YouSaid · the spoken record

Ramtin Naimi

lines on the record: 145
first: 2025-07-29
most recent: 2025-07-29
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“I think Agosian has a really cool story. He was a total outsider with no relevant pedigree, and he was kind of just dismissed his first few years or first decade until he ultimately became the leading guy in the category. Now I'm far, far, far away from that. And I think Silicon Valley is a more friendly place than the art world. Silicon Valley has been nicer to me than maybe the art world was to Larry Gigosian in the early days. So I don't want to draw the direct analogy, but I think the main thing is just staying consistent and maintaining the reputation and building upon that reputation and then producing great results. Venture is the only asset class where historical results is somewhat indicative of future performance. You can actually somewhat forecast how a venture capital firm will do over time based on how they've done historically. So I do believe if we just stay consistent, we have a pretty long trajectory and a long career ahead of us. I'm 34 today. I started this when I was 26. I think I have at least 20.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The money they did, right? That was my go-to market strategy. But over time, I think we became the signal, but I think people still tend to hold on to old narratives. So I could totally see that being a case. On the earlier days, we wore high volume. We're not anymore. As a firm, I think we invest in 14 net new seed deals per year, which is a little over one deal per month. So I don't think we're high volume today by any means. But as again, people tend to stick to old narratives and people will say that we're high volume and they're all call options, which I just would say is not true.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The most complimentary people would say that we become one of the leading seed firms in Silicon Valley in a relatively short period of time, that we have a great reputation among our founders. We're routinely referred to as the most trusted investor on the cap table of our portfolio companies. I think a lot of the multistage firms would consider us their most trusted seed stage venture capital firm partner. And I think some would say that we've achieved a lot more success than other people have that have started a venture capital firm in the same time duration that we have. I'd say the people that would say critical things would probably say that we're like heat seekers, signal chasers, which wouldn't have been inaccurate if you said that six or seven years ago because a lot of the model was aligned was around how do I get into deals alongside those firms, which candidly I had to because I wouldn't build raise SBBs otherwise. That's why the LCBs”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Founder is the advice they get from their seed investor is in addition to optimizing for a good deal for yourself at the Series A, you really should be optimizing for who's going to be the best board director to have on this journey with you for the next 10 years. The early days Andreessen, who were the founding partners, every single one of them were operators who had sold companies for hundreds of millions of dollars. It was hard to compete with this guy's going to be on your company who knows exactly what it takes to build a successful outcome and venture capital. And then the benchmark and Scoil alternative, they have some individuals like that, but they also have individuals who have been on the boards of the most incredible outcomes in Silicon Valley history. So they have a much better sense of what exceptional looks like more so than other people. They know things that work and they know things that don't work. And there's great board members at every venture capital firm and they're all very public. And there's a lot of people that do those venture capital firms that don't have those experiences that haven't sold a company and haven't yet been affiliated with a great company. And those guys will do great. And some of them will join boards and become one of those people individually. But when a founder is choosing, they're more likely to choose the person.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tend to win unless they're competing with one of the two other ones, and then they tend to only lose to one of the other two. If you eliminate those firms, then it's a free-for-all, and there are certain people who are more qualified to win certain deals than other deals. If you eliminate the dynamic, there's plenty of companies that could have absolutely raised a series A from one of those firms that somebody else ends up winning, but they preempt the deal and they just are very good at sniping deals. And I think those three individual firms have built brand weight that's so strong that founders really just want to be affiliated with them. And there are certain partners at those firms that have such amazing reputations as board directors that the Series A is the first time you're giving up a board director seat, not to say there aren't phenomenal board directors at a bunch of firms because there really are, but the density of high quality board members that have storied reputations of being great board members at those three particular firms, I think, outweighs the number of high quality board members that exist at pretty much any other venture capital firm.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That I've seen from my experience over and over again tend to be Sequoia benchmark in Andreessen. Even to this day, and somebody pulled out a stat that showed the VC firms that have the highest number of unicorns that they have led financings in prior to them becoming unicorns since 2015. And first place was Andreessen, second place was Sequoia, which validates this truth already. And then fifth place was benchmark, which is kind of shocking when you consider how much smaller their funds are and how targeted they have to be with the checks that they write.