Alex Rampell

Hence, he was right.

So now you have a pre-seed, a seed, a seed extension, a seed extension to like, what is a series A, right?

There's not like this, like normally a series A would be like the first institutional round of money.

Now, there's so much variance because like, oh, there's the Series A where it's like five superstars out of open AI and they need tons of money for compute.

No moral hazard on that.

You're not going to go spend money on people.

You're going to spend money on GPUs.

That's one form of Series A. Another form of Series A is like, I just did a Series A where the company had like $10 million of ARR when I invested in it.

So it's just all over the place.

So I think it's just hard to kind of cast a generality.

There are certainly ones where, like I used to call this the Series B trap, but again, I think the nomenclature has shifted.

But I would have agreed with your team if you called it the Series B, because at that time, there was a seed, there was a Series A, and the only difference between Series A and Series B is that you increased your burn and built infrastructure and kind of scaffolding.

So it's like, I have a company, I have customers, I have signs of product market fit,

I know now I should hire an HR team and a marketing team and all this other kind of shit that doesn't actually have any kind of impact on the metrics of the company.

And that was the Series B.

And then it's like, why would I invest in a Series B?

Because I get half as much ownership and nothing has changed vis-a-vis the Series A. So yes, there's a class of Series As that look like that.

But I would say of the Series As that I personally did in the last year, most of them have been like, holy shit, revenue is really scaling.

And these numbers are insane.

And those were Series As.