Curtesy of Rob Moffat from Balderton Capital:
- At seed/A stage, focus on how you can quickly demonstrate strong product-market fit with more modest amounts of capital.
- Unit economics really matter once you are at series B and beyond.
- Productivity of your product and engineering team matters. It is impossible to perfectly quantify the RoI of your product team but the exercise is worthwhile. What should the impact of your product roadmap for 2022 be on the bottom line, and how does this compare to your spending on product and engineering? Small teams can be extremely productive. Growing headcount by 200%+ each year puts enormous pressure on this
- Underwriting matters. We are already seeing this in insurance where low loss ratios in the pandemic (as people drove less and stayed at home more) have gone back to pre-pandemic levels, leading to prices hardening. In lending not so much yet (apart form a blip as stimulus payments in the US stopped) but it will probably come.
- As a result of this funding a debt book at a sensible price may be becoming more of a challenge
First princples 