20VC: The Three Types of Seed Round Today, Why Seed Has Never Been More Competitive, Why Pricing Has Never Been Higher, Why Boards at Pre-Seed Can Be Helpful & How Too Much Cash Too Soon Can Harm Companies with Ed Sim, Founder @ Boldstart

Ed Sim is one of the best seed round investors in venture as the Founder and Managing Partner @ Boldstart, Ed focuses specifically on developer, infra and SaaS at pre-seed and seed round. Over the last decade, Ed has backed some of the best including Snyk, BigID, Kustomer, Front and Superhuman.

In Today’s Episode on Seed Rounds We Discuss:

1. The Three Types of Seed Round:

• What are the three different types of seed round today?

• Has seed ever been this competitive?

• Will seed be unimpacted by the macro decline we are seeing?

• Why are growth and multi-stage funds being more active than ever in seed?

2. Too Much Cash Will Kill You!

• Why does Ed believe that too much capital can kill companies at the seed round?

• Why does Ed believe that the best founders are not always optimising for the highest price?

• What are the single biggest negatives of taking a high price at the seed round?

• What advice does Ed have for founders who have large offers from multi-stage funds at seed?

3. Is Growth Dead?

• Why does Ed disagree and suggest that growth is not dead?

• What do multi-stage and growth funds now what to see that they did not before?

• How will the growth market evolve over the next 12-18 months?

4. IPOs, AI and M&A:

• What will cause the IPO windows to crack open again?

• Why does Ed believe that many investing in AI are simply giving money to Nvidia?

• Does Ed agree that 95% of the cash going into AI from venture today will go to zero?

• Will we see more or less M&A in the next 12 months?

• How did Ed evaluate the Loom acquisition by Atlassian?