lead A's.”

“For that kind of Series A game, the Series A is not, for us, especially for a firm that just has, you know, checks for A's and B's and of this size, it's not an option value on putting a ton of money in later. Most of your value is made on that first check.”

“I think Series A is the worst place to be in the market. Little PMS, like one to three million of revenue. But the price is 200 X ARR.”

“Sometimes the best place to be could actually be investing a billion or things like that. Where it's de-risked. You can model the cash flows.”

“So for the series B, that was all inbound, but the series A, we actually did run a process because we were like, we should raise money here.”

“The deals that are getting swept off are going one and a half to 15, right?”

“They were finishing the year at one and a half million ARR, finishing next year at five million ARR. Today, brutal as it is, this isn't good enough to raise a good Series A.”

“You can't do Series A unless you have a four hundred million dollar fund today. Absolutely no chance.”

“And there's about a hundred million cows in the US. If you're doing well, you could charge 15 to 20 dollars per test. So even if you assume you could test every cow every year, you'd be at 1.5 billion, like total market, which is not enough to do a series A of…”

“Is I'm seeing Series A is priced at three to 500 on two to five million in revenue, but I'm finding the B at a hundred million in revenue priced at one to 1.5. It's a three X price increase for a 50 X revenue increase.”

“I think Series A is the worst place to be today, and my partners always hate me for this, because all Series A founders are like, great, we won't go and see them but it's the worst place to be. You have, like, one to three million in revenue, and you're at 200…”

“I think a billion dollar valuation is the new series, eh? And you're like, whoa, Harry, whoa, whoa, kiddo, calm down, listen to the facts. We used to do a fifty million post and hope it would become a 1,000,000,020 x, without dilution, blunt. Now, you enter at…”

“A billion dollars could just be the new Series A. If you think about it, we used to do a fifty million dollar post at Series A, hoping it would become a billion. Now you do a billion and it becomes a twenty billion dollar company.”