Ramtin Naimi
Founder & General Partner, Abstract Ventures. On 1 show, 1 appearance. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
investorfounder@ramtinnaimi ↗abstract.com ↗
Ramtin Naimi founded the seed and early-stage venture firm Abstract Ventures in 2016, scaling it to over $1.5 billion in assets under management. Ranked on the Forbes Midas List, he is known for early-stage investments in tech and crypto startups such as Solana, Rippling, and Polymarket.
1shows
1appearances
49statements
4resolved
1supported
0contradicted
25%fully supported
Everything Ramtin Naimi said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Naimi: 1990s and 2000s white male artists are currently a prime buying opportunity
“A lot of the people who were very iconic in the nineties and the 2000 happened to be white male artists who are currently out of favor in the art world. And there's not a lot of demand for their work, but it's a really good buying opportunity for those artists…”
Naimi: Seed funds claiming proprietary deal flow are delusional
“What became obvious to me was that seed funds that claimed they had proprietary deal flow were mostly kidding themselves, they're a little delusional, and it's hard to believe that a seed firm that has two or three people have more coverage at early stage than…”
Naimi: Elite VCs take every deal intro; struggling VCs claim lacking bandwidth
“The VCs who I believe are the most successful VCs and have had the most, you know, storied careers tend to be the people that take every single introduction I send them, and then the VCs who are still building their careers and I send them deals are like, oh, …”
Naimi: Early liquidity was crypto's bug because rich founders stopped building
“Early liquidity was the bug and not the feature of crypto. People got rich too quickly and they stopped building things.”
Naimi: Artworks bottom in value at 20 years before surging at 30-40 years
“If you look at all the data in the art world, it tends to work like this cycle continuously where things that were iconic 20 years ago tend to be undervalued 20 years later, then get very highly valued 30 to 40 years later.”
Naimi: Top art galleries offer million-dollar signing bonuses to poach artists
“We'll do a better commission split with you. You know, like, it's not fifty-fifty with us. We'll, we'll go sixty-forty. We'll go seventy-thirty. You want a signing bonus? Here's a million dollars cash up front. Like, go with us. Don't go with them. It's very c…”
Naimi: Dedicated seed funds rarely lead power-law rounds, excluding Uber and Roblox
“And what I'd realized over time was that if you eliminate Uber and Roblox from the equation whose seed rounds were led by first round capital, it's close to impossible to identify power law companies in which the seed round was led by a seed stage venture capi…”
Naimi: A $100M fund at 5% ownership beats a $1.5B fund at 15%
“What I focused on was ownership as a relative metric as opposed to an absolute metric. And what I mean by that was, I knew I could get five percent ownership in these deals very consistently, and I knew the firms that I was co-investing alongside can get 15% o…”
Naimi: Abstract Fund I gave higher look-through ownership than any VC in 94% of deals
“By the time we fully deployed fund one it became pretty obvious that in 94% of the companies we'd invested in, There was not a venture fund you could have invested in anywhere in the world that would have gotten you more look through ownership in that company …”
Naimi: Multi-stage tier-one VCs will take 10% seed ownership minimum
“Pretty much every multistage tier one VC firm will do a seed deal at 10% if they have to. If you push them down to six or seven, it's just not worth it. They'd rather wait for the Series A.”
Naimi: Dilution-sensitive founders build stronger teams and higher conviction
“I found I've had a lot of success with dilution sensitive founders... They tend to just be a little bit more high conviction on what they're building. And they tend to believe that every percent of equity they give away is one percent of equity they'll never g…”
Naimi: Successful Founders Must Have Proven Exceptionalism Before Their Startup
“It's hard for me to believe if I meet somebody
That if I can't get a sense that this person is special, or has been special, or has done impressive things in their life, that the first impressive thing they're ever going to do is this company that they're aski…”
Naimi: Sequoia, Benchmark, and a16z only lose Series A deals to each other
“Typically when one of those three firms extends an offer to a company, they tend to win, unless they're competing with one of the two other ones, and then they tend to only lose to one of the other two.”
Naimi: Very few VC firms have more than three partners closing top deals
“When those firms are competing for a hyper-competitive financing, it tends to be the same one, two, or three partners who tends to do most of the selling and closing for those deals to bring those deals home, and very few venture capital firms have more than o…”
Naimi: The mega private venture-backed startups will not all go public
“I don't think the end result is ultimately these companies are all just gonna go public.”
Naimi: The Big Four art galleries control prices for top artists
“If at any given time there is, you know, 50 important practicing artists in the world or even the estates of the most iconic dead artists, They tend to be represented by the big four galleries, Hauser, Gagosian, Zwirner, Pace, and once they're represented by t…”
Naimi: Michael Ovitz owns the best Picasso, Rothko, and Kline artworks
“Michael, you know, I think he's got three Picassos, but I think he's got the three best Picassos ever. And he's got probably the best Mark Rothko I've ever seen. He's got the best Franz Klein I'd seen. Even on contemporary artists, he has the single best Laura…”
Naimi: Seed funds cannot compete with multi-stage VCs on brand and pricing
“And then it became very apparent to me that when a multi-stage fund and a seed fund tried to compete with one another, that it was very hard for a seed stage venture capital firm to compete with a multi-stage venture capital firm. Oftentimes, multi-stage ventu…”
Naimi: Indexing all 1,000 2008-2011 seed deals would return 3x from Uber
“If you look between, like, it was either, I think, like, 2008 and 2011, there were about 1000 seed deals funded in that time frame, or at least publicly announced seed deals in that time frame, so there's some survivorship bias there, but what you need to ulti…”
Naimi: Abstract accounted for one-third of AngelList volume for six months
“That I ended up for a brief period of time, I think for a six month window, I was one third of all the volume on, on AngelList.”
Naimi: Incremental 'Local' Pivots Kill Failing Startups
“I think the local pivot is what kills companies”
Naimi: Sequoia, Benchmark, and a16z Have Highest Density of Elite Board Directors
“The density of high quality board members that have storied reputations of being great board members at those three particular firms, I think, outweighs the number of high quality board members that exist at pretty much any other venture capital firm.”
Naimi: Venture Capital Is the Only Asset Class Where Past Performance Predicts Returns
“Venture is the only asset class where historical results is somewhat indicative of future performance, and you can actually somewhat forecast how a venture capital firm will do over time based on how they've done historically”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Ramtin's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 INVEST LIKE THE BESTLEDGER | Founder & General Partner, Abstract Ventures | 1 | 49 | 25% 1/4 | full record on Invest Like the Best → |