Horus Group 𓂀

in lisbon for @WebSummit next week, mon to wed at @HorusGroup_ we commercialize and invest in seed-stage tech, from our own balance sheet. mostly fintech, AI and infra looking to meet: - seed funds and angels in those spaces - founders in the same spaces with a working product, raising their seed dm me and lets meet there

Founders will tell you 10 reasons why their valuation should be $20M but have 0 idea on how much (and when) to pay themselves. Here's my take as it's rarely brought up.

people underestimate how much work it takes to be able to raise a 6-fig angel round before anything was live. These checks usually come from people who the founder has spent years in the trenches with. and these checks are also the best as a) they come in with any resources they can provider b) they trust you enough to keep their mouth shut and not push you towards decisions you dont want to make. Meanwhile youre getting ahead since you can use that capital to speed up the go-live motion. And I do see these rounds as a green flag too, if youve worked your ass off and the people around you can write a 50-150k check because they like you, youve clearly done something right.

cheat day, @HorusGroup_ just turned two. Barely anyone who started around the same time is still here. Two years ago at our first offsite I laid out a five year plan, today im grateful to the core team who backed it when there wasn't much to back. Without the team's confidence behind that vision, the friends, the partners, we'd never have got in front of half the teams we've worked with.

the speed at which both winning and losing happens has compressed in the last 2 years. teams building something real are raising faster and at higher valuations than they would've 18 months ago. teams that aren't get filtered out of inbox piles in weeks instead of months. same dynamic as before just on a faster clock with AI in the loop.

founder asked me this week how detailed his seed use of funds slide should be. wanted to map it to the cent. that's not what gets seeds funded and the spreadsheet is a tell that you don't know that yet. pre-seed is vibes. founder, angle, why now. seed is a 10x of whichever vibes worked at pre-seed: same game, 5 things to point at instead of 1. series A is where it actually shifts. cohort data, retention curves, unit economics that survive a partner who's been burned. the story stops doing the lifting. what moves the needle at seed: - a one-liner that doesn't need a follow-up. - 2-3 named design partners. - a 6-month roadmap that doesn't pretend to predict month 18. anything past that is you optimising to look more legit instead of more interesting and at seed those aren't the same thing.