Unpacking "A Crisis Moment In Seed"
episode
Venture Unlocked: The playbook for venture capital managers
38 min
2 speakers
3 chapters
transcribed 1 month ago
Transcript
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Welcome back to another episode Our conversation was sparked by a three-part series of posts that Rob wrote, the first of which was called A Crisis Moment in Seed. The link for Rob's posts are on the Venture Unlocked sub stack. And during our conversation, we spent a lot of time talking about what inspired the post for him and how seed managers today should adapt to the shifted market. For anyone investing in seed, this is a must listen as Rob shared so many insightful views.
Sameer Khaji is the CEO and co-founder of Allocate. Allocate and Venture Unlocked are independent of each other. Any statements or references made by Sameer or his guests regarding third-party investments or securities are solely their views and opinions and are not intended as investment advice or an endorsement of such parties or securities by Sameer, his guests, or Allocate. Allocate or its clients may maintain relationships with or investment positions and guests, third parties or securities mentioned in this podcast. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.
Rob, I really appreciate you being on and this conversation is going to be really interesting for me because like you have thought a lot about it, but the world of venture capital, the evolution of it, you recently wrote over the last few months, a series of blogs around the seed universe, but I think it actually spoke more broadly toward where venture is today versus where it was. And I want to get into that, but maybe a good place to start is giving us a little bit of your background and what led you to some of those thoughts that you had on the blog.
Awesome. Well, thanks so much for having me. Excited to be here on the show. So for context, I'm one of the founders and a partner at NextView. So we're a pre-seed and seed focused fund. I live in the Boston area. We have partners in Boston, New York, and San Francisco and invest across the country. We started the firm back in 2011, and we're currently investing out of our fifth fund, about to crack open our sixth fund. And so starting back in 2011, we were like one of the OG like spinouts. We're one of the few funds of that era that were mostly guys coming out of existing venture funds, right? If you recall, most of the other peer funds at the time were like angels who are institutionalizing. And so we've kind of seen like...
Most of the movie in terms of how seed investing and early stage investing has progressed from that time period through to today. And there's been a lot of changes in the industry. When we started the firm, one of my partners had this analogy that the venture business is kind of like the beer industry. And he likened the rise of seed funds to like the microbreweries that were prevalent at the time. But, you know, fast forward like 15 years. That industry has changed a lot. And the venture industry has changed quite a bit. And there was a ton of maturation. 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.
Yeah, let's start with a little bit of the foundation right now. So you mentioned starting in your next few in 2011, I think you rolled out of Spark Capital, obviously a institutional firm. And at the time, there weren't a lot of seed funds. And if I kind of look back to 15 years ago, that was kind of the start. And there's a number of things that made it possible, obviously cloud computing, making it easier to cheaper to start companies. But, you know, here in Silicon Valley, there was folks like Jeff Clavier and folks like Aydin Senkhat and Steve Anderson and a lot of more angels that became known as super angels. They weren't even called micro VC or seed funds. And then since 2011, there have been a lot of tailwinds, both in technology and
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