Connor Ryan

Here's YC's official advice about being truthful and precise about what is pilot, bookings, revenue and recurring revenue. Founders, particularly first time founders, need to sear this into their brains. Don't mistake one tier for another. Be precise, and always be truthful.

I think this shift in seed valuations is starting to meaningfully impact portfolio construction and actually creates a new set of opportunities for EMs. For me it feels less like “everything is getting more expensive” and more like the market quietly splitting into two different layers. If you look at the chart, for most of the distribution not much has really changed – median quartile is moving, but not dramatically. What’s really happening is the top 5% completely detaching and pulling the headline numbers up. A few deals (AI infra, hot teams, etc) are getting priced at $100–175M at seed, which starts to create the illusion that “this is the new normal,” even though it’s really just a very narrow slice of the market. And that has a pretty direct impact on portfolio construction for smaller funds. If you’re running a $30-50M fund and trying to play in that layer, you either don’t get into those deals at all, or you get in with a check that’s too small to matter – $500K–$1M into a $100M+ round quickly turns into sub-1% ownership, and after a few rounds of dilution it’s hard to see how that position moves the needle even in a good outcome. So you end up in this awkward spot where you’re either overpaying for perceived quality or under-owning your winners, which is basically the worst combination for a small fund. But the more interesting part is that for the rest of the market (probably 70–80% of it) the game hasn’t actually changed that much. I think pre-seed and early seed in the $5-20M range still exist, and in some ways they’re even less competitive now because so much attention and capital is getting pulled into that top percentile. So what looks like “expensive seed” is really the creation of a new asset class inside seed (call it pre-priced winners or early growth disguised as seed) – while the true early stage is still there, just slightly out of focus. And ironically, that’s where the opportunity for emerging managers probably gets cleaner. "Less" competition, more room for ownership, more ability to lean into non-consensus – which is still where most of the actual DPI for a small fund gets built.

so so so many people are going to get burned on this i’m very good at financial modeling i was trying to use claude to model it cant do it. the formulas it writes get too complicated and it loses itself. people posting this, check your formulas! the formulas are so complex it’s impossible to tell it’s wrong if you don’t know your numbers core it needs a lot of guidance and training