> Money is so easy to get these days, especially at the pre-seed level, that the highest-quality companies are not even running a formal process but instead just hitting up their network.
I very much agree with that. Seed rounds used to be, on average, a lot more formal and rigid in the past. Raising $10k-$100k today is far, far more trivial than it was twenty some years ago. The distribution of angels is far greater, there are simply a lot more of them all over the US than they were in eg the 1990s, everything is a lot more casual at that scale today. It was plain difficult to talk to small investors outside of a professional VC context back then (angel tech investors outside of SV in the 1990s were a bad experience overwhelmingly), the language didn't exist, the angel investors were more often very inexperienced, and the angels didn't tend to know squat about the technology industry or the Internet generally (again, outside of SV). Some combination of increased distribution, more real wealth nationally, tech spread (today it touches nearly everything at all times), and inflation debasing what $10k-$100k means now (you have to increase that by 77% (!) to adjust the 1996 dollar to 2021).
I very much agree with that. Seed rounds used to be, on average, a lot more formal and rigid in the past. Raising $10k-$100k today is far, far more trivial than it was twenty some years ago. The distribution of angels is far greater, there are simply a lot more of them all over the US than they were in eg the 1990s, everything is a lot more casual at that scale today. It was plain difficult to talk to small investors outside of a professional VC context back then (angel tech investors outside of SV in the 1990s were a bad experience overwhelmingly), the language didn't exist, the angel investors were more often very inexperienced, and the angels didn't tend to know squat about the technology industry or the Internet generally (again, outside of SV). Some combination of increased distribution, more real wealth nationally, tech spread (today it touches nearly everything at all times), and inflation debasing what $10k-$100k means now (you have to increase that by 77% (!) to adjust the 1996 dollar to 2021).