article thumbnail

Announcing a Deal I’ve Wanted to Talk About for a Year

Both Sides of the Table

” So Ethan went to work as a product manager at Google Video. He had an idea for a startup that would help consumers better book service jobs and would take on Service Magic, which he believed had a business model that could be disrupted. I told Ethan on the spot that I wanted to be the lead investor in his new company.

article thumbnail

Building the Best Seed Syndicates

View from Seed

Aside from the early commitments, the next most important thing to focus on is nailing down your lead investor. I’ve found that the lead investor will end up doing 90% of the work for a startup (or will cause 90% of the pain if you get the decision wrong). Often one of the leads in the mix is a larger, multi-stage fund.

Syndicate 202
Insiders

Sign Up for our Newsletter

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

article thumbnail

Top 40 Startup Posts for August 2010

SoCal CTO

How I Think About Seed Investing As A VC - Feld Thoughts , August 2, 2010 Last week saw an explosion of discussion around seed investing, including plenty of negative comments around VCs as seed investors. While I agree that many VCs are crummy seed investors, I think there are some that are excellent seed investors. Developer.

Startup 191
article thumbnail

The Future of Startup Funding

www.paulgraham.com

August 2010 Two years ago I wrote about what I called " a huge, unexploitedopportunity in startup funding :" the growing disconnect betweenVCs, whose current business model requires them to invest largeamounts, and a large class of startups that need less than theyused to. forstartups was to find one angel to act as the lead investor.

Startup 93
article thumbnail

ProfessorVC: The Most Important Venture Capital Statistic

Professor VC

Mid-way through the process, we took another cut at our business plan and built a model where $5 million would be sufficient to get us beyond breakeven. This brought in a new set of prospective investors and required a lower investment from the lead investor as our existing investors were committed and on board.