Can boutique seed funds win seed leads against multistage firms?

Harry Stebbings · Jul 14, 2023 · hedged

Founders Fund is pretty good at seed investing

35:04 20VC: Why Fund Sizes Should Be Smaller, Should Founders Also Have Their Own Funds, Is Emerging Markets Investing Gone, Is Fintech Investing Dead & Who Will Be The Winners and Losers in VC in the Next 10 Years with Sheel Mohnot, Co-Founder @ BTV

Harry Stebbings · Jul 22, 2024

The seed market right now is a bad place to be investing

Multistage funds have become very aggressive at seed with a good product, elite operator-angels form a new competitive class, traditional seed funds still compete, and pricing is as high as it has ever been

22:39 20VC: How I Lost Airbnb at Seed Because of an Exploding Term Sheet | Investing Lessons from Roelof Botha & Peter Thiel | Why VC is Less Collaborative Than Ever and Great Companies Are Being Destroyed by Too Much Cash with Kevin Hartz @ A*

Harry Stebbings · May 12, 2025

Multistage funds have made seed investing very difficult for pure-play seed funds

Their seed products are efficient, fast and good, and their cost of capital is very different from that of much smaller seed funds

48:36 20VC Exclusive: Mercury Founder Launches First $26M Fund | Why Founders Should Take the Highest Price | Why Serial Entrepreneurs are Better | Why AI Is So Overhyped | The Future of Venture Capital with Immad Akhund

Hemant Taneja · Sep 22, 2025

The earliest relationship with founders and the trust it creates is the key to doing the best company-building work, which is why a large platform should still aspire to be a top seed firm

Trust formed at the earliest stage is what enables an investor to actually help build the companies that matter

5:20 20VC: General Catalyst CEO Hemant Taneja on The Future of Venture Capital: Chanel vs Walmart | Lessons Scaling GC to $40BN in AUM | Investing $5BN+ Into Stripe Over 14 Rounds | Investing Hundreds of Millions into Anthropic at $60BN Valuation

Hemant Taneja · Sep 22, 2025

Firms should orient around ownership and the relationship with the company rather than the size of the check they write, which is what preserves genuine commitment to seed at scale

Staying committed to seed gets culturally hard for VC firms as they scale, and reframing the goal as ownership and relationship rather than deployment counteracts that drift

6:15 20VC: General Catalyst CEO Hemant Taneja on The Future of Venture Capital: Chanel vs Walmart | Lessons Scaling GC to $40BN in AUM | Investing $5BN+ Into Stripe Over 14 Rounds | Investing Hundreds of Millions into Anthropic at $60BN Valuation

Hemant Taneja · Sep 22, 2025

A platform firm loses its right to exist if it stops doing early-stage investing well

Early-stage venture is the core that the rest of the platform leverages for broader impact

6:58 20VC: General Catalyst CEO Hemant Taneja on The Future of Venture Capital: Chanel vs Walmart | Lessons Scaling GC to $40BN in AUM | Investing $5BN+ Into Stripe Over 14 Rounds | Investing Hundreds of Millions into Anthropic at $60BN Valuation

Harry Stebbings · Nov 21, 2025 · hedged

Seed is a very active strategy for the large multistage firms, with Andreessen doing roughly 70 seed investments over two years and Sequoia around 26

He recalls a graph outlining seed investment counts by firm

Scope: admits he may be butchering the numbers

30:09 20VC: Max Altman on The New Seed War: Can Anyone Compete with Sequoia and a16z | Leaving $2BN on the Table with Reddit | Lessons from Backing Rippling at $25M Post | Why Climate Tech is a Mirage and Disaster

David Tisch · Feb 27, 2023

The seed market has bifurcated: multistage firms' seed product sets one standard of $5-7M rounds at $20-30M valuations, while founders not raising from a multistage fund face $2-4M rounds at $10-15M valuations

More companies fail than succeed, and behind each failure is a team whose dream didn't work out; investors shouldn't make their own business model the founder's problem

26:42 20VC: How Multi-Stage Funds Changed The Game For Seed Rounds, Why Signalling Risk is BS, The Three Most Important Variables for Founders When Raising Rounds & A Debate on Portfolio Construction: Does Ownership Matter with David Tisch

Nikhil Basu Trivedi · Sep 6, 2023

It is very hard for seed-stage specialists to build a business around the hot, star-studded, highly priced seed rounds; the viable path is backing less-heralded teams that already have a product in market showing early signs of working