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a fair way to describe Is different types of ways rounds come together. There is the typical process where the founder puts together a deck in a data room and lines up meetings every single venture capital firm and they go out and they pitch. And then there's deals that happen outside of that dynamic that we have less involvement. And oftentimes we help our founders build relationships with certain VCs in advance of the Series A process because that's actually a good way that we get information on what should be this company's North Star metrics. How should we know when this company will be ready to raise a Series A. Oftentimes one of those people will just come in and preemptively make the founder an offer and the founder likes this partner. The terms are fair and they don't want to spend the next three to four weeks of their life fundraising and they call it a day and they move forward. Certain species are very, very good at doing that. But in like the bake-off process when there is 15, 18, 20 firms around the table, very few companies end up getting more than three or four term sheets. There's a few companies that get seven, eight or nine term sheets. The firms who I think truly excel in winning hyper competitive series A rounds.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Every venture capital, they'll just tell me In the early days, it was really just a lot of who is this kid, why is he running these processes? Why are these people trusting him to run this fundraise? Why is he the gatekeeper for this round? Over time, it just kind of became accepted that I was that person. The definitive thing that made it proven that I'm the accepted party to do that, whether it's at the A or the B or the C, is I think we've proven to do such a service for founders when we're running these processes for them that even in deals where our co-lead is a multi-stage tier one big name platform fund, when that next round is coming, they will tell the founder we're more than happy to let Brompton slash abstract run this process because they'll do a better job at it than anybody else will. So I think once we got the validation from our co-investors that they think we would do a better job running this than they would, then I think it just kind of became accepted that for our portfolio companies is the way it's going to be.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the lowest average dilution in the Series A. We can basically make your company have way better access to lower cost capital in the future from the highest quality partners. I had one of my founders do a reference with another founder saying that the likelihood that you own 10% more of your company at exit is 10x higher with abstract on your cap table than not because if I can save you 5% at the A and 3% at the B and 2% at the C, these things tend to add up nicely if you end up exiting your company for $2 billion and you can end up with an extra $200 million in your pocket. I can't personally think of a single value add that a venture capital brings to the table that translates to more than an extra $200 million in your pocket.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In with all of them, and I will get feedback, and I'll find out what's resonating, what's not resonating, and who's truly interested versus who's not interested. And we'll keep the process going. We'll keep it tight, we'll keep it efficient, and we won't have any information leaks, and then we'll try to get you the best deal possible. But ultimately, what the best deal possible is what I ultimately try to do is get as much leverage from my founders as possible. Leverage comes in the form of terms sheets. The more term sheets they have, the more negotiating power they have. Everybody wants negotiating power and making a deal for themselves and for their company and for their existing shareholders. When you don't have leverage, you will sell 25% of your company at Series A to whoever gives you the terms that you want to work with. When you do have leverage, you can get that down dramatically. What I thought could be the number one value added of thing that I could do for my companies is make sure that by the time they exit, they own more of their company than they would have had I not been on the cap table. Now we have data that not only do we have the highest graduation rate from seed to series A, we also have the highest decile of average valuation of series A.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Too many people work at these venture capital firms, and that's too many young people telling their friends about who this fund is talking to, who's passing, who's not passing, what the valuations are coming in. And VCs are just trying to gather information as much as they possibly can. And when you choke off that information, then they're forced to really just do their own work and truly build conviction in a company. And they tend to work faster this way. After I close my fund, as I mentioned, all the LPs we had, it became pretty apparent to me that I became the person in Silicon Valley that had the direct line to the most senior GPs at every single one of these venture capital firms. So in the early days, I got some of my founders who trust me. And I'd say, listen, let's not bring anybody else in the fundraising process. I will be the sole node. I'll help you with the deck. I'll help you with the data room. Let's do a few mock pitches with people on my team. I will make an introductions to every single top GP that's the relevant partner at every single one of these venture capital firms for your company. We'll line up all of these meetings over a three-day window next week. And at the end of every single day, I will...”