At the early stage this is always classically difficult. For both founders and early stage investors, you're balancing dilution vs. percentage ownership. We th

At the early stage this is always classically difficult. For both founders and early stage investors, you're balancing dilution vs. percentage ownership. We think buying 5% of the company is the right level for a given seed fund. It's enough to be significant to return the fund, but not so much that you're crowding everyone else who you would want in the round. It takes a village to build a great startup and we particularly like to help founders put together a good syndicate of angels and seed funds, all of whom can help with advice, connections, customers, employees and just general support. It's basically binary whether a company gets to metrics that help it either be profitable or get to a Series A— so that's why at the early stage (all the way to Series A really) most VCs work backwards from percentage ownership. So we write checks of as small as $300K for earlier companies at lower valuation, up to $1M or more for companies later stage. It's enough to either get to the next milestone, or put together a good round. All of the real work happens after the raise, and it's usually a huge relief to founders to be able to get back to work.