Ramtin Naimi
speaker
1,391 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2025
last heard Jul 2025
Ramtin Naimi’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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They need to hire engineers who can easily get a job at Meta or Google or OpenAI for $400,000 a year.
And the seed stage company is trying to hire that person for $150,000 a year.
It takes a very specific person to convince somebody a $250,000 annual pay cut is in that person's best interest in exchange for equity in this company that just has a concept of an idea.
So that's really important because recruiting is something that I think a lot of people underestimate how important is at the early stage, the founding stages of these companies.
And then next is selling a product.
Oftentimes, V1 of these products are like these half-assed, broken, glitchy things that no one would pay for.
But these founders are able to go out and find individuals who will at least be a design partner or a pilot customer and give them a shot to build something.
Because oftentimes, it's not even in their best interest.
It's a time suck.
They'll say, come back to me when there's actually a working product.
And convincing somebody that it's actually worth spending time with them to perfect the product is also a specific type of individual experience.
On the technical side, we're looking for someone with extremely strong technical capability that other engineers would actually work for.
Some people are great engineers that other engineers might necessarily want to work for, and other people are just great engineers that other engineers would happily work for.
But what I look for on that side is shipping velocity.
This is the kind of engineer who's going to ship a product in six weeks or six months.
And at the end of the day, I think seed stage investing, at least for us, is very momentum driven.
I want to build a portfolio of 60 high momentum companies, hope that three to five of them escape velocity and become amazing companies.
Another thing that I've started to gravitate to over time, which is a little counterintuitive to being a venture capitalist because you want to own a lot of these companies, is I've found I've had a lot of success
with dilution sensitive founders.
You kind of meet two buckets of founders at seed stage and you ask them what kind of round they want to raise.
Showing 541–560 of 1,391 · page 28 of 70
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