The Changing Venture Landscape
I really like Mark and think he does a service to the community with these posts.<p>I recently did a Due Diligence call on a company that was trying to raise a $1M pre-seed round, and had previously taken 250k with basically nothing to show for it. I thought this was silly, for both the amount and the name (esp for first time founders).<p>Apparently though according to this, a &quot;pre-seed&quot; at $1-3M is actually a thing. This seems insane to me because at least from when I started being involved in startups around 2011, traction was king before you found a cent outside of friends and family or Angels if you were well connected, or had a previous exit.<p>This whole post though does reflect what we are seeing as a venture fund (I&#x27;m an LP in a tiny fund) with people asking for a LOT of money for basically no market proof and there being no real way to win if you&#x27;re investing at the $3-10M level. I think that is kind of crazy to be honest but I assume if I were raising money again I might be tempted to do that.<p>I think what is different in my mind from 2011 is that there used to be hope that someone could unseat Google, MSFT, Amazon, WalMart etc... the same way Apple, Amazon and Google did to IBM, DEC and Sun. I don&#x27;t think anyone truly believes there&#x27;s a startup that is hatching today that will unseat Amazon in the next 30 years.<p>-------------<p>Side note. Mark has apparently lost a ton of weight and become very fit since when I was following him more closely back in 2015. Congrats to him!<p>[0]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bothsidesofthetable.com&#x2F;how-i-lost-65-pounds-in-18-months-without-any-fad-diets-or-gimmicks-72a262f29f9c" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bothsidesofthetable.com&#x2F;how-i-lost-65-pounds-in-18-m...</a>