Those hot rounds are priced out of reach, so more often than not their investments are in teams that look like Melanie Perkins at Canva rather than a star-studded team in a hot area like AI

Scope: typically not in a hot area like AI; typically not a star-studded team

15:24 20VC: Why Small Funds Outperform Large Funds & AUM is a Vanity Metric | Why 99% of Investments in AI Startups Will Go To Zero | Being a "Traction First" VC & Investing Lessons from Investing in Canva and Missing Figma with Nikhil Basu-Trivedi

Eric Paley · Sep 20, 2023

The classic boutique seed fund model is not dead; only a small subset of companies price themselves out of reach of traditional seed investors

Most of the industry is rationalizing back toward normal prices, and only a subset of hot rounds price at levels most investors won't accept

Scope: prices not all the way back to ~2015 levels

4:33 20VC Roundtable: Is the VC Model Broken? The Biggest Disconnect Ever Between TVPI & DPI, Why Market Size is Dangerous, Why "Go Fast" is Terrible Advice, The Dangers of Raising Large Rounds at High Prices & Why Next Year Will See the Biggest Hiring Spree i

Immad Akhund · May 12, 2025

Multistage funds have made seed hard only for those trying to lead rounds, not for small non-lead investors, and they only serve one flavour of founder — the big-company exec or repeat entrepreneur

There are only eight or nine branded billion-dollar multistage funds and they underwrite to box-ticking profiles, so hungry first-time founders in unfamiliar spaces remain hard for them to back

Scope: if a founder fits the multistage profile, it is very hard to win the lead against them

48:55 20VC Exclusive: Mercury Founder Launches First $26M Fund | Why Founders Should Take the Highest Price | Why Serial Entrepreneurs are Better | Why AI Is So Overhyped | The Future of Venture Capital with Immad Akhund

Miles Dieffenbach · Aug 4, 2025

Consensus seed deals are extremely hard for small funds to win, while non-consensus founders and ideas remain accessible on price and ownership.

Multistage firms have planted a flag at seed with a much cheaper cost of capital and can deploy $5–10M checks where the traditional model was $2–3M, blowing up the seed fund model; non-consensus rounds are usually noncompetitive, which shows up in price and ownership.

Scope: distinguishes consensus founder/idea from non-consensus

15:28 20VC: Inside Carnegie Mellon's $4BN Endowment | Why 90% of LPs Shouldn't Invest in VC | The $140BN Problem with Multi-Stage Funds | The Hidden Math Behind DPI, TVPI, and Illiquidity with Miles Dieffenbach

David Tisch · Feb 27, 2023

Multi-stage encroachment into seed is not new behavior — firms have been writing $5M seed checks since 2018, and treating it as a net-new phenomenon is totally incorrect

Competition for Series A is so steep and there is only one winner, so if you don't take seed risk you may not get a shot at the A

29:43 20VC: How Multi-Stage Funds Changed The Game For Seed Rounds, Why Signalling Risk is BS, The Three Most Important Variables for Founders When Raising Rounds & A Debate on Portfolio Construction: Does Ownership Matter with David Tisch

Nico Wittenborn · May 22, 2023 · hedged

Multistage funds moving down into seed is a temporary phenomenon

Those funds still have to work on their untouched growth funds or they won't be able to raise again

Scope: concedes the inflow is happening

44:33 20VC: Why Your Fund Model Should Not Rely on $10BN+ Outcomes, Why the Large Funds Got Too Large, The Rise of Solo GP's; The Pros and Cons & Is Consumer Subscription Even a Good Sector to Invest in with Nico Wittenborn @ Adjacent

Rob Go · Jun 23, 2023

The current difficulty of seed investing caused by multistage funds is temporary; those funds will eventually decide the stage isn't worth their time and return to later, bigger-check rounds.

The economics don't work for multistage funds at seed — they'll turn attention back to later stage where they can write bigger checks.

