Carter Lahren and three investors explain how Bay Area founders can land early funding. Intel Capital deploys $300-350 million annually across seed to mezzanine rounds. Over $4 billion flows through specialized seed-stage funds, but the real shift is learning to pitch strangers instead of friends.
¡Hola! I'm Carter Lahren. I'm directing the Silicon Valley session of the Founder Institute, and the Founder Institute is the the world's largest entrepreneur training and startup launch program. And today we're hosting an event at Microsoft in Silicon Valley where we will discuss securing a lead investor. So founders from around the Bay Area will come to learn about exactly how to go about getting that initial cash that's so critical to starting your company.
We are the equity investing arm of Intel Corporation. We're a worldwide organization, so pretty much We have a footprint in every place in the world that you might look to go into. We invest typically in a range of $300 to $350 million per year, and we're stage agnostic, so that means we go from seed all the way to mezzanine rounds, and check size agnostic as well.
We're a highly specialized venture capital firm. I think that what we're seeing out in the world is there's more and more choice for entrepreneurs, so a lot of— we believe the best VCs become more and more specialized in certain things that they do really well. Our specialty has been— we've been around since '98, we have an office in San Francisco and an office in Seattle— is that we are unapologetically founder and team driven, and we do early-stage investing in things that we believe can be breakout consumer brands. There's never been a better time for entrepreneurs to raise money. I think there's something like 200 of these micro VCs. If you look at kind of a new tweener-sized venture fund, has raised over $4 billion in the last few years to focus almost exclusively on early stage. So there's more money at the seed stage than ever before. So a lot of these lines that you're kind of drawing in the sand, I think kind of go away. But there's one big one in my mind that I always talk about a lot, which is there's a line between when you can raise money from people that you actually know and when you can raise money from strangers.
