View from Seed

OCTOBER 21, 2014

As the seed-stage startup fundraise process has received more transparency in recent years, ranging from published advice on how to raise seed capital to increased availability through AngelList, Funders Club, and various accelerator programs, I’ve noticed another trend emerging. Lower-Than-Market Value.

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Valuation Founder Seed Stage Angel Investor 336

Steve Blank

APRIL 12, 2013

I just spent a few weeks in Japan and China on a book tour for the Japanese and Chinese versions of the Startup Owners Manual. The first wave of startups began when R&D centers and universities began to provide the technology and seed capital for new startups that were spin-outs or spin-offs. Like the U.S.

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Venture Capital China Offshore SBIR 279

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 6, 2019

Every year I try to answer the question of “what has changed in the Venture Capital industry” and this year my colleague Chang Xu and I took a deep dive through the data and called many of our peers for confirmation. If you want the whole deck you can find it on SlideShare but I’ve written up a short summary with commentary below.

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Venture Capital IPO Mezzanine Early Stage 292

Genuine VC

MARCH 24, 2014

A couple years ago, my partner Lee penned a blog post about the milestone benchmarks for startups raising a Series A round of financing. The four winning strategies for startups to go from Seed to A are: Build Scale/Momentum. For B2B startups especially, revenue is the best signal of product-market fit.

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Seed Capital Metrics Cofounder Revenue 212

View from Seed

JANUARY 28, 2015

In the last six months, we’ve been asked and answered several key questions about seed-stage startups and raising seed capital. All we do is seed — we focus on it, we want to be the best seed partner, and we obsess over helping startups through that first, formative 18-24 month period.

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Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 26, 2014

The best case I’ve seen is our portfolio company Osmo who had already built the product but used crowd-funding to handle inventory management, supply-chain logistics and perfecting the final version of the product. Contrary to popular opinion I actually believe crowd-funding is best used after seed capital or venture capital.

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PR Venture Capital Hiring Seed Capital 319

Hunter Walker

JANUARY 11, 2021

It’s frustrating if you’re a customer of an expense report SaaS startup and the company goes out of business, but it’s potentially devastating if your tele-therapist or addiction counselor suddenly disappears because the platform that employed them ran out of money. And for venture-backed startups this tends to be “get them customers.”.

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Startup Venture Capital Seed Capital Software 144

View from Seed

DECEMBER 6, 2018

And seed VCs, especially as new firms were being established, were eager to encourage their portfolio startups to plant that flag in the ground publicly. It seemed like every other TechCrunch post was announcing a startups’s new seed financing round. Fast forward and that situation has now dramatically changed.

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Seed Stage Stealth Seed Capital Later Stage 201

View from Seed

SEPTEMBER 11, 2019

One of our portfolio investments, a B2B SaaS company, was a pre-product startup at the time of the seed round. So these startups should look to raise seed capital either before launch or once they can show early revenue for proof points. They’ll want to understand trends in customer acquisition costs.

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Seed Stage B2B Seed Capital Revenue 149

Steve Blank

APRIL 12, 2013

I just spent a few weeks in Japan and China on a book tour for the Japanese and Chinese versions of the Startup Owners Manual. The first wave of startups began when R&D centers and universities began to provide the technology and seed capital for new startups that were spin-outs or spin-offs. Like the U.S.

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Venture Capital China Offshore SBIR 171

View from Seed

FEBRUARY 3, 2015

Today, NextView Ventures is excited to release a pillar project in our Growth Guides series: pitch deck templates for raising seed capital. These help address a common question which we frequently receive from entrepreneurs about how to create startup pitch decks for this crucial financial milestone.

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View from Seed

MARCH 29, 2018

We wanted to learn more about the nuanced industry market forces before applying the same hands-on investing model we do with tech startups in other verticals. We don’t seed companies that are developing drugs or medical devices that will require FDA approval. It’s a world that doesn’t fit our seed-focused model and fund strategy.

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Vertical Stealth Portfolio Seed Capital 120

K9 Ventures

JUNE 5, 2015

That in turn requires more capital. So while the infrastructure cost and startup costs may have declined, the operating costs have increased. Together this means that Seed stage companies need to run longer and at a higher expense structure, meaning they need to raise a lot more capital. Implications for LPs.

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Seed Stage Venture Capital Early Stage Valuation 48

VC Adventure

APRIL 22, 2014

I love this trend and have a longer form blog coming on the subject – which I think is massive positive force in the startup ecosystem. Here are what I think are the 4 keys to a successful angel investment strategy: 1) Take a portfolio view of angel investing- put aside a pool of money and plan to make 10 or more investments.

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Seed Capital Portfolio Startup Marketing 93

Growthink Blog

MAY 23, 2011

With this seed capital – more often than not totaling between $100,000 and $1,000,000 - the company accomplishes a number of key technical milestones, gets a beta customer or two, and then goes on a "road show" to venture capitalists around the country for capital to “scale” the business. Venture capitalists Cut Tough Deals.

