SaaStr

AUGUST 17, 2023

We came right back on 20VC to do a deep dive on where seed investing is right now with Frank Rotman, one of the most successful fintech investors, Sam Lessin on Slow Ventures, with an incredible portfolio, and Jason Lemkin: It’s a good listen. Per Harry: “WTF is really happening at seed right now? My Top 7 Lessons ?

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SaaStr

MAY 3, 2022

Seed stage VC didn't escape the turmoil in later stages in Q1, according to @cartainc data. Especially around seed rounds. You’ll hear that while investing has slowed down for Series A-D+ rounds, it’s still on pace with similar valuations for seed. And April wasn't great either. ?? Everything is harder now.

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SaaStr

JANUARY 23, 2023

And there are too many founders looking for bridge financing, and not enough bridge financing to go around, And yet, these are still very good times to raise a seed round. First, there are tons of new and newer seed managers that are ready to go. Second, top funds (including Sequoia this week) have brand-new Seed funds.

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SaaStr

FEBRUARY 4, 2023

What’s worse for a Seed VC: Losing 100% of a $2m investment on a seed start-up that never closes a Series A? or Losing 50% of a $2m investment on a seed start-up that ended up being a unicorn but then later stumbled? Here’s why: In the first scenario, the seed VC has to write off a $2m check valued at … $2m. The latter.

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SaaStr

OCTOBER 6, 2023

If you’re a seed-stage startup, Michael shares the best ways for you to present your company to startup investors. The Common Elements of a Seed Stage Pitch The common elements of a seed stage pitch include: What you do Team Traction Unique insights Market size Ask What does your company do? Who’s on your team? That’s the game.

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Tom Tunguz

JULY 19, 2019

The Jacob’s Ladder is a children’s toy that flips over, and it’s a great metaphor for the seed market. Seed rounds are rapidly approaching and now often equal to the sizes of Series As just five years ago. 1M or $3M or $5M seed. $7M Seed investors are moving up, with some raising bigger funds.

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SaaStr

MAY 10, 2021

The hardest investment rounds to price are seed rounds. They’re incredibly situationally dependent: A founder that sold her last company for $400m or IPO’d might be able to raise a pre-seed round at $40m pre (not uncommon). This is why so many seed rounds are terrible deals. Anyone logical would wait and invest later.

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SaaStr

APRIL 19, 2020

Q: What are the Pros and Cons of Seed Investing? Seed investing is a bit of a sucker bet. Well, the “good news” for seed investing is you should have a much lower entry price than a Series A-B-C investor. That’s where seed investing comes up short compared to Series A-B-C+ investing. What do I mean?

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SaaStr

AUGUST 12, 2021

The post The Best Types of Seed Round? And if you can do it on a crowdfunding platform … terrific! All have pros and cons in a perfect world. But it’s time to grow. Get it done. Raise that $3M-$5M the easiest way. Because it’s never easy. The One That is Easiest appeared first on SaaStr.

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SaaStr

FEBRUARY 6, 2021

If I were starting today — and in a sense, I’m running this experiment in many ways with SaaStr — I’d ask myself 3 questions if I had the option to raise seed funding (many don’t): Can we make it 24+ months with the team we need to hire without funding? Can we work even harder, and get to $2m+ ARR growing > 100% without funding?

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Venture Capital 241

Andreessen Horowitz

AUGUST 27, 2021

And the last decade has seen the emergence of strong online communities, alumni networks, … The post Introducing a16z’s seed fund appeared first on Andreessen Horowitz. The industry is rich with blogs, podcasts, tweetstorms, and newsletters providing guidance to new founders.

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SaaStr

AUGUST 26, 2022

One of the most exciting and terrifying things a SaaS founder can do is raise seed funding. 1: Why Seed Funding Anyway? 1: Why Seed Funding Anyway? Before you start planning for your seed round or seeking out an angel investor, you must pause and decide if you really want or need a seed investor.

