Episode description
20VC: The Biggest Misconceptions & Hardest Truths About Seed Investing Today; Why The Best Founders Don't Need You, Why Uncapped SAFEs Are Good, Why Reserves Are Bad, Why Signalling is BS, Why Price Doesn't Matter with David Tisch & Terrence Rohan
Episode description
David Tisch is the Managing Partner of BoxGroup, one of the leading seed-stage investment firms of the last decade having invested in over 500 seed-stage startups, including Plaid, Ro, Ramp, PillPack, Amplitude, Stripe, Warby Parker, Harry’s, Flexport, Classpass, Airtable and more.
Terrence Rohan is the Managing Director @ Otherwise Fund, a fund that discretely empowers a network of today's top founders to make multi-stage venture investments. Terrence has invested in the likes of Figma, Hugging Face, Vanta, Notion and Robinhood to name a few.
In Today's Seed Investing Special We Discuss:
1. Is Seed Investing Now a Commoditised Asset Class:
- Why does Dave Tisch believe seed investing will remain the most inefficient market? What does that mean for the future of returns at seed?
- Why should you always pay up and be price-insensitive at seed rounds?
- Why does David believe that no one is great at seed investing?
- Why does David believe that you cannot index the seed market?
2. The Biggest BS Elements of Venture Capital:
- Signaling: Why does David believe that the theory of signaling is total BS? Why does Terrence disagree and think it is valid and common?
- Group Decision-Making: Why does Terrence believe that investing decisions should be made solo and groups merely encourage consensus decision-making?
- Reserves: Why does Terrence believe reserves hurt DPI and are not good? How does David respond given his growth fund?
- Venture Value Add: Why do David and Terrence think venture value add services platforms are BS and not worth it?
3. The World of LPs:
- What is the single biggest misalignment between VCs and LPs?
- What are David and Terrence's biggest pieces of advice for emerging managers today?
- Should LPs expect depressed returns from venture as the asset class commoditises?