Rob Go

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281 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Nov 2025 last heard 12 Nov

Rob Go’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Nov 2025 with 1.

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Venture Unlocked: The playbook for venture capital managers · Unpacking "A Crisis Moment In Seed" · 12 Nov 2025 podcast

There was behind closed doors.

We had a lot of GPs who were like groaning about things that were different or more challenging than they used to be.

And so that kind of just led me to write a few posts, trying my best to just synthesize everything I was hearing and feeling in a somewhat coherent way.

Right.

Yeah.

So one other early pioneer in the space was Michael Deering, who I worked in his department at eBay many moons ago.

And frankly, I had a peek into what he was doing as he went from being an angel investor to starting Harrison Metal.

And I said, hey, that's really interesting.

And that points to one of the issues, right, with seed investing is it is the lowest barrier to entry segment of private equity because the cost of starting startups had gone down.

And so the cost of getting into the game as a seed investor had gone down as well.

and so as you mentioned right like one of the things we saw was just a flood of new entrants into the space i think there was a tailwind which was that like the original thesis was true right and so a lot of these funds and that vintage of funds performed really well as a cohort and they a bunch of folks were able to profit quite immensely from investing in really significant companies and entering these businesses at pretty attractive prices right and so

that propelled this segment of the market.

And I think that just created a huge amount of competition.

It actually enabled a lot of new company creation, which I think was really good for founders and for the industry, but it became really hard to decipher who is really going to be successful.

What does it take to be differentiated and to break out?

And as you said, we had this

Zerp environment coming out of COVID that just like supercharged everything.

And hopefully if you had a successful fund and you were in a position to get out of these companies and take advantage of those valuations, hopefully you did.

But at some point that came to a screeching halt and that created a lot of pain and a reckoning for a lot of investors, not just seed investors, but a lot of the late stage folks who tried to pile on to that momentum.

Yeah, I agree.

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