Scope: degree of difficulty is high for now

44:34 20VC: How to Raise a Venture Fund from Deck to First Meetings to Final Close, Why Venture is a Young Person's Game and Why Multi-Stage Funds Have Not Ruined Seed with Rob Go, Co-Founder @ Nextview

Harry Stebbings · Aug 9, 2023

The increase in seed supply coming from multistage funds is temporary and will fade

Scope: acknowledges it's a real increase in supply for now

16:26 20VC: The Memo: The State of the VC Market: Why Seed Funds Can't Invest in "Hot Startups" Anymore, Why Series A & B is Terrible, Why the IPO Market Will Explode in 2024 & Why VC DD is BS & Every VC Has More Fraud in their Portfolio with Jason Lemkin

Roger Ehrenberg · Feb 19, 2024

Large multistage firms crowding into hot seed deals is not new — it has happened forever, is theme-specific and highly cyclical

The same dynamic played out with cloud computing and machine learning, and now AI; large asset gatherers need many bets and portfolio convexity to justify their asset base with grand slams

9:04 20VC: Why VC Returns Will Get Worse, Why LP Incentive Structures are so Broken, What is the Answer to Liquidity with No M&A or IPOs, When to Sell vs Hold Your Winners & Turning $5M into $250M with The Trade Desk | Roger Ehrenberg, Eberg Capital

Harry Stebbings · Mar 27, 2024 · hedged

Because the weight of capital differs so much between large platforms and boutique funds, it is very hard for boutiques to survive.

A $5M check at a $25M valuation is easy for a firm like a16z but represents a big concentrated bet for a small fund investing in a company with no traction.

Scope: "I think"; framed as a personal worry

40:27 20VC: a16z's Chris Dixon on Who Will Win the Next Generation of Venture, The Two Ways to Make Great Venture Investments and Find the Best Entrepreneurs & Why AI Will Strengthen the Position of the Incumbents Moving Forward

Jason Lemkin · May 27, 2024

Seed investing is systemically broken today because entry prices have risen to a level where small funds must either take concentration risk or buy stakes too tiny to matter

A typical YC deal is now $25M pre versus $16M for a Series-stage deal when he started; to own a true 10-12% post-dilution at a $25M price you need a $3-4M check, which a $50M or even $100M fund can't write across enough companies

Scope: applies to $50-100M seed funds; alternative is going pre-pre-seed

54:10 20VC: Why Seed is Systemically Broken | Why Pricing is Worse Than Ever and There is More Funding Than Ever | Benchmarks for Churn, Retention and Growth Rates - Good vs Great | Why Last Vintage for Private Equity Will Suck with Jason Lemkin

Harry Stebbings · Sep 6, 2024

Multistage funds entering pre-seed and seed with dedicated products have made life much harder for pure seed players and will cause seed returns to significantly deteriorate.

They have entered with efficiency and solid products, increasing both price and supply of capital; a seed fund that returned 5x at $12M entry prices is cut to 2.5x at $25M entry prices.

Scope: applies to existing pure seed/pre-seed players

13:54 20VC: Why VC is a Ponzi Scheme Today | Why Most VCs are Bankers | Why Big VCs Ruin Startups | Why Incentives in VC are Broken | Why American Dynamism is a Tool for VCs to Raise Money with Nick Chirls, Asylum Ventures

Harry Stebbings · May 12, 2025

Small seed funds do suffer relative to multi-stage funds because they pay higher prices, which damages returns

Higher entry prices on the multi-stage seed product directly impact returns

50:46 20VC Exclusive: Mercury Founder Launches First $26M Fund | Why Founders Should Take the Highest Price | Why Serial Entrepreneurs are Better | Why AI Is So Overhyped | The Future of Venture Capital with Immad Akhund

Semil Shah · Nov 21, 2022

Multistage funds moving into pre-seed are less of a threat than they appear because they gravitate to pedigreed founders out of big organizations and are too big and slow to prosecute deals the way they claim on Twitter

Most of what Haystack does is first-time, less startup-pedigreed founders, and large funds can't move at the speed they advertise

18:02 20VC: Semil Shah on The Biggest Mistakes VCs and LPs Made Over the Last 24 Months, Why LP Churn is Coming, Core Lessons on Scaling from $1M Haystack Fund I to Today and How To Find, Win and Manage LPs as an Emerging Manager

Jake Gibson · Jul 14, 2023

No multistage fund has done a great job at seed

34:59 20VC: Why Fund Sizes Should Be Smaller, Should Founders Also Have Their Own Funds, Is Emerging Markets Investing Gone, Is Fintech Investing Dead & Who Will Be The Winners and Losers in VC in the Next 10 Years with Sheel Mohnot, Co-Founder @ BTV

