High assistants, high salaries, and other ways early stage founders will unlock VC seed

VC Jenny Fielding, founder of Everywhere Ventures and managing director of Techstars, has been treading on X. while posting“Do you have strong opinions about pre-seed founders with EAs helping them plan? I’m just checking.”

Fielding knew the post was “a little snarky,” he told TechCrunch, but it sparked a great conversation. Some people have suggested that early stage inventors could use great AI assistants. Some are upset that a VC means they shouldn’t hire someone to help them, even in the early stages of their company.

Fielding’s point, however, was that founders still hold certain misconceptions from the 2020-2021 high-income days about proper money management, especially during the early years, when income is scarce. This is when companies should be working on the basics of building a product that people want to buy.

“I was the founder. I started two companies,” he said. “Then I spent seven and a half years at Techstars, helping a lot of building companies.” So he tries to “give founders the real information they need, not the weird stuff,” he laughs.

While most seed investors, including Fielding, believe that founders should spend their money raised “how they want,” early-stage VCs will still judge founders’ money management, even if the VC is actually a silent partner.

“We invest early. We don’t take seats. We entrust this money to the founders. So yes, we look at the operating budget, and we have calls with them every quarter,” Fielding said.

Those judgments will happen when the startup needs to raise the next round and wants its seed / pre-seed VCs to give them warm presentations and happy recommendations to the next crop of investors.

So, while executive assistants can be helpful in established companies, they are also senior executive positions – not people who help build and support the startup’s product.

Beyond the CEO’s EA, there are other titles at the beginning of the first phase that can be a “red flag” for VCs: COO and CFO.

“A lot of times it’s the third-wheel founder who doesn’t really know where they’re getting in,” he said, adding that third-wheel founders can be “very expensive” in terms of stock and wages. “You need to build a brand and get customers. I’m not really sure you need a CFO and COO organizational structure. ”

Which raises wages themselves. This is another area where early investors can keep mum but pay attention. Fielding closed the deal when he analyzed the startup’s operating costs and realized that “the founder was paying himself $300,000,” he said.

While that salary may be similar to a salary in a previous role at Google or Microsoft, the ideal salary at the pre-seed level is between $85,000 and $125,000, he advises. It is a matter of statistics. Even if a founder raises a healthy pre-seed of $1 million but pays themselves $200,000, they have already spent one-fifth of the money.

“We’re not saying you have to make $100,000 forever,” he cautioned, but in the beginning, “you just don’t have that much money to burn.”