Jason M. LemkinCEO, SaaStr · Co-Founder of SaaStr AI, SaaStr Fund, Adobe Sign

The Secret to Successful Seed Investing Winning the Best Deals

21 Jun 2024 · 1 min

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Jason M. Lemkin gives practical, opinionated advice about seed investing: he argues seed is often not the most efficient way to make the most money (especially per unit time) and emphasizes the importance of "winning the deal." He shares mentor anecdotes—particularly about Byron Dieter—who focused on being part of every strong deal rather than always leading, illustrating deal-winning as the core objective in early-stage investing.

Chapters

To me that's a kiss of death. So people ask me what. It's just, it's just there. The other thing about seed investing is there are exceptions, but mostly it's not the best way to make the most money, especially measured against unit time. You want to manage billions, you just want to win the bet. This is what I learned from Byron Dieter early on. Another mentor for me who you know, runs the Bessemer cloud practices his, his job is to win the best deals. He's like, that's the job is to win them. People founders love Byron. He gave me a term sheet back when I was a founder so I knew him when we just started our careers, when he was just started as a non partner I think. But you know, people love Byron and he, he didn't need to be the first guy. He just needed to be in every deal. And then people like, and they like others too. I think Mamoon has some of these characters as well. But he would just win the deal. That's what you want.