Stop Calling It Pre-Seed. It's Just Seed

I keep hearing founders call their round a “pre-seed,” not realizing how naive that makes them sound. It signals they’re already planning on multiple rounds of outside funding, before they’ve even priced the first one. It’s better to treat anything before a priced round as just seed, period.

Once you say “pre-seed,” people assume there will be a seed, then a Series A, and so on. But if you’re really on a roll, with customers lining up and revenue climbing, why not skip the seed altogether and jump straight to a Series A? Of course it’s not always that simple. You need growth, metrics, and evidence you can handle a bigger round. But you don’t want to be the founder who signals a reliance on constant injections of capital from day one.

The best startups do more with less. Sometimes they raise a next round before touching the money they already have, because they’re so capital efficient that investors want to jump in with a preemptive round at a higher valuation.

Founders seem to like calling a round “pre-seed” because it suggests the next one is guaranteed and might be 2 or 3 times bigger. But what if you don’t hit the milestones to justify that? You’ve set an expectation you might not be able to meet.

Early on, you should be talking about traction, customer satisfaction, and building something people actually want, rather than highlighting the label you’ve put on your raise. And if you really believe in what you’re building, you’ll care less about extra dilution or heavier liquidation preferences. You’ll focus on growing your company so effectively that when you do raise, you can do it on your own terms.