Understanding VC Investment Stages: From Seed to Dominance
To all the VC people... does this sound correct?
Seed: “Does this deserve to exist?” You are underwriting judgment under uncertainty and early signals that a real buyer urgently wants the thing, even if proof is small and messy.
Series A: “Does this work as a business?” You are underwriting early product-market fit: consistent usage or revenue patterns and the first repeatable way to acquire customers, with a believable path to expand.
Series B: “Does this scale?” You are underwriting predictability: cohort growth and retention that hold as volume increases, plus efficient go-to-market and the start of real operating discipline.
Series C+: “Does this become inevitable?” You are underwriting dominance and durability: multiple growth levers, operating leverage and margins, organizational maturity, and clean exit optionality.
Across all stages: decision quality beats isolated outcomes. Clarity on tradeoffs, capital efficiency for the stage, bottleneck-finding, and a coherent narrative without hand-waving.
Rory O'Driscoll Jason M. Lemkin Harry Stebbings