Representative appearances

• What AI Means for Your Startup’s Future | Peter Walker Breaks It Down

  Um, what about seedstrapping? How are you thinking and tracking that? It's a really interesting I wouldn't call it a new concept necessarily, but it is something that is in the ether a little bit more these days. The idea that a company can take one round of venture funding, typically a million to three million in cash, and then just stop fundraising, get to profitability, control your own destiny. The question for me isn't necessarily from the founder side. That sounds lovely from the founder side. I get it. It's from the investor side, which is twofold. One, if you invest into seedstar companies and you expect them never to raise again, your internal marks won't change most likely. So you have to convince your LPs, hey, this was a good bet. Maybe you give them more access to the underlying revenues, etc., but you have to convince your LPs, by the way, my TVPI is not going to look good compared to all these other funds because my key companies are not raising. So discussion with your LPS, different strategy than perhaps you raise the fund on, etc. The other thing is I think it is still a very open question whether or not those seedstar companies can grow as quickly as the companies that go for full venture. Maybe they can. They certainly, you would expect, would hit profitability perhaps a little bit earlier, but that's kind of not the point. You know, company going 20% a year that's profitable is an amazing business. It's not a VC backable one. So, where do those sort of trends shake out? I hear a lot of people talking about seedstrapping. And then I also see a lot of AI companies that could potentially seed strap raising massive rounds. Yeah, I think going from 0 to 10 million of ARR is possible on a seed strapping. Let's say you raise like a million or a couple million, but getting to 10 million to 100 million seedstrapping. I really don't know if that's possible without VC backing or some type of growth capital. And I I totally see it's a good point in time to be seedstropping. Uh because there is a a big gap between seed and series A, which kind of leads me to my next question. And you know, we're seeing a huge jump up in uh seed bridge rounds because the series A target is moving so much. You know, you see series A rounds of 10 million plus or 50 million when the companies like yes 4xR but they've only gone from like 0 to 4 million where companies that have gone from zero to 1 or 2 million are having a hard time raising a series A. Yeah. So what are you seeing out there in this kind of seed bridge round to an A? Um I think that there are two different dynamics happening and they're spoken about very differently. So there are some seed bridges and by the way there are a ton of seed bridges happening right now on preferred equity on convertible notes on safes like any sorts of financing liquidation preferences kind of multipliers too. Lots of stuff lots of stuff. Um, on the one hand, there are companies that are so exciting to venture investors that they cannot wait to give them more money and they want to preempt the A round investors because they're just like,