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View from Seed

OCTOBER 22, 2015

One of the things we frequently discuss with founders is how to interpret and manage their dialogue with VCs when raising capital. We’ve written before on how to research partners , how to pitch the right investor at a given firm, and how to raise seed capital , generally speaking.

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Term Sheet Due Diligence Seed Stage Seed Capital 120

Seeing Both Sides

AUGUST 28, 2017

Goldman Sachs and CB Insights recently reported that startups have raised over $1 billion in Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) this summer — more than the total amount of venture capital raised during the same period. Need for growth capital. A company that can successfully raise money in an ICO may never need venture capital again.

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Early Stage Equity Venture Capital Government 20

Seeing Both Sides

AUGUST 28, 2017

Goldman Sachs and CB Insights recently reported that startups have raised over $1 billion in Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) this summer — more than the total amount of venture capital raised during the same period. Need for growth capital. A company that can successfully raise money in an ICO may never need venture capital again.

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Early Stage Equity Venture Capital Government 20

Haystack

AUGUST 18, 2019

If you hit one or two right, you can make a fortune in seed. And if you don’t hit one or two right, you end up with a mediocre portfolio. The seed “territory” is critical, indeed, and now that folks realize how important it is, there is a fight for that turf. But those bets take a long time to get liquid.

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Seed Stage Cap Table Early Stage Malaysia 108

thebarefootvc

MARCH 8, 2012

I remember writing a blog post in 2008, post-financial crash, on how the recession was going to re-vitalize the city’s tech startup community, which would eventually help diversify the NYC economy. Startups are not immune to globalization and can accelerate growth if thinking globally from launch.

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Silicon Valley Ghana Venture Capital India 69

Hippoland

DECEMBER 15, 2015

In late 2008, I was about to turn in my 2 week resignation at Google to start a company when Sequoia sent out a presentation to their portfolio companies. From my purview at 500 Startups in talking with many seed investors – both angels and VCs – this is what I predict will happen in 2016. Image credit: Giphy.

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Seed Stage Angel Investor Bootstrapping Startup 48

Business Plan Blog

JANUARY 2, 2014

While startups are still limited by the types of investors they can take money from (i.e. wealthy, verified investors), the lifting of the ban on general solicitation has allowed investors to publicly advertise that they are raising capital, be it on their blog, Twitter, Facebook, or crowdfunding site such as AngelList.

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Angel Groups Accredited Investor Angel Investor Due Diligence 51

VC Adventure

APRIL 22, 2014

I love this trend and have a longer form blog coming on the subject – which I think is massive positive force in the startup ecosystem. Here are what I think are the 4 keys to a successful angel investment strategy: 1) Take a portfolio view of angel investing- put aside a pool of money and plan to make 10 or more investments.

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Seed Capital Portfolio Startup Marketing 48

ReadWriteStart

NOVEMBER 5, 2019

As an entrepreneur, you have probably heard or read the “maxim” that only 10% of startups are successful, but is this true? The rounds were conducted from 2008 to 2010, starting from seed capital. Fortune published an article titled , Conventional Wisdom Says, 90% of Startups Fail. Data Says Otherwise.

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Venture Capital Cofounder Finance United States 77

Rob Go

NOVEMBER 30, 2012

Only a few funds have really found ways to create meaningful leverage for themselves as they scale and build large portfolios over time. The second issue is that many seed funds have expanded their teams to address capacity constraints. Groups like 500 Startups, and SV Angel continue to build very large portfolios.

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Seed Stage Pre-Money Valuation Dilution Early Stage 55

Software By Rob

JANUARY 8, 2019

Two-and-a-half months ago Einar Vollset and I announced TinySeed , the first startup accelerator designed for bootstrappers. Hundreds and hundreds of tweets, re-tweets, likes, Hacker News upvotes, email responses…it was immediately obvious that there is pent up demand for this kind of alternative early-stage startup funding.

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Early Stage Valuation Seed Capital Revenue 46

Up and Running

AUGUST 12, 2014

In as much as a scheduled interview with an angel investor can be, talking with Boris about what it takes to spark the interest of a venture capital firm was a coincidence. Or, were they a sign that things were indeed changing, and if so, what was changing to lead to a rise in women founding startups or in investors funding women?

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Venture Capital Founder Angel Investor North America 90

techcrunch.com

FEBRUARY 19, 2010

Researchers divided the portfolio companies into six stages and startups are still operating a loss in each of the first four. Those categories represent roughly 84% of all portfolio companies. However, I still see multi-million dollar investments in startups that seem to make no damn sense. dasein Yeah, I agree.

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Venture Capital Technical Review Sweat Equity Valuation 62

View from Seed

APRIL 23, 2015

In the startup world, one POTAJ that’s easy and worthwhile to defend is the need to focus on building great products and innovative technology instead of trying to over-sell lousy solutions. Their business models are, in many cases, focused on outlier exits within the portfolio. You can find those here. ). Accidental VC'

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