INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
With so many new investors, the old seed fundraise playbook needs a rewriteSeed fundraising is rarely easy, but it certainly used to be a
lot less complicated than it is today
In a simpler world, a seed investor (or maybe two) would lead a round, which meant that they would write the terms of the deal in a term
sheet and then pass that document to their friends to flesh out the funds and eventually close the round
That universe of investors was small and (unfortunately) often cliquish, but everyone sort of knew each other and founders always knew at
least who to start with in these early fundraises.That world is long since gone, particularly at the seed stage
Now there are thousands of people who write checks into the earliest startup venture rounds, making it increasingly challenging for founders
to find the right investors
In their place are more nuanced metrics like the ability to accelerate a deal to its closing
Today, your greatest lead investor may be the one who ends up writing the smallest check.Given how much the landscape has changed, I wanted
to do two things for founders thinking through a seed fundraise
First, I want to talk about how to strategize around a seed fundraise today, given the radical changes in the market over the past few years
Second, I want to talk about a couple of the archetypes of startup stages you see in the market today and discuss how to handle each of
explore in the coming weeks
If you thought traditional seed investing is complicated, wait until you see what the alternatives look like
The upshot, though, is that founders with the right strategy have more choices than ever, and, ultimately, that means there are more
preliminaries out of the way
This discussion assumes that you are a startup, looking to fundraise a seed round of some kind (i.e
As I see it, there are now roughly six stages for startups before they reach scale
