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

Both Sides of the Table

I was out to raise my first seed money in my second startup of $500,000. Having a great early investor provides downstream capital with a “signal” that you are a company worthy of being paid attention to even if you haven’t scaled your metrics. It is, of course, a very recent phenomenon.

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Why the New Seed Might Be a Bad Seed

This is going to be BIG.

in seed money instead of $1.5M You should target 18 to 24 months of runway post Series Seed." You just wind up spending it faster--and moving fast with lots of money, especially for a first time founder, is bound to be more mistake-prone and less focused. I don''t think early stage investors are taking enough risk.

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Traction vs. Product

Rob Go

Often, I find that there is a very distinct trade-off that surfaces when thinking about how to best position yourself for your series A: Option 1 is to focus nearly exclusively on some traction metric. Also, in a market where a bunch of high-flyers are crumbling, investors are more deliberate and less enamored by pure top line metrics.

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Why You’re Not Getting the Most out of Your Board

Both Sides of the Table

If you’re a venture-backed tech company or even an early-stage business fueled by angel or seed money I assume you have a good group of board members or advisors who will give you time to be helpful and they want to be helpful. Let board members know that you’re not walking through this in the actual meeting.

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To Follow On or Not to Follow On

This is going to be BIG.

There are a lot of people that artificially group together performance metrics for venture, and try to extrapolate successful stratagies from it. I think I'm terrific at helping early stage teams by rolling up my sleeves and doing what's necessary--getting them hires, PR, product strategy help to find that market fit.