20VC: Why Financial Models at Seed, $5M Seed Rounds & The Fear of Signalling Risk is all BS | Why Multi-Stage Firms Have Destroyed Seed & Who Wins and Who Loses in the Next 10 Years of Venture with Adam Besvinick, Founding Partner @ Looking Glass Capital

The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch

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20VC: Why Financial Models at Seed, $5M Seed Rounds & The Fear of Signalling Risk is all BS | Why Multi-Stage Firms Have Destroyed Seed & Who Wins and Who Loses in the Next 10 Years of Venture with Adam Besvinick, Founding Partner @ Looking Glass Capital

20VC

May 29, 2023

Adam Besvinick is the Founder of Looking Glass Capital, a pre-seed-focused firm started in 2020. Before starting Looking Glass, Adam spent about 5 years at Deep Fork Capital and Anchorage Capital Group investing in pre-seed through Series C. Adam's portfolio across funds includes the likes of BigID, Transfix, NomNom, and Hone Health, to name a few.

In Today's Episode with Adam Besvinick We Discuss:

1. How Twitter Led to Founding a Venture Firm:

How did Adam make his way into the world of venture through Twitter?
What are 1-2 of his biggest lessons from working with the legend, Chris Sacca?
What does Adam know now that he wishes he had known at the beginning of his time in VC?
What do most young VCs misunderstand when it comes to reputation?

2. Raising Fund I: The Process:

How many LP meetings did Adam have to close Fund I?
What docs and materials did he have for the fundraise? How does he advise other managers on doing docs for fundraises?
How do different LP profiles want different things in the managers they work with?
How did Adam approach first vs final close? How does he advise others managers on closing?
How did Adam instil a sense of urgency in LPs to move and commit to the fund?
What are 1-2 of Adam's biggest pieces of advice to managers raising a first-time fund?

3. Looking Glass: The Very Disciplined Pre-Seed Strategy:

How did Adam decide on the fund size? Why is it the optimal fund size?
What is the desired ownership for Adam? What level of dilution does he expect across the lifecycle of the company?
What is the average check size? What is the average entry price?
How does Adam approach reserves and follow-on checks?
How does Adam reflect on his own relationship to price?
Why does Adam not like the majority of pre-seed micro-fund strategies?

4. The Market: Multi-Stage Firms Destroying Seed

Does Adam agree that "multi-stage firms have destroyed seed rounds"?
How does Adam advise founders when they have multi-stage offers and seed firm offers?
Who will be the winners and losers in the next 10 years of venture?
Why is it harder than ever to advise founders on fundraising rounds today?

Discussion about this podcast

The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch

The Twenty Minute VC (20VC) interviews the world's greatest venture capitalists with prior guests including Sequoia's Doug Leone and Benchmark's Bill Gurley. Once per week, 20VC Host, Harry Stebbings is also joined by one of the great founders of our time with prior founder episodes from Spotify's Daniel Ek, Linkedin's Reid Hoffman, and Snowflake's Frank Slootman.

If you would like to see more of The Twenty Minute VC (20VC), head to www.20vc.com for more information on the podcast, show notes, resources and more.

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