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Tom Tunguz

AUGUST 8, 2019

Eight years ago, there were nearly zero AI startups seeded. Facebook’s hegemony reduced the rates of social media seeding by more than 65%. AI or Machine Learning is a new technology that will benefit nearly every type of sector and we’re still in the very earliest innings. Social Media - Facebook went public in 2012.

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SaaStr

FEBRUARY 2, 2022

Q: Dear SaaStr: How Can I Tell If a Seed VC Fund I Haven’t Heard of is “Good Enough”? But any VC firm you’ve heard of is plenty well established to write a seed check at least, and follow the standard norms and processes. Everyone knows Sequoia, Andreesen, etc. You have to do what it takes to survive and thrive.

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Kellblog

JANUARY 7, 2022

With angel and seed money flowing, and a great environment for company creation, I’ve been talking to a lot of seed-stage and pre-seed stage startups of late. What I Sound Like Talking to Seed-Stage Startups. The positioning challenge is fundamentally different between a seed-stage and a larger company.

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SaaStr

NOVEMBER 24, 2021

Here are 9 simple tips that are easy to implement — and almost 100% guaranteed to impact your odds of raising seed or Series A funding: If your existing investors have a strong brand and aren’t positive on you, it can be much harder to raise. At a minimum keep them in the loop. Don’t just ignore them after they write a check.

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For Entrepreneurs with David Skok

SEPTEMBER 25, 2018

There is much hand wringing in the startup ecosystem about various forms of signaling between the seed and A rounds.

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SaaStr

NOVEMBER 21, 2019

Join this panel of investors from Connect Ventures, Blossom Capital, Dawn Capital, The Family, and Indico Partners as they provide an overview of the current investment landscape, and discuss whether the seed stage is emerging as the new Series A. We are a $50 million fund based in Lisbon, and we invest mainly in seed stage.

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Tom Tunguz

JUNE 26, 2018

Earlier this week, I wrote about the collapse in the number of seed investments. First, there are fewer seed investors participating in the market than in 2015, about 40% fewer. Second, many of the most active seed investors and institutional seed funds are investing in fewer companies. This grows the size of seed rounds.

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Tom Tunguz

MARCH 7, 2018

In the US, the median seed round has nearly quadrupled over the past seven years. In the mean time, seed investment has grown more than 7x and then fallen to a bit more than half of the high. As the market has grown and retrenched during that time period, I’ve been wondering about the geographic diversity of these seed dollars.

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SaaStr

MARCH 1, 2024

Seed rounds can’t really be done at 6x ARR typically. A combination of the fact that so much seed capital in the market is keeping multiples close to all-time highs there — at least for the hottest seed and pre-seed startup. At the end of the day, the top SaaS companies IPO and end up trading at “standard” ARR multiples.

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SaaStr

JULY 8, 2020

What Nobody Tells You About Seed Investing with SaaStr CEO Jason Lemkin and Cowboy Ventures Founder and Partner Aileen Lee. Five or 600 since then, but back then, you could probably count the seed firms on one hand or two hands. From Satya from Homebrew, we just heard that seed’s at an all time high. Aileen Lee: Yep.

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Tom Tunguz

DECEMBER 13, 2023

The typical software startup raised their Series A 15 months after raising their seed at 2x their seed valuation. A year ago, that Series A would have been raised three months earlier at 3.5x the valuation. Here’s another way of visualizing the data. The red dot is 2023 - the other years are in grey.

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SaaStr

FEBRUARY 24, 2020

Q: Investors want to tranche a $1M seed round in 3 stages. The post Investors want to tranche a $1M seed round in 3 stages. Can I protect against them freezing rest of instalments? If an investor wants to do tranches: Find an investor that doesn’t; or. But never, ever assume the second tranche comes. It often doesn’t.

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Finance 157

SaaStr

DECEMBER 29, 2023

So net net we still see very high levels of seed investment. Net net, we are seeing a world where seed remains vibrant, but each stage after that is tougher. Seed rounds are down -9% this year. It’s still a weird world in venture: Firms are both shutting down and raising new funds. Hence, so many unicorns. But Series D? -41%.

