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How the Seed-Stage VC Trend Began, The Downsides of Unicorns & Much More

Both Sides of the Table

If you are a 20-something tech entrepreneur you could be forgiven for thinking that seed-stage investors, Angellist Syndicates and widely available angel money always existed. Let me take you back just 10 years ago to 2005 in Silicon Valley where I returned after 11 years of living in Europe.

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Should Founders Be Allowed to Take Money off the Table?

Both Sides of the Table

On a panel that I sat on with Ron in LA in 2008 he stated that there were no circumstances in which the founder should take money off of the table. A friend of mine is a serial entrepreneur and is running a high-profile, early stage company in NorCal. He’s been at it since 2005. I believe this is wrong.

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How to Start a Startup

www.paulgraham.com

March 2005 (This essay is derived from a talk at the Harvard ComputerSociety.) You need three things to create a successful startup: to start withgood people, to make something customers actually want, and to spendas little money as possible. Usually you get seed money from individual rich people called"angels."

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How to Fund a Startup

www.paulgraham.com

November 2005 Venture funding works like gears. A typical startup goes throughseveral rounds of funding, and at each round you want to take justenough money to reach the speed where you can shift into the nextgear. It wasnt because they werent accredited investors that I didntask my parents for seed money, though.

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From Nothing To Something. How To Get There.

techcrunch.com

One of the things I do as a founder of a later stage startup is to meet with early stage entrepreneurs to help them get their companies going. For both companies, the initial traction enabled raising seed money to get them to a traditional VC investment.) The second one not until 2005.

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Top Startup Advisor Paul Graham Just Warned Against Taking Google's Money

www.businessinsider.com

Google Ventures has made more than 100 seed investments, Maris said, including some past and present Y Combinator companies, and is making one to two new ones a week. Parse, one of the most-anticipated startups in Silicon Valley these days , went through Y Combinator last year and raised seed money from Google Ventures , for example.