How do seed investors decide who's worth backing, when there's not a fully proven commercial model yet?

On August 10, we're sitting down with Liz Wessel, a seed-stage investor and Partner at First Round Capital, to unpack exactly that.

How do the best investors identify exceptional founders before there's a company, product, or traction?

Tomorrow, we're sitting down with Alice Bentinck, co-founder and CEO of Entrepreneur First, to unpack exactly that.

A few years ago, I was building a consumer transportation startup in Asia, and ended up raising $12m in a Series A financing from First Round Capital. For context, we were looking at investors that had done well in our sector (consumer transportation), and First Round had invested in Uber at Seed.

With my second startup (Metal), we have built the AI-native operating system for founders raising VC that we wish had existed when we were raising for our first startup. The below write-up provides a playbook for founders raising Series A/B/C rounds (based on lessons learned from raising nine venture rounds over the past seven years).