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Focus on. I thank everybody in our team specializes in their own specific things. But one process that I thought was broken in venture ecosystem was the fundraising process when I first got into this and you're an investor, so you've seen these spreadsheets before when a founder wants to fundraise. They put together a Google Doc and they shared that Google Doc with all of their investors. And on that Google Doc, on the left-hand column, it's a list of every single venture capital firm they want to talk to. And then they ask all of their investors to go through that list and say, please mark whether or not you have a relationship at one of these venture capital firms, how senior your relationship is, and how close you are with that individual. And then the founder will go through that list at the end and ask nine of his investors for intros to 30 different venture capitalists and they'll kick off their process. The reason I thought that was bad was there's too many people involved in the fundraising process. And there's too many potentially misaligned incentives. This potential investor might have a really close relationship with this VC. They might be trying to do their buddy a favor by helping them win a deal.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Competing for deals is very challenging. It is an incredibly time consuming process. And for us competing is a very labor-intensive process because prior to doing this podcast, there's nothing publicly available about me on the internet, period. Pretty much all of the selling I need to do is explaining to the founder who we are, what we do, having seven or eight of my other founders and calling them and explaining the benefits of working with us and saying that if they were to start a company again, they would absolutely come back to us for our seed rounds. When we do decide to win a deal, we really do go all in in terms of how much we're putting behind to make the case for the founder that we are their best seed partner, period. In addition to fundraising, obviously, we have a full platform team now like anybody else would expect from a large seed fund that we have today. We have an incredible head of GTM. We have an incredible headcomms. We have an incredible head of talent. So we can help with all of those things. But what we really wanted to do is be exceptional one particular thing, or at least what I wanted to.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But oftentimes you have to deviate from that to get the company into your portfolio because ultimately venture is an outlier's business, you have no idea if the deal that you passed on due to price will be the outliers. So you kind of just have to swallow the bullet sometimes.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“50 posts, but if I can maintain an average entry valuation of sub 30, it'll be nice. If you start doing too many deals that are north of your 30, you start messing up your portfolio construction model because the more deals you do over 30, the less number of shots you have on goal. Because if my goal is to have 60 companies per fund and suddenly my entry valuation starts to deviate from what I modeled in my portfolio construction model, then I start need to consider myself, is investing in this company worth losing one shot on goal out of this fund? That's kind of when you start thinking about price a little bit more discerningly. Then some of the answers is yes. I'm just like, I want to invest in this company. This company needs to be in the fund. You kind of need to convince yourself that you like it twice as much as another company in your fund because you're shooting two bullets on one deal. But once we've decided to invest in a company, price tends to be not something that dissuades us from investing in that company until it gets so egregious that you can no longer call it a seed deal. That's basically our point of view. Obviously, we try to get it to fit within the confines of our portfolio construction model.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Basically, pretty simple. If there's multi-stage funds around the table, the deal will get done no lower than 25 and it'll probably get done no higher than 50. If it gets done higher than 50, it means when multistage got really excited and just turned it straight into a series A, at which point it's not really a fit for me anymore. And that does happen. The 50 is something you actually undertake into consideration because every venture capital firm has a portfolio construction model. And my portfolio construction model says that I want to own 8 to 10% of 60 companies at seed. And I want to maintain that 10% ownership in the best 10 of those companies through Series B. I have assumptions for what my entry valuation needs to be into these companies. It used to be I want to maintain an average entry valuation of sub 20 million. That's become impossible. I used to be able to do that, but I could no longer maintain an average entry valuation of sub 20 million. Maybe my average entry valuation today I want to maintain is sub 30 million. That means sometimes I'll do a deal at 15 posts because I found a deal that was off the beaten path and it's a precede. Maybe I took an early bet on people. Sometimes I'll do a deal of”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Anything just by questioning them. There are certain founders you ask questions to. Their answers lack depth. Their answers lack substance. And you end up in these situations where I'm like, even when I ask you the