Episode #97: Rob Go of NextView on Seed VC's Existential Crisis

Rob Go (0:00)

What is true for everybody is that the bar is really, really high, because back to my first point, the market is mature, right? And so there's almost no strategy out there where you can have B plus execution and get the results. There was a time 15 years ago where within seed stage investing, I think you could absolutely do it. But today, I think those those opportunities are very, very few and far between. You can really be executed at a high level no matter what you're doing.

Mia Farnham (0:24)

It's the week of September 28th. Welcome to The Learning Corner, a Precursor Ventures podcast.

Welcome to The Learning Corner by Precursor. I'm Mia Farnham and I'm joined by our GP and managing partner Charles Hudson, where we will be talking about the good reason articles that caught our team's attention over the past week. We're also lucky enough to have Rob go from NextView on the pod this week, who's writing we've featured so many times since podcast inception. So it's super exciting to have you on Rob. Welcome to the podcast.

Rob Go (0:55)

Thank you so much for having me and I appreciate you reading and sharing stuff that I write. It's always nice to know that other folks that we admire see some similar things in the markets. I appreciate that.

Mia Farnham (1:03)

And we're going to dive into so many of those pieces for the next 30 minutes. But Rob, do you mind for the listeners just giving a run up on yourself, background on NextView, thesis of the fund, all of that good stuff.

Rob Go (1:14)

Yeah, I'm one of the founders of a fund called NextView. We're a pre-seed and seed focused venture fund. We started originally in the East Coast, but we have offices now in Boston, New York and San Francisco, and we invest across the country. And we tend to be application layer investors. You know, the heritage of the firm, we were all operators, entrepreneurs at high growth internet companies. You know, we kind of take that sensibility into how we invest, and we typically invest a relatively small number of companies per year. So try to be really engaged and hands on with everything that we're a part of.

Mia Farnham (1:40)

Jumping right into it, like I mentioned in the intro, we've been featuring stuff that you've written for a while now. Almost over a year ago, you wrote a piece that CVC is facing an existential crisis, not like a normal down cycle, but more of a structural shift, and you named four forces behind it. Industry maturation, YC, maybe some other accelerators there, the mega funds and the power law becoming consensus, and the AI platform shift favoring infrastructure oversees. So sitting here almost at the close of 2026, do you feel a little bit more alarmed or less alarmed since when you wrote it, and which maybe of those forces has proven to be the strongest over time?

Rob Go (2:21)

I think that all those things are still roaring away as true as ever. And it's no surprise to me that, I don't know, was it last week that NFX is going sort of angel mode, private mode? There's a lot of these trends that we're seeing in the market, right? As folks respond to these different challenges for seed VC. So I think there are two forces in particular that are pretty pronounced. And I describe it as like the convergence of two things that word consensus becoming consensus. So first is the power law. And we rewind the clock like a year ago or 15 years ago when Peter Thiel was doing his CS lectures. And the power law was a secret. And most people underestimated that dynamic within actually all markets, but specifically with venture markets. And now we've gone like really hard the other way. People are just massively zealous about the power law, and that really is reflected in how they invest. The second is AI. And there was a time not that long ago when everybody was wondering, what's the next next thing going to be? And they were searching for it. And now everybody, 100 million percent, believe that the next next thing is AI, and it is going to be unprecedented in so many ways. And so I think it's the convergence of those two things that have really propelled us to where we are today.

Charles Hudson (3:32)

It's funny, our AGM is in six or seven weeks. I've been thinking about all this. And to Rob's point, I told someone this weekend, it's hard to be a seed investor when the one unitary mega trend in AI and infra happens to be a very difficult thing for your model to accommodate. And I think it's even, in some ways, I think it's gotten even harder because it's not just that the initial rounds are so big, it's that the compound rate at which the follow on rounds happen is really hard to keep up with. So you can have a company that raises at 300, you're like, wow, that's expensive. Then it's a billion, then a quarter later, it's five billion and you're like, wow, well, if you got in at 300, you're up 20X and all the tranching. And it's just, I think, a very difficult time if you're a business model, whether you're a seed VC or not, if your business model doesn't accommodate AI infra, I'd argue you have a challenged business model and venture right now. Until people's attention shifts to some other category, whether that's physical AI or robotics, or just a broader acknowledgement that there are other things beyond AI infra that matter.