Everyone says they’re a seed investor. But are they really? Too many firms treat Seed as a stepping stone — a quick stop before chasing later-stage checks and bigger fund sizes. That’s not seed investing; that’s résumé building.
Seed investing isn’t just a smaller version of Series A. At this stage, the business is raw, the data is thin, and the founder needs more than a check — they need a partner who knows how to turn chaos into clarity. Being a seed investor means embracing uncertainty and helping founders build the foundations that unlock growth. The foundation laid at Seed, if done with rigor and thoughtfulness, should set the tone of execution for later rounds.
Think about what the founder is actually doing at this point: they’re closing their first ~10 customers, figuring out pricing, and making that critical first sales hire. They don’t need a passive investor watching from the sidelines; they need someone in the trenches, pressure-testing the business model and helping ensure those early go-to-market iterations sustain towards a viable and exciting venture scaled company.
There are plenty of myths about seed investing that deserve to be called out. The first is that seed is just a pit stop on the way to bigger rounds. For many emerging fund managers, that’s true — they use Seed as a stepping stone to raise larger funds and move to a later stage focus. But for Laconia , Seed was our first and only stop. We’ve spent the last 10 years building and perfecting our entire firm around this stage of investing, refining our strategy, our process, and our support systems to be built-for-seed, not just passing through it to later stages..
Another myth is that Seed investors can afford to sit back until Series A. In today’s market, garnering Series A funding has become a much higher bar. Much of the heavy lifting that used to happen post-A now has to be done at Seed.
And maybe the biggest myth is that Seed represents a longer path to liquidity. In truth, if capital strategy is managed well, Seed creates more optionality, with its lower investment cost basis, not less — through later round valuation increases, secondary sales, or even exciting ROI earlier exits. It isn’t always about waiting a decade for a billion-dollar outcome. It’s about creating strong, risk-adjusted returns with multiple paths to success.
From our vantage point at Laconia, being a true Seed investor requires a very different approach. It means staying focused on Seed rather than drifting into later stages, investing as a team instead of operating in partner silos, and building systems to consistently surface founders others might miss. It means diligence that goes beyond decks — such as setting up real prospective customer conversations during the due diligence process — and scaffolding companies with the support they need to hit their milestones. That’s part of the reason why 97% of our portfolio companies go on to raise follow-on funding.
This is also why LP investors should lean into Seed rather than shy away from it. Yes, it takes more hands-on work, but the return profile is uniquely attractive if you approach it with discipline. Seed is the best entry point for value creation because ownership percentages can be meaningful and the cost basis is low. It creates more paths to liquidity, not fewer. And in today’s market, where many larger funds are drifting away from the earliest stages, the opportunity set is actually clearer for those who specialize in it. Others write small checks across a dozen companies in a sector just to “learn.” That may serve the fund’s curiosity, but it’s rarely good for the company. That’s another blog for another time.
The market is moving in a direction that makes this discipline even more important. Series A rounds have become harder to raise, terminal liquidity events have been pushed further out, and yet the transformative potential of new technologies such as AI is only growing. Seed, done right, remains the stage where the strongest multiples live — and where founders and investors alike can create meaningful outcomes along the way.
For Laconia , that’s always been the mission. Seed wasn’t an entry point on the way to something else — it was the destination from day one. We built Laconia for seed, and we’re as focused on it today as we were when we started ten years ago. The only question is: are the people investing alongside you truly built for seed, or are they just passing through?