Martin Mignot · Aug 11, 2025

Very large funds are unnecessary for seed, early venture and early growth, and actively distract investors by pulling them toward later stages and very big checks

If you have much capital to deploy you will naturally focus on later stages and large checks, which is an impediment to helping at the earliest stages

Scope: seed, early venture, early growth

8:27 20VC: Figma, Scale, Wiz: Inside Index's Decacorn Factory | Decision-Making, Investment Process, Biggest Lessons, Biggest Misses | Why Gross Margin is a Fallacy at Seed | Never Turn Down a Deal on Price with Martin Mignot, Partner @ Index Ventures

Max Altman · Nov 21, 2025

Multistage firms are not doing seed well and structurally cannot

Scope: acknowledges he is biased as a seed fund manager

29:46 20VC: Max Altman on The New Seed War: Can Anyone Compete with Sequoia and a16z | Leaving $2BN on the Table with Reddit | Lessons from Backing Rippling at $25M Post | Why Climate Tech is a Mirage and Disaster

Harry Stebbings · Jan 4, 2024

Seed entry prices have not meaningfully declined for quality founders even as exit multiples compressed to four or five times revenue

Great SaaS founders, repeat founders and blue-chip spinouts still command prices as high as they've ever been, maybe 10-20% down in some cases

Scope: specifically about top-quality and repeat founders at seed

16:27 20VC: Predictions for 2024: What Happens to Early Stage VC Funding, Do a Load of Venture Funds Die, What do LPs Do in 2024, Does Figma Kill the M&A Market, Will IPOs Comeback & What Does a Trump Administration do for Startups with Jason Lemkin @ SaaStr

Harry Stebbings · Jul 22, 2024

Seed is a hard business because five-on-twenty-five is now the average entry price for great founders spinning out

23:15 20VC: How I Lost Airbnb at Seed Because of an Exploding Term Sheet | Investing Lessons from Roelof Botha & Peter Thiel | Why VC is Less Collaborative Than Ever and Great Companies Are Being Destroyed by Too Much Cash with Kevin Hartz @ A*

Harry Stebbings · May 22, 2023

Seed is not a great place to be right now because multistage funds are pushing earlier and flooding seed with less price-sensitive capital

Growth and multistage funds don't want to deploy big dollars but want to stay in market, so they send principals and associates to write seed checks while they manage troubled portfolios

Scope: said despite being a seed investor himself

44:08 20VC: Why Your Fund Model Should Not Rely on $10BN+ Outcomes, Why the Large Funds Got Too Large, The Rise of Solo GP's; The Pros and Cons & Is Consumer Subscription Even a Good Sector to Invest in with Nico Wittenborn @ Adjacent

Jake Gibson · Jul 14, 2023

The spray-and-pray seed approach used by large multistage funds is very bad, and firms cycle in and out of it

Andreessen did a lot of it early, stopped, restarted, and has likely stopped again

Scope: Founders Fund and Accel are exceptions that have done seed well

35:06 20VC: Why Fund Sizes Should Be Smaller, Should Founders Also Have Their Own Funds, Is Emerging Markets Investing Gone, Is Fintech Investing Dead & Who Will Be The Winners and Losers in VC in the Next 10 Years with Sheel Mohnot, Co-Founder @ BTV

Harry Stebbings · Aug 11, 2023

A $50M seed fund cannot lead seed rounds and still achieve adequate diversification, and even $100M is not enough

With ~$40M investable and $2M checks at three-to-four million average seed rounds, you get only ~20 positions with no reserves, which assumes you are an exceptional picker

Scope: assumes leading rounds; assumes no reserves

22:46 20VC Roundtable: NEW FORMAT: Why the Seed Investing Model is Broken, How to Make Money at Seed Moving Forward; Who Wins and Who Loses, Why Venture Value Add Platforms are BS and Failed and Why There Will be an IPO per Week in H2 2024

Harry Stebbings · Aug 4, 2025

$50–100M seed funds are the worst place to be, because the math forces either subscale ownership or subscale diversification.

Average seed rounds are $4–5M, so meaningful ownership needs a $3–3.5M check, and 30 companies for diversification means ~$90M of checks; smaller funds therefore write tweener ~$1.5M checks that are very hard to win in a $3–4M round against the best firms.