question, the answer still isn't ever real answer. I don't actually feel like you even know the answer. And then there's the other founder who you'll ask a question and they can give you a 15 minute long answer to every question you ask. He's either been asked this question five times before he's asked himself this question 10 times already and thought about every angle to it. Not saying that that's absolutely necessary, but at least it shows to me that they came to this with like a first principles mindset and they truly have thought a lot about building this specific company. At the end of the day, I do try to look 18 months in the future if this company does well. How many investors do I personally know they'll be interested in leading a follow-on around the financing for this company? If it's a company that three-tier one funds have already led a series A or Series B financing in, most of their tier one funds are going to be more interested in following on the one of those companies than the new company. So then there's certain times where maybe it's a mistake where I just believe a category is too saturated.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The idea needs to be thematically interesting to me and not an overly saturated market that shows some sign of novel thinking. And what I mean by that is there is this weird phenomenon in Silicon Valley that every time a tier one fund or maybe two tier one funds finance a company in a category and the next three months I'll get pitch 15 companies doing the exact same thing. And it's very hard to discern whether that person truly wants to build a company in that category or whether that person just wants to be a venture-backed founder and they know that there is capital available for this category right now. Oftentimes I'm looking for signs of novel thinking. So it's either needs to be one of the first one or two times I've even heard this company pitch to me before or it's getting pitched to me with a completely brand new perspective, a perspective that I haven't heard before that I think means that this person actually truly thought about what they were trying to build. Specific ideas less important to me. It's more about the founder's understanding of the idea. It's very easy to understand how thoughtful someone has been about”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Good example. We were at a small check into the seed round of play, I think, eight years ago. I think they hard pivoted two years ago into what Clay ultimately is. Bapi is a company in our portfolio that was originally called Superpowered. Doing very, very well. They've scaled from zero to double digit millions of ARR within 14 months of launch, but that was four years after I seeded them and seven pivots later. Crea is another example of multiple pivots until they finally caught fire with the latest version of their products. Crea was originally called Geniverse.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then TTYL pivoted five or six times until it turned into paparazzi, and then paparazzi launch, I think it was the first consumer social application ever to debut at number one on the App Store. And by the end of that day, they had three term sheets from three tier one VC firms, and they signed a term sheet with Benchmark. Within six weeks, it became very obvious that there was no retention. The growth was there, but the retention wasn't there. And he just returned cash. He had all this money from benchmark. Nobody was telling to shut the company down, but he was like, I've only been thinking about consumer social for the last three years. I know if I pivot again, it's going to be another consumer social idea because it's all my brain is wired to do right now. So I need to shut this company down. I need to return cash and I need to just go back to the drawing board. And if and when I come up with another company, I'm going to come back to you with a seed round so I don't have the series evaluation hanging over my head. And then there's other founders who have churned their entire team, maybe even half their founders, but they maintain the balance sheet and they went to like skeleton crew mode until they figured out things that had nothing to do with their first version of their business. Clay is a really”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I ask about what entrepreneurial things you've done. Tell me your story. If there is something impressive in their story, they will make sure it stands out. Sometimes the special thing is they got into the school of their dreams. So did everybody else that went to that school. So like something that's truly different, I'm looking for resilience is key. That's a little harder to discern, especially with the age of foundries that I back. Not everybody's had a situation where they've had to deal with hardship to develop that resilience, but some of the founders in our portfolio that have done pivot after pivot after pivot have survived for years and then ultimately started a company that had nothing to do with their first company and ended up being very, very successful. Now I'm not saying that every founder should stick with every single company for a certain period of time. There was founders who should absolutely stop working on a company and either return cash or find a soft landing or something and move on. But there are other founders who will just do these non-local pivots. I think the local pivot is what kills companies. And an example of this, we invest in a company called Paparazzi. We had seeded them when it was TTYL.