I sat down with David Tisch from BoxGroup. If you’ve looked at a seed firm’s website and seen one famous logo, that’s usually the whole list. David’s list is Ramp, Plaid, ID.me, Stripe, Airtable, Warby Parker, Clay, Zipline — and Cursor, which just got acquired for $66 billion. Then he shrugs and says it probably just means he’s been doing it awhile.
We talk about the part of this job that doesn’t show up on a website. Seed is messy. The feedback loop is five, ten, fifteen years. The founder is living inside the dream; we’re a line item and a phone number. David’s view is that most of us should end up as extras in the credits. If they need to listen to you, that’s already a problem. Unsolicited VC advice is close to worthless. The few people worth listening to are obvious, and the third partner at the thirtieth-best firm is not one of them.
What he actually underwrites is the why. Not the slide that says what they’re building — the reason they’re the person who can drag it through a decade of moving parts. Early tell: can they recruit? The smartest friends on campus. The band from Palantir or Anthropic or Ramp. Cursor started as a person Claire met in Dorm Room Fund, before there was a product. Two college friends, giants attacking from every side, and they still held the thing together.
We get into the ugly middle of the companies everyone now treats as inevitable. Facebook, Uber, Airbnb all did down rounds. Fundraising is permission to make progress, not progress. A lot of AI “revenue” right now is companies trying not to miss something. Pets.com and Amazon were in the same business in the same moment. One of them was the company.
David lives in New York because that’s home, not because he’s running a geography thesis. SF is the deep talent pool. Most other cities can build a few companies. Israel has a real early network — if a seed is leaving the country, he wonders why you’re seeing it. Nobody is calling to do you a favor. Collaboration exists. Sharp elbows exist more.
He won’t pretend he’s smart enough to tell you whether we blow up the data centers. He will say technology has been a force of good, this moment is early, and his job is still the same as it was sixteen years ago: wake up tomorrow and find someone who might actually change the world.
If you want him: david@boxgroup.com.
Transcript of podcast interview with David Tisch
Listen on Spotify, iTunes or wherever you listen to podcasts.
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