Should a small or first-time fund manager stay narrowly within one stage and strategy, or broaden its mandate?

Jason Lemkin · Aug 9, 2023

Sticking strictly to your sweet spot is core to investing performance — only doing the narrow overlap of stage, founder type and product category you already understand before the meeting

He only did deals in search, contact center and Salesforce-adjacent products he intuitively understood, with founders better than him and good growth, which produced a 100% hit rate

7:02 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

Jason Lemkin · Aug 9, 2023

Knowing your type of deal almost inherently gets your risk profile right

It tells you your valuation ceiling and how much to deploy into what, which caps how much you can lose

8:48 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

Mark Goldberg · Oct 25, 2024

Committing to a single stage is better for investor discipline than preserving multi-stage optionality, because stage optionality forces you to keep too many doors open while a single stage forces a real test of conviction

At a multistage fund you can be wrong and right at the same time; investing at one stage gives you one bite at the apple, which focuses the mind and lets you build operations around that conviction

Scope: framed as a new muscle he is learning himself

46:00 20VC: The Truth About Multi-Stage Firms; Why Portfolio Services are for VCs not Founders | Why Politics is Rife & Decision-Making is Broken in Large VCs | Why Reserves are Bad for Founders & How Boutique Firms Will Win with Mark Goldberg @ Chemistry

Max Altman · Nov 21, 2025

A small seed fund should stay in its lane and do a few things well rather than trying to cover the whole market, since it only needs one or two wins per fund

This is how Steve Anderson operated at Baseline and it is guiding how Max builds his own fund

Scope: applies at small fund size

63:55 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

A seed firm should hold its entry point and model constant rather than scaling into later stages, because consistency is what maintains the founder relationship across the whole journey

If the firm holds true to who it is, it stays aligned with founders building over a long horizon

52:08 Hold entry stage and model constant to preserve founder relationship consistency

Max Altman · Nov 21, 2025

First-time managers should be humble and stay in their lane rather than declaring out of the gate that they will lead Series A rounds

You have to know and be honest about what you are actually good at, whether that is seed or a Box Group-style strategy

71:40 First time managers should be humble not declare series a ambitions