Sam is smart but i completely disagree with this take — and i’d use 500 Startups Fund I & II performance as my rebuttal.

Moreover, if ur going to make a “seed VC won’t work anymore” argument then SHOW US YOUR MATH… useless to have a debate w/o financial models & data. https://t.co/iZdVoz6W9H

https://twitter.com/lessin/status/1684207238011817988

given current market conditions, a reasonable argument could be “Seed VC works @ $3-5M valtns but not at $10-20M” and I might agree… but w/o showing the math it’s simply a *philosophical* debate about a *financial* outcome.

… which is a waste of fucking time.

(show the math)

1/ there's lot of VC "inside baseball" on what's going on with startup valuations.

in short: VCs are SHITTING their pants over existing portfolio while same time SALIVATING over potential "more reasonable" (LOWER) valuations for new deals.

anyway here's my take on next 12 mo's:

https://twitter.com/saarsaar/status/1486524514296942594

2/ first off, the public market has taken a big fucking messy dump on tech IPOs, cloud stocks, Saas and E-Com companies, which are down ~30-50% in just the past few months.

not pretty, but kind of expected since everything went thru the roof over the past few years.

1/ today $TWLO has a market cap of ~$49B and announced they're acquiring Segment for ~$3B.
while it's easy to #humblebrag "i was fortunate to be a seed-stage investor 12 yrs ago" (see i just did it) and make a splash on @VCbrags, i have another story to tell. 2/ about 8 yrs ago i invested in a small #SaaS startup from Australia that was just a few people and had raised <$500K, was doing maybe $10-25K in monthly ARR (sorry if i'm forgetting exact #s but it was pretty early)

i've invested for ~20 yrs, met 1000's of founders, seen 1000's of decks, done 100's of deals -- yet it's still humbling how often i'm wrong or uncertain about what's going to happen. like Yogi Berra sez: "It's tough to make predictions... especially about the future". #sigh🤷 i read about a lot of other VCs bragging about their big investing wins (and how they had #CONVICTION about investing early), but i'll be honest it's rare that i'm sure things are going to go great... and again, often that i'm wrong when i feel that way.

1/ random rant on negotiation: we tend to under-value people who are NICE and REASONABLE in negotiations, and forget about how easy and pleasant they are to deal with. 2/ similarly, we often praise people who negotiate HARD or TOUGH in a way that seems positive -- like "wow that person drove a hard bargain; they stuck with it and got what they wanted" -- when in reality, they were just a pain in the ass and you just gave up / gave in / caved.