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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When there is 15, 18, 20 firms around the table, very few companies end up getting more than three or four term sheets.
There's a few companies that get seven, eight, or nine term sheets.
The firms who I think truly excel in winning hyper-competitive Series A rounds that I've seen from my experience over and over again tend to be Sequoia, Benchmark, and Andreessen.
Even to this day, and somebody pulled out a stat that showed the VC firms that have the highest number of unicorns that they have led financings in prior to them becoming unicorns since 2015.
And first place was Andreessen, second place was Sequoia, which validates this truth already.
And then fifth place was Benchmark, which is kind of shocking when you consider how much smaller their funds are and how targeted they have to be with the checks that they write.
But typically when one of those three firms extends an offer to a company, they tend to win.
unless they're competing with one of the two other ones.
And then they tend to only lose to one of the other two.
If you eliminate those firms, then it's a free for all.
And there are certain people who are more qualified to win certain deals than other deals.
If you eliminate the dynamic, there's plenty of companies that could have absolutely raised a series A from one of those firms that somebody else ends up winning, but they preempt the deal and they just are very good at sniping deals.
And I think those three individual firms have built brand weight that's so strong that founders really just want to be affiliated with them.
And there are certain partners at those firms that have such amazing reputations as board directors that a series A is the first time you're giving up a board director seat.
Not to say there aren't phenomenal board directors at a bunch of firms because there really are, but the density of high quality board members that have storied reputations of being great board members at those three particular firms, I think outweighs the number of high quality board members that exist at pretty much any other venture capital firm.
And the founders, the advice they get from their seed investor is in addition to optimizing for, you know, a good deal for yourself at the series A, you really should be optimizing for who's going to be the best board director to have on this journey with you for the next 10 years.
The early days, Andreessen, who were the founding partners, every single one of them were operators who had sold companies for hundreds of millions of dollars.
It was hard to compete with.
This guy's going to be on your company who knows exactly what it takes to build a successful outcome in venture capital.
And then the benchmark and Sequoia alternative, they have some individuals like that, but they also have individuals who have been on the boards of the most incredible outcomes in Silicon Valley history.
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