Mercedes Bent
speaker
417 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2025
last heard Sep 2025
Mercedes Bent’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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That at the same time, if you get there early enough, it's less competitive.
And so winning is less important.
You ideally want to be competing against time and the founder's timeline of when they have fully decided to go out and compete.
make themselves known to a broader set of people versus competing with a founder who's an established known quantity in the field who is suddenly going to have a competitive term sheet right away.
That's how I view it at least.
I view we invest...
Pre-seed and seed.
And pre-seed really, if you're doing it right, you should be competing against a founder's own internal timeline, not the market.
And so there's a lot of opportunities I'll work on for months or years where I am judging the founder as having been in three different stages.
One is the first phase is where they have not really even decided to be a founder.
I just think they're high quality and I'm hoping that they will get there one day.
The second phase is kind of the founder curious phase.
And this is a really optimal time that you need to be seen as the one guiding them towards this journey.
And that is a period of, you know, three to 12 months, oftentimes.
Then there's the founder convicted and actually like launched, which is they've decided to go out there and do it.
They may not have
team.
They may not have the idea fully baked out, but actually both of those phases, if you get the timing of them right, are the area where you as a VC win and compete.
And I think a lot of winning and competing is targeting that timeline correctly.
and understanding the signals and being the person walking the founder or the future founder down the proverbial aisle to the destination where you both say I do.
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