Pre Seed

“When we started Afford 10 years ago, this year will be 10 years for us pre-seed, which has now become a category, was not a category back then. You know, it was actually a negative term, right? It was reserved for founders who could not raise a seed round, and…”

“In fact, when Sequoia launched their most recent fund, they said, I guess we're now Presteed investors, too.”

“If our round is hundred percent storytelling, zero percent data, the next round is still 90% storytelling and 10% data.”

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

“And I think more broadly speaking, between pre-seed and seed, like, I'd say seed, which is kind of where the valuation range is that you're looking at, the bar is higher than landing one customer.”

“We have a geographic thesis that you can build great companies anywhere. And that at the pre-seed sort of first check stage, you know, you're best served with a local partner.”

“You come out of school today and you've done nothing in your life and you're a first time founder with a terrible idea and you're raising it like you're the median pre-seed It's ten million posts.”

“At the later stages, at the earlier stages, it's increasing. So pre-seed, seed, series A, there's just a huge amount of capital looking to get in.”

“We launched, we built the company in January, but in three weeks we raised the three million dollar pre-seed, which is a pretty good size pre-seed and pretty fast momentum.”

“We're raising one million dollars for our pre-seed to bring that vision to reality.”

“You know, about half of that 170 is seed or pre-seed. So at that point, you're basically just hiring the team, mostly.”

“I don't think venture will get fairer for pre-seed. I don't think venture will get fairer for folks that don't check any boxes.”

“If you look at where most of these data points are, and if you take a look at the median, you can see that most pre-seed round sizes were around one to one and a half million, and valuations were very roughly at five to ten million.”

“I don't think pre-seed actually exists anymore.”

“I think the media confuses the privileged pre-seed with the less privileged. I don't think we've seen the same levels of inflation for folks that have no social proof.”

“I don't think pre-seed actually exists anymore, bluntly, for the majority well, not for the majority, but for a lot of founders, whereby if you come out of a top Facebook, Twitter, Datadog, Slack, you name it, you can raise, you know, three to five on 20 like …”

“I think great founders skip the pre-seed. I don't really ever see, like, tier one pedigree founders coming out with a pre-seed.”

“You don't have unit economics. The CAC is going to explode, or you don't know where it's going to go. The LTV is going to shrink. We just don't know.”

“I don't think so. I think there's always going to be a place for pre-seed, especially for those founders, maybe first-time founders, maybe founders that are not found in the typical places. I think there is always going to be a place for very early stage round…”

“What used to be a series A today is a pre-seed, and then there's a seed, and then there's a series A, which is basically the old series C.”

“I actually kind of coined the pre-seed term at one point in, I think in 2013, 2014 because I saw the seed market kind of evolving where it was becoming a two million to three million dollar round, and I was like, wait, these things are changing, and so there h…”