Lead Investor

“The point is you have this free call option as a lender to own companies if you have to. And if you're lending to good companies and you control your outcomes, where you're a lead investor, you can probably get to better resolutions.”

“I also think you should not wait for a lead. And you should just set terms and pull people in like one-on-one. Increase the valuation as you go along. Because as you need money less, you can increase that valuation.”

“We had a month and a half ago now an issue where we had to actually let go of our lead investor over disagreements on various things”

“So we're not seeing that lead investors are absolutely necessary for a round to get closed, especially at the pre-seed and seed stage, right?”

“We used to not care who the other investors were. We're like, we're going to help you and we'll get other people great around us. Now we actually care about quality, you know, of the lead investor.”

“In preparation for the next round, the most important thing is investors invest in lines and not dots, and so I would sit down with your new leads and align in that first meeting on five names that would be ideal leads for the next round, and then also clearly…”

“I still actually believe pretty strongly in, in ownership, especially as a lead investor, and why that's important in architecting a fund model. But at the time, if what you're playing for is three, four hundred million dollar outcomes, then like, it's pretty …”

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

“There's tons of angel and scout funds, but they're not leading these deals. You still need someone to catalyze. If you're trying to raise a proper round, if you're trying to raise enough money to get your next inflection point, you do need a lead investor.”

“Interpreting if a manager is in your conference room and you're saying, tell me about these five deals and, you know, to ask, were you the lead? Were you the lead? Were you the lead? No, no, no. And you start to realize, okay, this manager has fallen from a pl…”

“When the company encounters challenges, sometimes an investor group really needs a lead because they need leadership. It's very, very easy to be a good investor when everything's going up and to the right and, you know, the founder is doing all the right thing…”

“The lead has to carry the company. And the non-leads don't. No one's expecting a non-lead to write another check into the company, but everyone's expecting the lead to write another check.”

“In general, I would say, The leads are usually doing a lot of due diligence, or at least enough due diligence work, and the follow-on checks are not.”

“We operate what we call an investor-led equity crowdfunding model, and what that means is that before any opportunity comes to us and is open to a wider network of investors, there has to be an established lead investor involved who's kicked the tires of the b…”