Okay, but here's the thing that grinds my gears: when money is raining from the sky, we call "seed" the stage where someone with a nacent business concept gets

Okay, but here's the thing that grinds my gears: when money is raining from the sky, we call "seed" the stage where someone with a nacent business concept gets funded. Money is no longer raining, so let's take a sobered approach to identifying fundraising stages. A nacent business is not at the "seed" stage--this is "pre-seed". By nacent, I mean someone who wrote some software over a short period of time and then joined an accelerator in hopes of turning that software into a business. Why is this not "seed" stage? Because a market (customer) for that software has yet to be established, the team is only coming together and beta testing is still in the future. Accelerators are offering "pre-seed" funding on the chance that their help and encouragement will get the team together and the product to a point where other investors will take interest and the product will get ready for the market. Let's get this right: - no final product, no market discovery, no team together = "pre-seed" - beta-tested product, market discovered, team assembled = "seed" Some accelerator ventures may actually reach "seed" stage in their cohort. But most of them likely will not. I've looked at hundreds of these.