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How I Invest with David Weisburd · Startups & Venture · October 2026
Asked what game a seed investor should be playing, the AngelList executive said it all comes down to winning a seat in the round. He said AngelList's data shows that companies priced highest early on tend to have the best outcomes, so the edge is access, not picking.
…is the game that you should be playing as a seed investor and startups? As a seed investor, it really comes down to how do you get coverage? And so I'll think about this from both the manager and then from LP's perspective. Because where we sit at AngelList, we get to kind of see both sides of the table. From the manager's perspective, it's all about how do I win my right in the round? Because it's really the key thing to understand about venture: it's the only asset class where you have to sell your money to the company. The best companies are, their rounds are oversubscribed. The signals are pretty clear typically. The founder, either off founder strength or revenue momentum or early traction, if it's pre-revenue, even at the earlier stages when it's just a kind of a vision, you can look at connecting the dots. And the data that we have is super clear on that. The rounds that end up having higher outcomes are higher priced upfront on average. And so it's not about…
One of the reasons I wanted to have you on the podcast is Angelus has access to tens of thousands of startups. So when you make these statements, they're empirically backed. You said something there that the biggest outcomes tend to be the most expensive valuations early on. Do you have empirical…
Yeah, it was a really surprising outcome for me, actually. And it's one of the things that changed my view of the world. I actually used to think that venture, I'm a big, big proponent of the efficient capital market hypothesis and the idea that unless you're pricing new information in like hedge…
What do you make with that insight? How do you go about incorporating that into your investing strategy at the seed stage?