Ramtin Naimi

But the thesis in which it was built off has stayed constant and that multi-stage tier one VC firms were better at seed investing than seed funds are.

And it's not to say that they'll outperform them because I don't think the portfolio construction model allows for that anymore at the scale of those funds.

But I do believe that the power law companies of the future will be more likely have seed financings led by multi-stage venture capital firms and seed stage venture capital firms.

And in the early days,

People didn't think multistage firms did much seed investing.

But if you look at Sequoia, they led the seed round for Stripe, Airbnb, Dropbox, and NewBank.

And Andreessen led the first institutional rounds for Okta, Databricks, and Slack.

And Costa led the seed round for Instacart and DoorDash.

And Index led the seed round for Robinhood and Figma.

And Lightspeed led the seed round for Snap and I think AppDynamics.

And the list kind of goes on and on.

What became obvious to me was that seed funds that claimed they had proprietary deal flow were mostly kidding themselves.

They were a little delusional.

And it's hard to believe that a seed firm that has two or three people have more coverage at early stage than a multistage fund that has 30 or 40 people.

And then it became very apparent to me that when a multistage fund and a seed fund tried to compete with one another, it was very hard for a seed stage venture capital firm to compete with a multistage venture capital firm.

Oftentimes, multistage venture capital firms had brand weight the seed funds couldn't compete with, but more often than not, it was the fact that they were willing to offer valuation in terms that a seed fund couldn't compete with.

And I decided to build a seed stage venture capital business, initially aligning my interest with multistage funds as opposed to aligning my interest with seed funds.

The reason I was actually thinking that people were wrong when saying multistage funds were jacking up the prices of all these deals

is we pulled the data on this.

And if you look between 2008 and 2011, there were about 1,000 seed deals funded in that timeframe, or at least publicly announced seed deals in that timeframe.