Ramtin Naimi

And the number I settled on was about 10%.

Pretty much every multi-stage tier one VC firm will do a seed deal at 10% if they have to.

We push them down to six or seven.

It's just not worth it.

They'd rather wait for the series A. So then we started leading financings more consistently.

We ended up leading 14 companies in that first fund.

And the first four deals I ever led, two had raised follow on from Benchmark, one had raised follow on from Sequoia, one had raised follow on from Andreessen.

So I had a very positive feedback loop that the deals that I was leading at seed were not adverse selection.

And that gave me more confidence to continue leading.

The more time I spent just focused on seed, I just get a lot more confident in my ability to pick seeds versus relying on other people as proxy.

Now we have a ton of data that actually shows quite clearly that the deals that we have led as a venture capital firm have actually dramatically outperformed the deals in which we're not the lead investor, but we'd co-invested in.

So nowadays we probably lead like 80 or 90% of the companies in our portfolio.

We pulled the data on every seed firm out there.

And we are the firm that has the highest likelihood of getting a follow-on Series A by Tier 1 VC firm.

So the highest graduation rate of any seed fund from seed to Series A to a Tier 1 fund is us by a pretty wide margin.

By the time we closed the first fund, it became pretty apparent that I accidentally built probably the most well-networked LP base in Silicon Valley.

And I wanted to find a way to leverage that for the benefit of our founders.

That's ultimately who our primary customer is.

And over time, we really started focusing on being the number one venture capital firm to get a founder from seed to series A. I'm curious how you got the capital in the AngelList days to first do those deals, the 25K to 500K deals.

And so I'm curious to hear more about the details of each.