The 3 main goals of a seed stage company can be summarized with: 1) Build a high-performance organization (hire, fire, motivate, align, etc.) 2) Build equity (find product-market fit, differentiation, etc) 3) Survive! (become investable or break-even) Anything missing?

Borrowing from @cdixon: 1) if you have a map or already know that you're facing the peak of the mountain, use goals to move there fast 2) if you have no map or don't know where are you, move randomly to find the path cdixon.org/2009/09/19/climbi…

I enjoyed reading how objectives help you (or maybe not 🤔) reach greatness: "Measure What Matters" by @johndoerr "Why Greatness Cannot be Planed, the myth of the objective" by @kenneth0stanley and @joelbot3000 Any recommendation on pairs of books with contrary views?

A must-see for first-time CEOs: youtube.com/watch?v=OJ9HZHjH… By @peterfenton @jesskah What makes a great CEO? - learn-it-all not a know-it-all; voracious appetite to learn - aptitude for building the operating system of the business - authenticity, clarity of purpose, deep motivation

Ownership is only growing at Seed stage, some ideas on why is that: a) Maybe it takes longer to get into series A? b) Maybe seed funds are growing in size and getting more ownership sensitive? c) Maybe founders are happy to get more dilution and get several funds involved?

A couple of ways to read that chart: a) Cloud is not eating On-prem and IT internal sofware. On-prem and internal IT is here to stay b) All the growth in Software comes from SaaS (thx @pawell) PS: A lot of cool data in @BatteryVentures presentation

4) Due to the previous, the increase in the value of the equity of the founders has been spectacular. But also for every other investor - the first investors experience x400+ returns (!) Note: I'm assuming only the dilution from the new rounds, there's no follow-on, etc.

3) That capital efficiency means that the level of dilution for a business that has raised +2bn has been pretty "soft": a couple of major points in the first couple of rounds (44% and 30%), but then between 2 and 20% Note: this obviously misses any other dilution (ie. ESOP...)

2) The company has been exceptional at turning money raised into increases in valuation - from x2 to x100, even for some significant amounts of money (!)

1) The valuation of SpaceX has been growing consistently, but there have been two major steps (Mar 05, x5 and Jan 15, x9). Note that some later stage investors are experiencing multiples in their returns that are exceptional even for seed (!)