Samit Kalra

Seed VC @1984Ventures
More about me here:

[Samit Kalra @samwise9606]

@therosieum You can't just say that to everyone who disagrees with your premise. People can dislike the way the team behaved because they saw it with their own eyes

[Samit Kalra @samwise9606]

@arshammem So...let's back the fastest growing companies and the most credentialed founders

[Samit Kalra @samwise9606]

@ankurnagpal Ankur, check out Ridley https://t.co/13mE28IW0S

[Pavel Prata @pavelprata]

Which emerging VCs have the strongest early-stage picking alpha?

Standard emerging manager evaluation still leans heavily on qualitative signals – GP background, thesis articulation, founder references. All useful, but by the time TVPI and DPI tell you something meaningful, you're usually already in or already too late.

So I experimented with a quantitative framework to answer a core LP allocator question: which small, early-stage fund managers consistently back seed-stage companies that go on to raise exceptional Series A rounds – before those outcomes are visible to the broader market?

I started with @harmonic_ai Scout (my fav research tool!) and checked every company globally that raised a first pre-seed or seed round between 2022–2026 (Post-ZIRP). The funnel looks like this:

1/ 55,491 companies raised a pre-seed or seed round – the full opportunity set
2/ 4,368 (7.9%) went on to raise a Series A – the base rate, roughly 1 in 13
3/ 764 (1.4%) qualified as Tier 1 Breakouts – above-median Series A for their vintage year, with at least one top-tier institutional VC (from a defined set of 38 firms: @a16z, @sequoia, @lightspeedvp, @IndexVentures, and peers)

For each of those 1,604 companies, I traced back to every investor who backed them at pre-seed or seed — before the outcome was visible. 4,176 unique investors across the breakout set.

Then I computed a simple ratio for each: breakout companies backed at seed divided by total seed investments in the period. I'm calling this the "Tier 1 Concentration Rate".

After filtering out mega-platforms, accelerators, CVCs, and angels and requiring a minimum of 10 seed deals – 20 emerging managers (sub-$250M AUM) surfaced with notably high concentration rates.

A few things stood out:

1/ Several micro-funds under $100M were placing 25–35% of their seed bets into companies that later raised from @Sequoia, @a16z, @lightspeedvp – consistently, not as one-off flukes.
2/ Participant concentration and lead concentration are different signals. Participant = network and access. Lead = independent conviction before consensus forms. For LP diligence, these deserve to be evaluated separately.
3/ The data has real limitations: ~12% of breakout companies had no named seed investor in the database, we can't cleanly separate Fund I from Fund III for a given manager, and small sample sizes mean some high concentration rates likely reflect luck rather than repeatable skill.

But the core idea holds. "Tier 1 Concentration Rate" is an early, measurable signal of picking ability – observable years before fund-level metrics tell you anything.

For LP allocators evaluating Fund I–III managers, that timing gap is the whole problem. This is one attempt to close it.

What’s your take on this experiment?

[Samit Kalra @samwise9606]

Tennis players should be proactively drinking pickle juice during every match

[Samit Kalra @samwise9606]

@jason_howerton Check out https://t.co/7Z6nfGdV87

[Samit Kalra @samwise9606]

@edsuh First Round?

[Samit Kalra @samwise9606]

Esther Perel would be the world’s best early stage investor if she chose to

[Samit Kalra @samwise9606]

@awxjack My generalized framing for what’s defensible is “doing hard things beyond the AI.” And pre AI companies who add AI are also better placed to be long term winners than upstarts in many cases

[Samit Kalra @samwise9606]

Congrats to Andrew Tulloch - surely the highest paid employee in the world (history of the world?)

[Samit Kalra @samwise9606]

@tbpn @btaylor Easy come, easy go

[Samit Kalra @samwise9606]

@martin_casado It's been impossible to find something non-consensus in AI investing since every sector is now investable. WHich means investors tend to gravitate towards outlier growth and execution. Inception-stage "belief" capital is thus less unique than in the past

[Saoud Rizwan @sdrzn]

Incredibly grateful for all the support after we announced @cline’s Series A. This opportunity would not be possible without our community, so thank you all 🙏

I also wanted to give a huge shoutout to @ramyadeeb and @mdp at @1984Ventures. Ramy has been like a mentor through this wild journey, from when I moved out to SF (after living in Indiana most of my life), to hiring our first team members and navigating building a company around something as fast growing as Cline.

When it was just me drowning in GitHub issues, Mark was literally opening PRs while I was interviewing. When we needed an office space, Ramy didn't blink before letting us take over their (beautiful) office in SOMA for our growing team.

To any first time founders out there, Ramy and 1984 are the kind of partners you want in your corner - investors who you know are genuinely fighting for you and truly on your side, the kind who roll up their sleeves and help you figure it out. Can't recommend them enough 💪

[Samit Kalra @samwise9606]

Signaling risk used to be about whether a multi-stage fund would invest in your next round. In 2025 it's whether even if they invested in you, they'd still invest in your competitor

[Samit Kalra @samwise9606]

@martymadrid @rod_mallo Wow. This perfectly encapsulates it (coming from a VC himself)

[Samit Kalra @samwise9606]

Does Granola tell the other participants that the call is being recorded? Can't remember seeing that disclosure anywhere

[Samit Kalra @samwise9606]

@brettberson 95% of what I'm investing in these days

[Samit Kalra @samwise9606]

@adityaag @vkhosla What’s an example?

[Samit Kalra @samwise9606]

@Peter_Fitz As a tennis player myself, watching Sinner is awe inspiring. He can hit at full power from start to finish. That’s more exciting than histrionics