When Someone Asks Me About Series A, Now I’ll Just Share This Post

With the explosion of seed investors and seed financings, it’s been fascinating to see the psychology form around “Getting To The Series A.” It’s as if it is a huge marker everyone wants to achieve, and it makes sense. Yet, I’ve found I keep having the same conversation over and over again with seed founders who “think” they’re preparing for A when, in reality, they should be preparing very basic M&A discussions (if they’re lucky).

To that end, I wrote a series of posts about (1) some universal ground rules for preparing for the Series A and (2) exploring alternatives to financing when the Series A doesn’t arrive. The tweets and posts around this led to a vibrant online discussion, which led to a live event organized by Bloomberg BETA last week.

Roy Bahat from BETA took the lead and I moderated the second discussion. We jointly invited Rebecca Lynn from Canvas, Brian O’Malley from Accel, Josh Elman from Greylock, Maha Ibrahim from Canaan, and Hunter Walk from Homebrew. It’s a two-part discussion, each part about 60 minutes. I am not going to have the audio transcribed because I want folks to listen to all 120 minutes of this. No shortcuts on this one. Part of the reason I was glad this came together is because it comes up so much in conversation, I grew tired of explaining it or writing about it. Now, thanks to everyone who participated, I can just share a link to this post and the audio instead!

Seed to Series A: Myths of Raising an A from BLOOMBERG BETA on Vimeo.

Seed to Series A: New Realities of Raising an A from BLOOMBERG BETA on Vimeo.