1/ Uniqueness and barriers to entry are the key to long-term value. Today's early-stage VC market is driven by ultra-rapid over-priced rounds. While I am sure that each individual round can be make to seem rational, the overall market picture is crazy.

2/ Angular has looked at nearly 1,000 investment opportunities in 4Q20 alone (952 to be exact. While we are not close to see "all" the pre-A market in EU+IL, I think we see a fair piece of it.

3/ In our recent deal flow alone, we've seen 4 companies trying to reinvent excel, 5 companies trying to unify SMB banking, 6 companies trying to provide easy-to-spin-up cloud backends, 3 companies trying to do code analytics, 4 companies trying to solve data privacy.....

4/ Many of those companies (nearly all of them) go on to QUICKLY raised very large seed rounds ($5M+) at what I consider to be irrationally high valuations.

5/ From the speed of the financing rounds, it's very easy to conclude that no one is really asking particularly challenging questions or doing deep analysis.

6/ The challenge, however, is that everyone is getting funded. (And we are only looking at EU+IL. There are US competitors to consider as well!).

7/ In previous years, if you were lucky enough to get seed funding, there might have been 1-2 other serious competitors in your space with funding to compete.

8/ Today, even if you are lucky enough to raise an over-sized and over-priced seed round, there are going to be 5-10 competitors with equally large cash piles competing head to head with you.

9/ The role of the financing process itself has also - in too many cases - diminished. it's no longer educational at all. It's no longer a gauntlet founders run to validate a plan/concept/idea. It's an ATM-like nearly instant process.

10/ All of these factors are going to eventually combine to crush VC returns - and will also make operational challenges more severe for founders as well.

11/ So what is a pre-A investor to do? Join the fray? Spray & pray? That's a one-way street. The answer is in uniqueness and barriers to entry and embracing the centrality of contrarian investment.

12/ Our focus at Angular is on identifying opportunities that are underappreciated and misunderstood - even by very sophisticated investors. Opportunities where we have a clear thesis on why our view is different from the mainstream.

13/ This strategy - by definition and by intention - rarely works. But when it does work, it can generate fund-returning outcomes.

14/ This strategy also requires intellectual intimacy with the founders we back. We need to get to know them and understand why they are seeing the world in a way no other VCs seem to agree with.

15/ Those are the unique, outlier, "angular" founders we are looking for. Show us the crazy stuff you are working on and explain to us why most smart people think it's crazy - and why you think it's not. We're crazy enough to listen.