The “Post-Seed” Opportunity

Feb 20, 2014 • Paul Singh

In 2010 I stepped into venture capital and in the following years I made hundreds of early stage investments around the world. In that time I learned a lot about startups, a lot about venture capital, and a whole lot about how it is all changing. I founded Disruption Corporation based on three of those ideas:

  1. The business of venture capital is rapidly changing. On the management side, it’s less about fees and more about multiple revenue streams. On the investing side, it’s more about deal selection and less about deal sourcing. The venture capital industry is slowly catching up to the needs of high-growth companies today.
  2. Currently, the “post-seed” round presents the best opportunity for investors. There’s a funding gap between the Seed round and the Series A – and it seems to be getting wider. Rather than writing it off as the “Series A Crunch,” I believe the investors that can systematically identify the most promising companies are positioned for great returns.
  3. The Private Market is maturing. Prior to the early 1990s, the vast majority of public market trades happened manually — with paper. Once the trading platforms became electronic, a number of new players were able to access the market. In 2013, the private market made the same shift via AngelList and their Syndicates product. As the private market and its players evolve, so do their needs for tools, resources and guidance.

Here at Disruption Corporation, we started by building tools for investors and quickly added a layer of research and premium content for those investors to better understand the private markets. Now, we’re ready to put our founding thesis into action: we’re going to begin investing in promising companies, using our tools and research.

We’re interested in tech-enabled businesses across a wide variety of industries and geographic regions. Our focus is on companies that have achieved a level of product-market fit and, ideally, have revenue coming in. So while we’re probably not the best place to raise $50K for your latest idea or $5M for you to enter a new market, we are squarely aiming at the funding gap that exists for great companies and willbegin making investments in the next 30 days.

Our name is less about what we do and more about whom we empower. We exist to support the people who change the world, and we do this through bringing them tools, resources, and guidance to make more confident decisions for better financial futures.