Right now, VCs often knowingly invest too much money at the series A stage. They do it because they feel they need to get a big chunk of each series A

Right now, VCs often knowingly invest too much money at the series A stage. They do it because they feel they need to get a big chunk of each series A company to compensate for the opportunity cost of the board seat it consumes. Which means when there is a lot of competition for a deal, the number that moves is the valuation (and thus amount invested) rather than the percentage of the company being sold. Which means, especially in the case of more promising startups, that series A investors often make companies take more money than they want. Seems like this is a plausible explanation of what happened to Color (http://www.crunchbase.com/company/color-labs http://www.crunchbase.com/company/color-labs)? Also, I rather enjoyed reading: Which means the first VC to break ranks and start to do series A rounds for as much equity as founders want to sell (and with no "option pool" that comes only from the founders' shares) stands to reap huge benefits. As I always thought the big, required option pool that so heavily diluted founders/early employees was a bit out there. Seems much more sane to practice JIT dilution.