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
The Twenty Minute VC
4.4 • 637 Ratings
🗓️ 29 May 2023
⏱️ 44 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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?
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | When you raise $5 million at 25, you have a target on your back before you've even written a |
| 0:04.6 | single line of code. Giving someone $5 million and four years to figure it out is a luxury of a billion |
| 0:10.3 | dollar venture fund. You need to have at least 24 months of cash. If you can't find product |
| 0:15.1 | market fit by being that disciplined over a two-year period, you probably didn't deserve to raise |
| 0:19.3 | more than two and a half. Welcome back to 20 VC with me, Harry Stebbings, and it's been a while since we did an inside |
| 0:24.6 | baseball VC show. And so today, that's exactly what we're going to do. And joining me in the |
| 0:28.9 | hot seat is Adam Besvenig, founder of Looking Glass Capital, a pre-seed focused firm started in |
| 0:34.4 | 2020. And before starting Looking Glass, Adam spent five years at Deep Fork |
| 0:38.4 | Capital and Anchorage Capital, investing in Pre-Seed through Series C. Adam's portfolio across |
| 0:43.8 | funds includes the likes of Big ID, Transfix, Nom, and Home Health, to name a few. But before we |
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