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

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?