VC Anj provided Arena's founding team with grants and a corporate entity but allowed them to walk away at any time. This high-conviction, low-pressure incubation built immense trust and ultimately convinced the academic team to commit to building a company.
![[State of Evals] LMArena's $100M Vision — Anastasios Angelopoulos, LMArena thumbnail](https://assets.flightcast.com/V2Uploads/nvaja2542wefzb8rjg5f519m/01K4D8FB4MNA071BM5ZDSMH34N/square.jpg)
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To win the best pre-seed deals, investors should engage high-potential talent during their 'founder curious' phase, long before a formal fundraise. The real competition is guiding them toward conviction on their own timeline, not battling other VCs for a term sheet later.
For a seed investor, the most critical downside protection isn't a legal term in a document, but the implicit guarantee that the founder will never quit. This psychological commitment is the ultimate, unwritten liquidation preference.
A technically brilliant but risk-averse potential co-founder was hesitant to join Huntress. The turning point wasn't the idea itself, but the external validation that came from securing a $50,000 check from a startup accelerator. This small amount of capital was enough to de-risk the leap and convince him to commit.
YC's program for students isn't just about flexibility; it's a strategy to track promising founders for years. By encouraging repeat applications, YC gathers longitudinal data on a founder's evolution, thinking, and progress, de-risking the eventual investment by observing their entire pre-founding journey.
WonderCo first maps a target market to find an exceptional company to back. They only choose to incubate a new company from scratch if their deep search reveals no existing "rocket" to provide fuel for, ensuring they build from a position of unique market insight.
The firm’s core belief is being a fund *for* founders, trusting them to run their companies without heavy operational input. This hands-off approach gives partners the bandwidth and "permission" to go deep on their own projects, leading to spinouts like Anduril and Varda.
Beyond the network and money, a key YC benefit is the profound psychological impact of having respected partners who genuinely believe in your mission. For a lonely early-stage founder, this support transforms the journey from a solitary struggle into feeling like they're "playing for the home team," which raises the stakes and boosts motivation.
A truly exceptional founder is a talent magnet who will relentlessly iterate until they find a winning model. Rejecting a partnership based on a weak initial idea is a mistake; the founder's talent is the real asset. They will likely pivot to a much bigger opportunity.
Constant exposure to top founders and a build-centric environment at YC creates an irresistible "itch" to start a company. The organization accepts that its best employees will almost always leave to become founders themselves, not to join other tech giants.
Incubating a company with a proven internal employee who develops an idea, like Every did with Good Start Labs, is a superior model. It bypasses the adverse selection problem inherent in recruiting external founders for pre-formed ideas, as the founder's capabilities and commitment are already known quantities.
