Andy Stinnes
Contributor
Andy Stinnes, general partner at Cloud Apps Capital Partners, leads early-stage investments in cloud businesses and serves as active board member and adviser, offering operational support for portfolio companies based on his 20+ years in executive roles in business software.
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Seed is not the new Series A
It seems there’s news every day about startup funding reaching record highs, new unicorns being minted and tech firms going public. There’s no question that we are in the middle of a long-running and accelerating venture bull market.
All of this impresses upon us that every indicator in startup funding points up and to the right: Venture firms have more dry powder, deal sizes are growing rapidly, valuations are soaring and investment terms are more founder-friendly than ever. And all that is indeed happening.
But a closer inspection reveals that these trends are a lot more nuanced and apply very unequally across the funding continuum from seed to the late stage. What’s more, most of the underlying truths and rules are not changing.
The venture alphabet soup of “A, B, C rounds” suggests it’s all the same, just one after the other, but it is not. It is more like playing an entirely different sport.
Beware of the outliers
The stage definitions in venture …