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Somebody asked and said, Is it true that nobody's ever started a successful company after 35 years old? Because in Silicon Valley, everyone's like, I know all the power law companies are founded by younger individuals, which has some truth and also doesn't. And the people who answered that question were like, Reid Hoffman. He's like, I founded LinkedIn when I was over 35. And Mark Bennyoff, he's like, I founded Salesforce when I was over 35. And Reid Hastings, I founded Netflix when I was over 35. Every single one of those people were very successful by the time they'd started those companies. It's hard for me to believe if I meet somebody that if I can't get a sense that this person is special or has been special or has done impressive things in their life, that the first impressive thing they're ever going to do is this company that they're asking me to invest in.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The number one thing that I look to from founders is prove to me that you're exceptional. If you look at the most successful impressive founders out there, they tend to have been impressive people prior to starting that company. They had a history of doing special and impressive things. And there was this famous question on Quora once upon a time.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That it's very easy to forget what was interesting on a daily basis. We're kind of just thinking up has anybody met anything that other people on the team should meet?”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have a 30 minute meeting at least once a day to just catch up on every company people have met with that day because we meet with so many companies”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There is nothing to exist, so you really just need to have your tentacles everywhere to get as many companies as possible surfaced up to you. And there is so little that exists about these companies that there is very little work you can do to qualify or disqualify in advance. So you really just need to spend time with them.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I probably always tell people it's not a flex to get a meeting with me because I pretty much don't say no to meetings. But I probably take anywhere between 18 to 30 pitches per week that goes back to the Michael phrase of frame of reference. The more companies you meet, the easier it is to spot the people that truly stand out. Obviously, you miss things over time, but I think it's hard to know what great looks like without seeing a lot of things. I also find that the VCs, who I believe, are the most successful VCs and have had the most storied careers tend to be the people that take every single introduction I send them. And then the VCs who are still building their careers and I send them deals are like, I'm a little swamp for bandwidth right now. I'm like, that guy's not going to make it. It's pretty obvious who really wants to meet Rule Off at Sequoia. I think you heard this line from Doug Leone. I think when I first met Rule Off, he told me in order to be successful in venture capital, you have to have Dumbo ears, which means you have to hear everything or see everything. And I saw Neil's podcast here yesterday where he was talking about how they don't care about coverage. I think that could be true at growth stage. I think at seed stage coverage is absolutely key because there is no market map of everything that exists. Most of these companies don't even have websites.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For a week, what I would say tons of pitch meetings. That is what I think our time is best spent doing. Pitch meetings and then helping our existing portfolio. Founders pitching you. Founders pitching us.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It varies, but it's typically somewhere between three to four, sometimes five meetings, and then doing a lot of back channel work in between those meetings. Sometimes you have the time to do that. Other times you don't. Having said that, the way our firm is set up, we have standing meetings multiple times a day. So our whole firm is designed around speed. And we've built our model around being able to do what might take another venture capital from two to three weeks, we can do in two to three days. Okay.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not working out, they're going to fire them before their 12 month cliff so that there's not deadweight equity with 30 to 40 people that no longer work at the company, which is also really great from an IR perspective and your investment because it makes it such that the option we'll refresh, and the next round is not as big as it would have been if they just loosey, goosey gape away a lot of equity. Those founders who are the dilution sensitive ones in my portfolio that have the highest bar for the talent they hire, that companies in my portfolio where all of those things ring true and the companies are doing quite well, people are always shocked at how small the teams of those companies are relative to the scale of what they've achieved. So I truly do believe incredibly high quality talent has like a multiplier effect on company efficiency”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Two buckets of founders at seed stage, and you ask them what kind of a round they want to raise, and they're like, Oh, you know, typical $5 million, 25 post round down to sell 20 to 25% of my company, pretty standard. And I'm like, I don't think there's anything standard to selling 20 to 25% of your company. See, you don't have to sell 20 to 25% of your company. Do you need $5 million? And then there's the other founder who comes in and says, I need $3 million and I want to sell as little of my company as humanly possible for that $3 million. I found that those founders tend to just be a little bit more high conviction on what they're building. They tend to believe that every percent of equity they give away is 1% of equity they'll never get