Naimi: Indexing all 1,000 2008-2011 seed deals would return 3x from Uber
Ramtin Naimi · How This VC Went From Broke to Becoming the Hot Hand in Silicon Valley · Invest Like The Best · Jul 29, 2025 · at 29:22
Abstract Ventures founder Ramtin Naimi argues that historical seed valuations were inefficiently low and that multi-stage firms properly adjusted pricing upwards.
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“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 ultimately look at is that Probably 80% of the companies got announced, because that's just what ends up happening in ventures, so let's assume there was a thousand companies, and Uber was in that bucket, and if you wrote an equal size check into every single one of those 1000 companies, you would have gotten a 3000 X just on Uber, so you would have actually had a three X net venture capital portfolio blanketing the entire market, and then there was also Airbnb, and Dropbox, and so many other companies, and Instagram that were funded in that window, There is no world in which you could blanket an asset class and should be able to generate a three, five, seven X. So that was a very clear sign that deals were too cheap back then”
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