Episode 748 | The Ins and Outs of Startup Investing
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Welcome back to Startups for the Rest of Us. I'm Rob Walling, and in this episode, I sit down with Einar Volset, co-founder of TinySeed, and we take it in a little different direction than we normally do. Oftentimes when we talk about TinySeed, we will talk about things that we've learned investing across. All these SaaS companies that could help you as a B2B SaaS founder, or maybe I'll interview a TinySeed founder so we can take learnings and apply them to the broader community and the broader audience. But in this episode, Einar and I talk through something that he actually knew quite a bit about when we started TinySeed, and I knew very, very little about, and that is startup investing and venture investing and why people would invest in a fund versus investing individually. We talk a little bit about... the math of venture and how and why TinySeed is so different.
But we also talk about the fact that the venture industrial complex has really left behind thousands and thousands of startup founders. And that really was and still is the goal of TinySeed. As you know, my mission is to multiply the world's population of independent self-sustaining startups. TinySeed is part of that because no one else was serving that market when we stepped in. And so this episode is a bit of inside baseball. It's a look behind the curtain of running a venture fund and TinySeed and even a bit about the broader venture space. I find this stuff super interesting because it's not something that I have ever been exposed to before running this fund. And who better to explain it than TinySeed co-founder Einar Bolset.
Before we dive into our conversation, MicroConf Connect applications are open until tomorrow, January 15th. MicroConf Connect is an application-only paid community service If you sign up in the next couple days, you get access to our upcoming workshop with Kate Suma on January 23rd of 2025. You're going to join Kate live as she delivers SaaS onboarding best practices and tips, plus does a live teardown of a Connect member's onboarding experience. We do a live workshop or event or sometimes it's a Q&A with me once a month, every month for paid MicroConf Connect members. Head to microconfconnect.com in the next 48 hours to apply and get in in our January batch. And with that, let's dive into my conversation with Einar. Einar Volset, welcome back to Startup for the Rest of Us.
Thanks for having me.
It is good to have you on the show, man. Folks know you from Hot Take Tuesday. They also might know you as the managing partner of Discretion Capital that helps seven and eight figure SaaS companies sell for amazing outcomes, as well as co-founder of TinySeed.
There you go. It's nice to have you all to myself without Tracy interjecting with her blue sky nonsense.
Seriously. Her open source communist blue sky. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's right. This is great. Hey, Tracy. Hi, Tracy. So today we're going to go a little off the start up to the rest of us beaten path, so to speak. And I have had a crash course over the past four or five years in not only just investing in startups, but then venture investing and what that looks like and how if you are a venture fund and you don't return what the S&P 500 does, then you crash into. burn. And I didn't even realize that was possible, how valuations are created. And, you know, frankly, we're going to talk about TinySeed, about the stuff we've learned. This is not just a big sales pitch of TinySeed. We are fundraising right now. And folks can reach out to you, tinyseed.com slash invest, if they want to get in touch, if they're an accredited investor. But the idea here is to share a bunch of the learnings that you and I have had.
I think you had a lot more back in 2018 when we started this. But to talk about investing in startups, potential outcomes, and frankly, I also want to talk about tiny seed and really dig into why it's different from, say, someone going through YC. Because we have folks who get into both and who have gone with tiny seed. And that blew my mind.
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