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SaaStr

OCTOBER 15, 2019

It is preferable for a simple, telling and important reason: at least at the seed stage, the economics of founders and investors are very aligned. Put differently, at the end of the day, it’s not likely there will be a huge economic difference between Common / Founders Stock and Series Seed Stock issued to founders. That may be OK.

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SaaStr

JANUARY 16, 2024

Now worth $8 Billion, they mainly just raised a seed fund and didn’t raise material additional capital until the pre-IPO phase. Raised one core seed round, and then got to nine figures of ARR. A few folks that have done this, more or less: Klaviyo. The Trade Desk. There are more stories like this.

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SaaStr

MARCH 26, 2024

So when I started writing venture checks in 2013, I didn’t know what I was doing, but I had a strong start: First was Pipedrive co-leading seed, then acquired for $1.5B seed, now at $200m+ ARR and an IPO candidate Third was Greenouse/Parklet, acquired for $800m and now at $200m ARR Fourth was Salesloft, acquired for $2.5

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SaaStr

FEBRUARY 10, 2024

For Angel, Pre-Seed: At least 50x, with a possible chance of mode. For Seed to Series C or so: At least 10x, with a possible chance of 100x. Dear SaaStr: How Big of a Return Are VCs Looking For in a Startup? The loss rate in general is so high here, the winners have to do 50x.

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Tom Tunguz

MARCH 23, 2023

Seeds peaked at 1500 in Q1 of 2020 falling to 155 in Q1 of 2023. Seeds fell 64%; As 68%; Bs 86% & Cs 80% of last year’s round counts. The ratio of As to seeds has held constant. Q1 volumes by year show broad declines across early-stage venture capital. So has Cs to Bs has increased, but Bs to As has dropped sharply.

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Cobloom

APRIL 12, 2021

So today, I'm demystifying the world of startup funding rounds , and explaining the motivations (and common valuations) behind Seed through Series C investment. In the ultra-competitive SaaS sector, that's time you don't have spare.

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SaaStr

FEBRUARY 25, 2024

The endless seed, YC, AngelList, the explosion of non-professional angels, ramen efficiency, the dramatic increase in valuations, and so many other newer factors have lessened the number of “old-school” Series A deals. 1,000 unicorns make almost every investment style look like it worked.

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SaaStr

JANUARY 25, 2024

Our sweet spot is pre-seed and seed with checks ranging from $100k to $2m. Before Twitter, he was a Partner at Battery Ventures, where he co-led the seed and early stage investing practices. What’s your sweet spot for investing — check size, stage, type of deal? And how big is your current fund?

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Tom Tunguz

APRIL 18, 2016

Starting in late 2015 through the first quarter of 2016, founders have shifted their seed fundraising strategies toward a single investor. Seeds led by a single investor have increased by 50% in these trailing six months. How much of this trend is due to greater participation of venture capitalists investing in the seed market?

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Tom Tunguz

JUNE 14, 2023

Stage Valuation Correlation, R^2 Seed 0.99 Seed, A, & C stage companies’ valuations are identical across these two sectors. I plotted the 75th percentile valuation of all US software companies by stage compared to AI companies over the last twelve years.

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Tom Tunguz

AUGUST 20, 2023

The blue line shows actual Seed, A, & B activity by quarter. By looking at the cumulative rounds since 2010, we can see that Seed, A, & B volumes all trended meaningfully above their predicted counts. The model suggests we should see about 1000 Seeds, 240 Series As, & 65 Series Bs per quarter. [1]

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SaaStr

AUGUST 10, 2023

WTF is Happening At Seed Right Now: Why does Jason believe seed is more active than ever? Is the pricing of seed rounds impacted since the downturn? Why does Jason believe that seed investors cannot participate in “hot seed rounds” anymore? In Today’s Episode with Jason Lemkin We Discuss: 1.

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