Startup Professionals Musings

DECEMBER 20, 2011

Since they don’t know you (yet), their first integrity check on you as a person is whether your friends and family believe in you strongly enough to give you seed money for your new idea. If you set around quietly waiting for someone you know to offer you money to fund a startup, you will probably have a long wait.

Early Stage 247

Early Stage Technical Review Elevator Pitch Due Diligence 247

Startup Professionals Musings

FEBRUARY 3, 2013

Since they don’t know you (yet), their first integrity check on you as a person is whether your friends and family believe in you strongly enough to give you seed money for your new idea. If you set around quietly waiting for someone you know to offer you money to fund a startup, you will probably have a long wait.

Technical Review 273

Technical Review Entrepreneur Elevator Pitch Due Diligence 273

Hippoland

AUGUST 17, 2016

A reader named Turner Dean recently asked me whether it’s better to raise seed money on convertible notes or straight-up equity. In reality, at such an early stage, it almost doesn’t make sense to do a priced round, because you don’t know what the fundraising landscape will be apriori.

Equity 48

Equity Convertible Security Silicon Valley Technical Review 48

YoungUpstarts

OCTOBER 28, 2015

Startups need to understand how to manage the seed money they receive from investors and VCs. The primary terms for these types of transactions are the valuation cap and the conversion discount. Debt or convertible securities (e.g., a SAFE or KISS) provide a much simpler transaction with less terms to negotiate.

Convertible Security 100

Convertible Security IP Technical Review Software Review 100

Gust

DECEMBER 18, 2013

Assuming the company is able to make effective use of the seed money to greatly increase the value of the enterprise, all of that value therefore accrues to the founder, rather than the investor. That is a swing of 15x from the investor’s point of view!

Valuation 150

Valuation Founder Seed Money Common Stock 150

This is going to be BIG.

APRIL 16, 2018

First, in the early stages, there's a lot more information that can be gleaned about you than we can know for sure about the success of your company. You think you're getting this big fat check compared to the seed money you raised, but they're actually doing something more like dipping their toes in the water.

Due Diligence 96

Due Diligence Early Stage Term Sheet Vesting 96

Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 31, 2019

First, the introduction of seed money as an institutional form of capital. Before the mid-2000s, we mostly had individual angels writing small checks from their personal capital, but over the last 10-15 years we’ve seen hundreds of new institutional seed funds formed. No need to name names.

Lean 108

Lean Venture Capital Conversion IPO 108