Scope: based on current average seed round sizes

14:42 20VC: Inside Carnegie Mellon's $4BN Endowment | Why 90% of LPs Shouldn't Invest in VC | The $140BN Problem with Multi-Stage Funds | The Hidden Math Behind DPI, TVPI, and Illiquidity with Miles Dieffenbach

Jason Lemkin · May 27, 2024

The same pre-YC deal he did at $7-8M pre in 2018 would price at $25M today, and today he would simply wait and pay the 25

57:00 Seed prices have permanently risen so investors should simply pay the new price

Semil Shah · Nov 21, 2022

Traditional pre-seed round caps have roughly doubled over the last ten years, simply because of inflation, making ~$3M on $15M the median entry point today

Rounds that were traditionally $4-8M caps with under $1M raised have all doubled

6:42 Pre seed round caps have roughly doubled over a decade due to plain inflation

Harry Stebbings · Nov 21, 2022 · hedged

Multistage funds decide on seed checks in seconds because the check size is immaterial to them

The amounts are so small relative to their fund that they don't scrutinise them

18:42 Multistage funds decide seed checks in seconds since the check size is immaterial to them

Harry Stebbings · Mar 17, 2023

US multistage funds are now beating European seed funds in competitive early-stage European deals, which is a new phenomenon

He has seen three such cases in the last three months on supremely hot deals, having never seen it before

29:14 Us multistage funds beating boutique european seed funds in competitive deals is a new phenomenon

Harry Stebbings · Apr 10, 2024

Multistage firms have commoditized seed so efficiently that LPs would be better off just backing Sequoia and Andreessen, who bid up every great seed round.

Everyone now has a seed strategy and the large multistage funds show up in all the best rounds.

44:48 Lps would be better off backing only the largest multistage brands for seed exposure

Cem Sertoglu · Nov 20, 2024

Early-stage venture is not being commoditized, despite attempts to commoditize it

Commoditization implies you can scale it by pouring money on it, but early-stage capacity is limited; and cash is not fungible to founders — raising from Sequoia, from BEK, or from an angel-investing dentist are not the same thing

8:50 Early stage capacity is scarce so capital alone cannot commoditize it

Harry Stebbings · Nov 20, 2024 · hedged

The fact that essentially every multistage firm now runs a deliberate seed strategy — writing formulaic $5M on $25M checks to founders who tick the right boxes — is evidence that seed has become a commodity

The offers are near-automatic for founders with the right pedigree, like an application that gets signed if you tick the boxes

9:25 Formulaic multistage seed checks are evidence seed has become a commodity

Cem Sertoglu · Nov 20, 2024

Multistage firms that build an asset management business adjacent to their early-stage strategy start to look like commoditized products, whereas firms that stay early-stage rooted with constant fund size and concentrated portfolios retain a real edge

Firms like Benchmark keep playing the game they have an edge in — constant fund size, concentrated portfolio after concentrated portfolio

9:50 Firms that add asset management scale look commoditized while early stage rooted firms keep their edge

Cem Sertoglu · Nov 20, 2024

The differentiator of a small seed partnership versus a broad-portfolio multistage firm is care: the attention a founder gets from a partner doing four or five checks per fund is qualitatively different.

Each partner writes only four or five checks per fund and discusses one or two investments per year, so capacity and attention per founder are far higher.

17:58 Concentrated check volume per partner gives boutique seed funds deeper founder attention

Harry Stebbings · Aug 9, 2023

Overstretched multistage partners are pushing principals and associates who have never led rounds to spray $1–2M checks, and that new entrant is eroding price discipline at seed

Big fund partners are underwater with refinancings, board seats, company crises and layoffs, so they delegate small checks to juniors

17:36 Overstretched multistage partners delegate checks to inexperienced juniors eroding seed price discipline

Jason Lemkin · Aug 9, 2023

The quick 'check-the-box' deals juniors can approve are effectively only available to founders out of Stripe, YC or with traction — nontraditional founders can't get them

Nobody wants to throw money away on 'I love the idea' alone; the five-minute decision needs pedigree or traction supporting it

18:00 Quick junior approved checks require pedigree or traction shutting out nontraditional founders

Jason Lemkin · Aug 9, 2023

The old seed dynamics — natural price ceilings around $10m pre/post, a month to get to know a founder, and time to socialize deals — are gone

When he started investing in SaaS and cloud, seed rounds with revenue simply didn't get done much above 10 pre and deals moved slowly enough to collaborate

