John Doerr, Vinod Khosla, Alfred Lin at Post Seed 2016

Join us for our annual VC event on December 1 at Ruby Skye in San Francisco

In the ever changing venture capital landscape, there are more options then ever for companies to raise money at the early stages. They can choose from crowdfunding or debt financing, or take advantage of a vibrant angel investing environment. The options available to founders are plentiful.

However, for a variety of reasons, there's been an emergence of a new timeframe in a startup's life cycle. It's the stage after a startup gets its initial seed round, but before the startup gets a traditional Series A, which today appears to be larger, of around $6 million to $8 million, sometimes even $10-plus million.

Given the small amount seed startups are taking in, many of these companies need more capital to land those traditional A's. As Bullpen's Duncan Davidson has said, "seed is a process." And that process or gap between those two rounds is now known as “Post-Seed.”

In order to examine this trend, Vator, with partners Bullpen and Venture51, is holding its second “Post-Seed” Conference on December 1 in San Francisco, where investors will come together to discuss the topic, as well as founders who have personally been through the process. 

We are proud to welcome three leaders from the investment world to share their thoughts: John Doerr, Vinod Khosla and Alfred Lin.

John Doerr is a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, which he joined in 1980.

His career began in 1974 at Intel, where he held roles in engineering, marketing, management and sales. He later founded Silicon Compilers, a VLSI CAD software company, and co-founded @Home, a nationwide broadband cable Internet service.

His investments include some of the top companies in Silicon Valley, such as Google, Amazon, Compaq, Intuit, Twitter, Netscape, Symantic and Zynga. He currently serves on the boards of Google, Amyris Biotech, and Zynga.

Doerr co-founded and serves on the board of the New Schools Venture Fund. He also holds several patents for computer memory devices, is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of U.S. President Barack Obama’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness.

Vinod Khosla is the founder of Khosla Ventures, a firm focused on assisting entrepreneurs to build impactful new energy and technology companies. 

After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in New Delhi, Khosla co-founded Daisy Systems, a computer-aided design system for electrical engineers. He then started the standards-based Sun Microsystems in 1982 to build workstations for software developers.

In 1986, Khosla joined KPCB as a general partner, before forming Khosla Ventures in 2004.

Over his career some of his investments include semiconductor company Nexgen; advertising-based search company Excite; and telecommunications business Cerent Corporation.

Khosla  also is a charter member of The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE), a non-profit global network of entrepreneurs and professionals that was founded in 1992 and has more than 40 chapters in nine countries today. He is a founding board member of the Indian School of Business.

Alfred Lin is a a partner at Sequoia Capital. Previously he was the COO, CFO, and Chairman of Zappos.com until 2010.

Lin holds a B.A. in Applied Mathematics from Harvard and a M.S. in Statistics from Stanford. While at Harvard, Lin met Tony Hsieh, the future CEO of Zappos. In 1996, Lin dropped out of a Ph.D program at Stanford to join Hsieh at LinkExchange as CFO. After LinkExchange sold to Microsoft for $265 million, Lin was the VP of Finance and Business Development of Tellme Networks (MSFT).

He also co-founded Venture Frogs, an incubator and investment firm, also with Hsieh.

His investments include Airbnb, DoorDash, FutureAdvisor, Houzz, Humbl Bundle, Instacart, Kiwi, Moovit,reddit, Romotive, Shopular, Stella & Dot and Trippy. Lin currently sits on the board of directors at a number of companies, including Airbnb, Achievers, FutureAdvisor, Houzz, Humble Bundle, Stella & Dot, Kiwi, and Romotive.

Tickets for Post Seed are on sale. Get them here while they last!