Ramtin Naimi analyzes venture capital shifts (Part 4)

And we're very active through obviously two very euphoric, frothy seeming markets. What are the most notable differences and similarities? If you look back to 2021, the companies weren't that interesting when you looked at them. It's just we didn't have anything else to compare them to. You were looking at SaaS companies growing, what was it, 5x, 3x, 3x 2x? And everyone was like, that's best in class. And you would have companies with, you know, $8 million of SaaS revenue, raising a billion dollar valuations and they had very constrained tams. And you kind of had to look at these things for like a seven year timeline to get to 100 million of ARR. And that was what venture was back then. And that was exciting. And now you look at companies today and you're like, I can't believe we've been got out of bed for those types of opportunities back then. So in terms of the round structures, the volume of deals, people feeling the need that they need to keep up with the market is all very similar. In 2021 there was a period of time where if you pretty much ask every VC and even LPs about this similar situation, there's like a six month window in 2021 where VCs were just ripping checks. And if you ask any of those VCs to look back at their portfolio for 2021 in that six month window, a lot of them are like, yeah, we like that grabbed our heads and being like, what were we thinking doing all of those deals? I'm not saying we're at that point in the market today. Like we could be in 2019 and not 2021. But some of the things that I'm starting to see happen today in 2021 that was like public market investors trying to aggressively come into venture is very actively happening right now. How frantically people were trying to do deals back then versus how they're trying to do them now. Some of the things we started seeing near the late end of 2021 were companies getting term sheets very, very quickly and then term sheets getting pulled also very, very quickly or reneged or renegotiated in one way or another. And in the last six, seven, eight weeks, I've probably seen a larger amount of deals get renegotiated after being offered than I have since 2021. But the thing that's most dissimilar is kind of the enthusiasm around the companies. I don't think people were investing in companies in 2021 thinking that these companies were going to be category defining or be global scale companies within 18 to 24 months and that you're kind of just seeing in this market play out. You're having companies find product market fit at a faster rate than ever. I'm looking at companies in my portfolio that I'm using very actively, and I can't think of anything I invested in 2021 that I was using personally. And now I'm actually starting to see how much value these things can drive family members that are using some of these products that never would be an early adopter of AI products or tech products, period. And they become integrated as parts of their daily life. So I think there's a huge paradigm shift in terms of.