A Post Seed World

I can’t recall who was on the thread, but I can distinctly remember the subject. It was 2005 or 2006 and there was an issue brewing in the emerging market of a new niche of early-stage investing.

The issue?

What do we call this thing?

At the time, the two leading contenders (super angels and micro VCs) rang hollow for the 4 or 5 of us on the thread working to help this model emerge. After a hearty back and forth, we settled on the Seed moniker. In talking to the press, to founders and other VCs, we agreed we’d use Seed as the standard we’d rally around.

But, the branding of Seed and the standardizing of it as a “series” of financing was only one of the many factors that allowed this new form of finance to have an outsized impact on the startup world.

There were many other factors that contributed to Seed scaling from the 4 or 5 of us on that thread nearly 12–13 years ago to the 500+ established seed funds in the market today.

Indie.vc fills a similar gap that sits squarely between lifestyle businesses and monopolies in the making; yet, the ecosystem around supporting these kinds of companies is not nearly as well established with the venture community at the time Seed emerged. VCs don’t seem to see the same “too early” opportunity in the “too small” opportunities (i.e. not obviously a billion dollar business today). Though it is improving by the day, the funding landscape for these Real Businesses remains a mish-mash of lenders, Angels, and private equity firms with far less overlap in their methods and models for deploying capital and supporting founders than that of the traditional VC community.