Ramtin Naimi

Why is he running these processes?

Why are these people trusting him to run this fundraise?

Why is he the gatekeeper for this round?

Over time, it just kind of became accepted that I was that person.

The definitive thing that made it proven that I'm the accepted party to do that, whether it's at the A or the B or the C,

is I think we've proven to do such a service for founders when we're running these processes for them, that even in deals where our co-lead is a multi-stage tier one, big name platform fund, when that next round is coming, they will tell the founder, we're more than happy to let Romton slash Abstract run this process because they'll do a better job at it than anybody else will.

So I think once we got the validation from our co-investors that they think we would do a better job running this than they would, then I think it just kind of became accepted that for our portfolio, it comes as the way it's going to be.

You're a side of the beast now for this process.

There's different types of ways rounds come together.

There is the typical process where the founder puts together a deck and a data room and lines up meetings with every single venture capital firm and they go out and they pitch.

And then there's deals that happen outside of that dynamic that we have less involvement in.

Oftentimes, we help our founders build relationships with certain VCs in advance of the Series A process because that's actually a good way that we get information on what should be this company's North Star metrics.

How should we know when this company will be ready to raise a Series A?

oftentimes one of those people will just come in and preemptively make the founder an offer and the founder likes this partner the terms are fair and they don't want to spend the next three to four weeks of their life fundraising and they call it a day and they move forward certain vcs are very very good at doing that but in like the bake-off process

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.