The most common version of venture capital investing is essentially a pattern-matching exercise conducted at a point when the uncertainty has already been substantially reduced. By the time most institutional funds write their first check into a company, the founder has raised angels, demonstrated early revenue, built an initial team, and established enough of a track record that the risk/return calculation looks relatively comfortable. This is rational behavior. It is also, we believe, a significant source of systematic underperformance.
We invest at seed. That means we write checks when there is often no product, no revenue, no team beyond the founders, and no certainty about whether the market will work. What we have instead is a founder, an insight, and a hypothesis. We believe that this is precisely the right time to invest in the companies that will matter most.
Why Early Stage Produces Asymmetric Returns
The mathematical case for seed investing is well established. Early checks into companies that become significant businesses generate multiples that later-stage checks cannot match, because the valuation step-ups between seed and Series A, and then from Series A onward, capture most of the value that was created during the earliest and riskiest phase of company building.
But the mathematical case is not the primary reason we invest at seed. We invest at seed because we believe that the insight that makes a company important is formed at the very beginning, and the window to access that insight at fair value is narrow. Once a company has proven its model, the insight is no longer proprietary. The competition has seen the same signals and is allocating resources accordingly. The founder who had a three-year head start built on genuine conviction is now navigating a race against well-funded followers.
"We are not in the business of validating what others have already proven. We are in the business of recognizing what others have not yet seen."
What We Are Evaluating at Seed
Without a product or revenue track record to evaluate, our seed-stage assessment is necessarily founder-centric. We spend the majority of our diligence time trying to understand three things: whether the founder has genuine first-principles understanding of the problem they are solving; whether they have a realistic and differentiated hypothesis about how to solve it; and whether they have the specific type of resilience that early-stage company building demands.
The first of these, first-principles problem understanding, is the most important. It is also the most difficult to fake. When a founder truly understands the mechanics of the problem they are working on, they can answer questions from unexpected angles without losing coherence. They can identify which assumptions are load-bearing and which are contingent. They know what they do not know, and they can articulate a credible approach to finding out.
The second, a differentiated solution hypothesis, is necessary but not sufficient. Many founders understand the problem deeply and still propose solutions that are not differentiated enough to be defensible. We look for hypotheses that reflect insights about user behavior, distribution dynamics, or technical constraints that are not obvious to well-resourced incumbents.
The third, founder resilience, is the hardest to assess in a short diligence process but is arguably the most predictive of eventual outcomes. The early years of building a company are relentlessly demoralizing. Products break, customers churn, key hires leave, competitors emerge. The founders who navigate these periods without losing their core conviction about why they are building what they are building are the ones who eventually get to the other side.
The Access Advantage of Early-Stage Investing
There is a second reason we invest at seed that is specific to our focus on underrepresented founders. The founders we back are disproportionately those who do not have easy access to the traditional venture capital networks that dominate deal flow at later stages. They may not have gone to the right school, may not have worked at the right company, may not live in the right city, or may not match the visual template that conscious and unconscious bias in the industry defaults to.
By investing at seed, before those access barriers have fully crystallized, we can reach founders who will be the subject of significant competitive interest at Series A but who, at the seed stage, we can access through our own sourcing efforts and relationships. This is a real and durable advantage that compounds over time, and it is one of the structural reasons we believe our investment strategy will continue to generate differentiated returns.
We do not apologize for investing early. We do not apologize for investing in founders who look different from the industry's historical default. We believe these two commitments are mutually reinforcing and that together they constitute a venture strategy worth building a firm around. The results so far have given us every reason to continue.