back. And that's incredibly powerful because more so than negotiating with investors, which is great, they tend to maintain the highest bar of talent that they hire because they think about equity the same way whether it's going to an investor, whether it's going to an employee, and they want to make sure everybody they hire is worth every ounce of equity they get. Those founders also tend to be the ones that aren't wasteful with their equity, you know, if someone”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To build something because oftentimes it's not even in their best interest. It's a time suck. People will say, come back to them when there's actually a working product and convincing somebody that's actually worth spending time with them to perfect the product is also a specific type of individual. On the technical side, we're looking for someone with extremely strong technical capability that other engineers would actually work for. Some people are great engineers that other engineers might necessarily want to work for, and other people are just great engineers that other engineers would happily work for. But what I look for on that side is shipping velocity. It's the kind of engineer who's going to ship a product in six weeks or six months. And at the end of the day, I think seed stage investing at least for us is very momentum driven. I want to build a portfolio of 60 high momentum companies. Hope that three to five of them escape velocity and become amazing companies. Another thing that I've started to gravitate to over time, which is a little counterintuitive to being a venture capitalist because you want to own a lot of these companies, is I found I've had a lot of success with dilution sensitive founders. You kind of meet.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With that as an investor, but it's very beneficial when a founder has that salesmanship rigor. And the next one is hiring. Hiring an early stage startup companies is sales. 85% of the companies we finance are based in the Bay Area. They need to hire engineers who can easily get a job at Meta or Google or OpenAI for $400,000 a year and the seed stage company is trying to hire that person for $150,000 a year. It takes a very specific person to convince somebody, a $250,000 annual pay cut is in that person's best interest in exchange for equity in this company that just has a concept of an idea. So that's really important because recruiting is something that I think a lot of people underestimate how important it is at the early stage. The founding stage is these companies. And the next is selling a product. Oftentimes V1 of these products are like these half-ass broken glitchy things that no one would pay for, but these founders are able to go out and find individuals who will at least be a design partner or a pilot customer and give them a”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've learned over time that investing in founders for me works a lot better than investing in markets. I'm better at identifying what a good founder is and what a good market is. There is genetic makeup that I look for in a founding team of a company and whether it's spread amongst one founder or multiple founders. I'm looking for a combination of very strong commercial ability and very strong technical ability. I'm not technical, but Alex and my team is technical, Andre is technical, Will is technical. They're more suited to vet the technical capabilities of an individual than I would be. But when I mentioned that the commercial aspect, I'm really looking for salesmanship in three different verticals. Vertical one is ability to fundraise. Seems simple, but building a startup company is hard and anything you can do to put the odds slightly in your favor makes your odds of success that much more likely. There are certain founders who are good at fundraising, certain founders who are not good at fundraising. The founders who are good at fundraising get to build their startup company that much more easy than someone who's bad at fundraising. That's obviously somewhat sometimes solved for because you could help.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, you know, we hired a team, we built a really cool back end platform from scratch. We wanted to be seen as a very serious institution early in our funds lifecycle. Alex, my partner, has a much more traditional background than I do. He's a Bridgewater Columbia guy. So very process-oriented, very analytical, very data-driven. Early on in our fund, we basically built a CRM from Ground Up, which we're actually putting out as a company. To bootstrap your way into the venture capital world.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That raised the fun in year six to get it for another 12 years. That seven year timer adventure is nothing. They get no carrot. Most of the excitement adventure starts to happen years nine and ten.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They get economics on everything I did in that first seven years in perpetuity. Everything I do in seven years and one day, they're not entitled to.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The price was just shy of 50. I had some experience with this. I invested in the manager company Polychain. So I learned a little bit about what a management equity financing looks like. And there were some learnings I took away from that. I wanted to ultimately own my own company. And I thought that over time, if I scaled having the founders of every single big platform fund owning an equity piece, my manager company is probably not the best thing for me long term. So we had set a sunset on that, I believe it's six or seven years.