Seed & Series A

Most of what a seed investor does happens in the first ninety days and the last ninety days: getting the round structured properly, and getting the company ready for whoever leads the next one. Everything in between is the founder’s job, and our main contribution is not making it harder.

We invest at the point where a company has a working product, at least one rights-holder or venue operator paying for it, and enough usage to have an argument about retention. That is usually a seed round, occasionally a Series A where the earlier rounds were angel-funded, and sometimes a pre-seed where the founding team has built and sold inside this industry before.

How we size a cheque

We size a first cheque to secure a meaningful minority position — large enough that the outcome matters to the fund and that we can justify the time we intend to spend, small enough that the founder keeps control and the cap table stays clean for the rounds that follow. We do not publish a fixed number, because the right cheque is a function of the round size, the ownership already committed to angels and accelerators, and how capital-intensive the business is. A pure software ticketing platform and a company shipping sensor hardware into two hundred venues need different numbers to reach the same milestone.

Alongside the initial cheque we set a reserve. Reserves are modelled at entry against a specific set of milestones, and the founder is told what our posture is before signing. We would rather say “we hold reserves but we will need to see the second competition renew before we deploy them” than let a founder assume a bridge that will never come.

Instruments and structure

We prefer a priced round with a standard set of preferred terms: a one-times non-participating liquidation preference, pro-rata rights, standard information rights and a conventional protective-provision list. Where speed matters or a round is genuinely early, we will use a post-money SAFE, on the understanding that stacked SAFEs with different caps create dilution nobody has modelled. Part of our diligence is building the cap table forward through the next two rounds so the founder can see what their own ownership looks like at Series B under realistic assumptions.

We do not ask for full-ratchet anti-dilution, redemption rights, or a veto over ordinary-course hiring. We do ask for the right to maintain our position in future rounds, and we exercise it when the evidence supports it.

What diligence actually involves

Four things, in roughly this order. First, cohort work: we want to see retention by customer cohort rather than aggregate revenue growth, because in sport a single multi-year federation contract can hide the fact that nothing else renews. Second, a technical session with your engineers rather than with you — an hour on architecture, on how you handle peak load at the moment a gate opens, and on what you would rewrite if you had a quarter. Third, unit economics down to the transaction: gross margin after payment processing, fraud losses, support cost and any revenue share back to the rights-holder. Fourth, references with the people who renew you: heads of ticketing, commercial directors, venue operations managers.

We ask for the bear case in writing and we write our own. The investment memo that goes to committee contains the three reasons this could fail, and we share that section with the founder. Nobody benefits from a firm that only tells you what it likes.

Timing

From a first meeting to a signed term sheet is typically four to six weeks, and most of that is reference calls scheduled around other people’s seasons. If we are going to decline, we aim to say so within two weeks, with a written reason. A slow maybe is the single most expensive thing an investor can give a founder, and we treat producing one as a failure of our own process.

After the round

The first board meeting sets a reporting format we will not change for a year: a short written pack circulated seventy-two hours ahead, a standing set of operating metrics, and a section for what the founder wants help with. Between meetings, the portfolio operations team is the first point of contact, and we hold ourselves to a response inside one working day. We plan the next round from the day the current one closes, working backwards from the metrics a Series A or B lead in this sector will actually ask about.