Seed

“And for a drone company operating, and we're going to be more consumptive of seed than taking seed, planting it in trays to be in a nursery, and then growing it into seedling hand planting, far less consumptive of seed.”

“I think today we're almost seeing the opposite problem where, you know, an idea that's too small is not something that we want to engage with, and you can talk about how you put a hundred billion dollars to work in the seed productively.”

“I mean, there's 30, 40 companies that at seed have raised a hundred to three hundred million.”

“A fifty billion dollar outcome doesn't look like a fifty billion dollar at seed. It probably looks like a half a billion dollar outcome. And then you'll find that, oh my God, this is continuing to gather momentum and it is much bigger than it is.”

“The hardest part of the market is seed in many ways, and the worst performing funds will be the 50 to a hundred million dollar funds. I say this to explain because you're too big to be collaborative, To write those hundred to 250 K checks and be a friend, but …”

“Yeah, median C would have been more like six or seven. Median A would have been more like 25.”

“We are most excited about the truly early stage in the seed in NA, and as our size is relatively modest, at a 1,000,000,006, we can actually get access that's meaningful, and some of these smaller funds that can move the needle for us.”

“Yeah, I turned it down at Seed.”

“Every startup that I invest in at C, like, I have no expectation of ever seeing liquidity for a decade, right? The seven year, I don't know where the seven year thing came from... A decade is the norm.”

“I think seed in SF is for suckers.”

“The first is they can literally decide they're not pricing this round, they're buying an option on the next round. If Harry's trying to make his money on seed, and they're simply trying to set themselves to make the money on the B, they can, by definition, pay…”

“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.”

“So in recent quarters, call it 20, in 20, 22, for instance, that same percentage of companies that got from C to A in two years or less was more like 15%. So from 40 to 15. Big, big, big, big drop.”

“When you went clubbing and you have to pay the entry fee at the door, that's like seed for the AUM galleries and the table is the C and the D.”

“Yeah, I think the, there was one company that tried a little bit called Seed that was doing kind of SMB banking, but at that point that kind of faltered but yeah, nothing at scale for sure.”

“And I think also in founder world, very few founders are able to move between being a great founder at seed and a great founder at series B and C. And maybe this is also sometimes why companies fail.”

“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…”

“That said it's not clear to me that, that construct needs to exist at seed and pre-seed in a way that necessarily, like, makes the company better off. And so typically what I see is that there are cases where, like, the founder wants to form a board, they want…”

“If you're a multi-billion dollar fund, and you write a two million dollar check into, to a company, and you invested in the wrong company in the category, Like, you don't get a chance to write a two hundred fifty million dollar check into the right company. So…”

“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.”

“The probability at seed of picking something that becomes a unicorn is three percent.”

“The problem with doing it at seed is that the lead time from when you invest to the realization is so long that you might have gotten in front of the parade, but that doesn't mean you made any money, whereas if you do it in the public markets, it's great, righ…”

“The problem with doing it at seed is that the lead time from when you invest to the realization is so long that you might have gotten in front of the parade, but that doesn't mean you made any money. Whereas if you do it in the public markets, it's great, righ…”

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

“We're going to keep our firm together. We're going to make the same number of investments each year, 10 to 12. But instead of having an ownership target that forces a certain check size, so, and so forth, we're going to write most checks between a hundred K an…”

“And so the way to sort of think about it is at the early stage seed, it's about 80 to 90% attrition. At the series A, it might be 60 to 70, series B sort of comes down.”

“Company wants to raise a seed, wants to raise an A, isn't really there, and they could probably figure it out with a handful of conversations, but they decide to press the gas on it, they have like, 50 conversations, end up with nothing, and the problem is, an…”

“Seed has shifted, the word seed has shifted from a million to three million dollar round to a five to eight million dollar round.”

“I don't think you can index seed, and I don't think you can aggregate seed into a low margin product.”

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

“I think the vibrancy of seed is here to stay. There's too many folks that made money. There's too many folks that enjoy investing. There are too many LPs that are still going to search for that alpha. And there will, every year there's going to be thousand X o…”

“Like the valuations in Seed have not dropped. And we've looked at this data really over like 10 plus years.”

“For the best deals, in the best markets, pricing continues to remain incredibly high at seed, and I believe we will see it stay that way over the next six to 12 months.”

“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.”

“As mentioned, many of the multistage funds are reluctant to deploy the 20 to forty million dollar Series A and B checks, and are instead moving to seed to remain in market, still writing checks, but putting fewer dollars out the door.”

“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…”

“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…”

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

“And so this is from the last six months of fundraising announcements that I cover on my site. And you can see these are bottom quartile to top quartile. And seed, ranging around four million.”

“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.”

“A lot of the later stage investors have now decided to move into seed, and so some of the promiscuity that you've alluded to comes from the lack of discipline that they had in late stage now being applied to early stage.”

“We've never let an A, and absolutely never let a B or a C. We are unequivocally involved in every funding round, and we've built a business around there, but we only do seed.”

“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.”

“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.”

“PR firms are way too expensive. Typically you have to keep them on a monthly retainer, and, you know, most companies, even through Seed, Series A, they don't have the budget for that.”

“These portfolio constructions are incompatible. If you're an investor, you're going to end up having a lot of companies that need a little bit more money to hit the milestone. And if you're an entrepreneur, what happens if you raise just a little bit too littl…”

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

“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…”