Our co-founder Nnamdi Okike (@thedatavc) joined the How I Invest podcast to discuss the growth of 645 and its investment strategy in a changing venture capital market. Check it out at the link below.
$50 million seed rounds have become normal in AI. Nnamdi Okike says that is one of the worst things that can happen to an early-stage company.View quoted post on X
Nnamdi Okike (@thedatavc) is Co-founder and Managing Partner of @645ventures , which is raising its fifth fund after building its early sourcing model at Insight Partners. His firm has spent twelve years studying what actually predicts which seed-stage companies survive, and outsized early capital is not on the list of good signs.
Here is how he explained it on my podcast:
"When you raise a really big round out of the gate, especially when you don't have product market fit, when you're still trying to figure out what's going to work, the tendency is to spend much more money than you need to, do a lot of experiments you shouldn't be doing. Not to mention, you create a culture within a company that is the wrong culture. I actually think massive rounds are really bad for companies."
Scarcity forces a founder to decide which experiment actually matters instead of running all of them at once. It also filters who joins the company in the first place: people who sign up because they believe in the problem, not because a fifty-million-dollar round means a comfortable salary. Okike has watched entire cohorts of YC founders raise the same size round at the same valuation regardless of whether they are building emerging-market fintech or a nuclear reactor, which tells him the number is being set by the market's mood, not by what the business actually needs.
The founders he backs raise exactly enough to hit the next milestone and not a dollar more. That constraint is the discipline, not a limitation on it.
This episode is presented by @juniper_square, with additional support from @AlphaSenseInc.
Full episode below 👇
youtu.be/VenqKz8-ZKg