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was one of the situations in life where I was actually quite fortunate where there was a lot of demand for what I wanted to do. I set a price that I thought was fair. And at the time, the price seemed high for me. And in retrospect, it seems low for them. I think those are the best deals in the world where everyone's happy. I was happy to get the deal up front and they're happy they made that deal at the end.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A bunch of the syndicate investors who are actively supporting my deals are on the platform. I'm starting a fund. And those guys all became LPs as well. It even helped establish the platform for me to raise a fund with. But then also not every single founder in the world wanted SPVs. There's a public nature to that. I didn't want to be limited by the ability to invest in companies. So at one point, Lightspeed invited me to be a scout for them. I put half my scout fund into the seed round of rippling. So that worked out well. I was working a job at Core Innovation Capital. I had some money there and did some angel checks and tandem to everything. But yes, you could literally bootstrap a venture capital for him out of bankruptcy in Silicon Valley.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Zero and 15 on every single one of those deals. And then I got so excited and so jacked up by this, I got so active that I ended up for a brief period of time, I think for a six-month window, I was one-third of all the volume on Angelists. And it was fantastic. But the cool thing about it was when I had stopped doing deals on AngelList and decided to raise my fund.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Zero and 20 for the LPs. If Angelus sources the capital, which in my case they did in every single deal, they get 5%, I get 15%.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I didn't source one dollar of the capital on that platform. Angela sourced every penny of capital that came into those deals. And once I realized it was real, I just On ham, I was looking for deals, I was just hunting for deals all day long.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Crazy, I was stunned the first time this happened. The first deal I ever put on Angel List, I wrote the write up, I put the syndicate up and then sent it to Angelists. And then I refreshed it four hours later and there was $470,000 subscribed to the deal.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I could write about the deal dynamics. And then within 24 hours, they're like, we raised $300,000 to raise $400. I remember the first deal I put on Angelists.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Starting a venture capital firm. It's funny because at the time it was this humiliating experience. I put everything I had into this one company, turned out to be the wrong category to build a company in. I pulled the plug. Thankfully, I got a job after that. So I was able to get back on my feet somewhat quickly. But no, I didn't have parents that I could rely on for seed cash to start being a venture capitalist. I didn't go to an Ivy League school where all of my friends' parents were the guys who ran every single one of these venture capital firms. So I truly believe that there is no excuse because I think there is enough tools, at least in venture. I can't speak to other asset classes that have really democratized access to capital. And if you prove that you deserve capital, there is people in Silicon Valley who will give that to you. Angels is the perfect platform for that. Angelist has capital on their platform, dedicated capital. If you find a deal, we'll put the money into it. I started finding deals and I started bringing it to the platform. And the money showed up. I was like, this is real. I could bring a deal to the platform. I could write a summary on the company.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I literally had filed bankruptcy at 24 years old when my previous startup company had failed. I was literally out of bankruptcy.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think there is any excuse saying that you can't start a venture capital firm with no money because I was literally flat broke when I started abstract.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wanted to find a way to leverage that for the benefit of our founders. That's ultimately who our primary customer is. And over time, we really started focusing on being the number one venture capital firm to get a founder from Seed to Series A.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Two had raised follow on from benchmark, one had raised follow on from Sequoia, one had raised follow on from Andreessen. So I had a very positive feedback loop that the deals that I was leading at Seed were not adverse selection, and that gave me more confidence to continue leading. The more time I spent just focused on seed, I just get a lot more confidence in my ability to fix seeds versus relying on other people as proxy. Now we have a ton of data that actually shows quite clearly that the deals that we have led as a venture capital firm have actually dramatically outperformed the deals in which we're not the lead investor, but we had co-invested in. So nowadays we probably lead like 80 or 90 percent of the companies in our portfolio. We pulled the data on every seed from out there. And we are the firm that has the highest likelihood of getting a follow-on Series A by tier one BC firm. So the highest graduation rate of any seed fund from seed to Series A to a tier one fund is us by a pretty wide margin. By the time we close the first fund, it became pretty apparent that I accidentally built probably the most well-networked LP base in Silicon Valley.”
2025-07-29 · Invest Like the Best · Ramtin Naimi - Building Abstract - [Invest Like the Best, EP.435] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source