22:17 Old price ceilings and slower collaborative seed process have disappeared

Bucky Moore · May 5, 2025

Boutique seed specialists and mega platforms will both compete and collaborate rather than the platforms simply eating seed

Multi-stage firms want to be first because generational returns come from concentrating capital in a company from seed onward, but seed firms depend on platforms for downstream capital and platforms know seed firms will find companies that were non-obvious or invisible to them, so alienating them would be crazy

48:29 Platforms and boutique seed funds compete and collaborate mutually dependent

Nico Wittenborn · May 22, 2023

Large multistage firms won't become a serious competitive threat in seed because their core existence is in peril and competing at seed won't save them

They are preoccupied with existential problems, so they won't redirect all their energy into seed competition

45:05 Multistage firms financial distress prevents serious seed competition

Harry Stebbings · May 22, 2023

Big firms can still compete at seed by deploying junior investors who carry the brand name and write $5m on $25m

The brand name does the work even if the partners aren't personally involved

45:23 Junior investors deploying the brand name let big firms compete at seed cheaply

Nico Wittenborn · May 22, 2023

A solo, focused seed investor should not compete for rounds where the founder wants a big-brand name on the cap table, because those are different founder types

For big firms seed is a defensive strategy to keep ownership in future outliers, not their core business; his offer is that seed is all he does, founders get only him and he moves faster, which appeals to a specific founder

45:31 Founder type segmentation means brand seekers and speed seekers pick different seed investors

Jake Gibson · Jul 14, 2023

It makes no sense for multistage funds to write small seed checks

A $1M learning check into a losing competitor poisons the relationship with the category winner, costing the fund the chance to deploy $100M into the company that matters

34:06 Small seed checks into losing competitors poison access to the eventual category winner so multistage funds shouldnt do them

Adam Besvinick · May 29, 2023

Multi-stage firms operating at seed have driven seed valuations up significantly and are still doing so, so the way to get reasonable entry prices is to be the first money — ideally the first yes — into a round

By avoiding the regular-way multistage seed market he has been able to enter at $6M, $8M, $8M and $11M caps as first money in over the last eight months

8:58 Being first money in lets small funds avoid multistage inflated seed prices

Harry Stebbings · May 29, 2023

Multi-stage firms have destroyed seed

30:14 Multi stage firms have destroyed the seed stage ecosystem

Miles Dieffenbach · Aug 4, 2025

New and small funds are a risky and hypercompetitive part of the market, with thousands of seed funds, angel funds and operator funds competing.

The scaled multistage firms' strong performance has let them expand, and the small-fund end of the market is crowded with thousands of managers.

14:15 Thousands of competing seed and angel funds make the segment hypercompetitive

Harry Stebbings · Aug 4, 2025

Non-consensus deals barely exist anymore — even non-AI deals are priced richly, so investors no longer have the luxury of getting a better price for being contrarian.

Venture is now such a mature asset class that pricing doesn't reward non-consensus.

16:03 Non consensus pricing advantage has vanished as venture matured

Max Altman · Nov 21, 2025

Sequoia and Andreessen do not have seed lead checks locked up; the winning seed leads in AI are widely dispersed

Of the first 40 post-transformer AI companies now worth over $1B, only Andreessen had two lead checks and no one else had more than one; the rest are spread among Greenoaks, Elad Gil and many others

28:25 Seed leads are widely dispersed not locked up by megafunds

Max Altman · Nov 21, 2025

A small three-GP seed fund can win against a multistage firm at seed by selling GP access and positioning itself as the conduit to a tier-one Series A, though it will lose when Marc Andreessen himself is doing the deal and joining the board

Founders backed by a partner rather than a marquee GP won't get real time from that firm, and they still need a Thrive, Sequoia or Kleiner brand by the A or B to succeed

30:25 Gp access plus conduit to a tier one a wins except against marquee gps

Harry Stebbings · Aug 11, 2025

For AUM-gathering funds, seed is merely an entry ticket to the real product, which is deploying $100–500M at Series C and D

Analogy: seed is the club entry fee at the door and the C and D rounds are the table

9:12 Seed is an entry ticket for large later stage checks

Martin Mignot · Aug 11, 2025

Seed should be treated as a high-conviction stage handled exactly like a Series A, not as an option or entry ticket

The goal is to be as early as possible, become the largest shareholder, and be the most valued and referenced investor in the company, which requires working closely with founders even at seed

9:42 Treat seed with series a level conviction not as entry ticket