Keep pulling the thread on Ramtin Naimi.
The art collection of the late Paul Allen sold for over $1 billion in cumulative sales at a Sotheby's auction.
Ramtin's founding thesis for Abstract is that multi-stage, tier-one venture capital firms are historically better at identifying and winning power-law companies at the seed stage than dedicated seed funds.
Sequoia Capital has a history of leading seed rounds in major technology companies, including Stripe, Airbnb, and Dropbox.
Andreessen Horowitz led the first institutional funding rounds for Okta, Databricks, and Slack.
Khosla Ventures led the seed funding rounds for Instacart and DoorDash.
Between 2008 and 2011, an investor who invested equally in every publicly announced seed deal would have achieved a 3x net return on their portfolio, primarily driven by Uber's 3,000x return.
Between August 2016 and June 2017, Ramtin funded 47 seed deals over a 10-month period using AngelList SPVs.
Ramtin's early investments via AngelList SPVs included seed-stage checks into Rippling, Solana, Clay, Newfront, and the management company of Polychain Capital.
Ramtin's SPVs on the AngelList platform have generated returns close to $100 million.
Among Ramtin's first 47 investments, Solana reached a market capitalization over $100 billion, and Rippling is approaching a $20 billion valuation.
At age 26, Ramtin sold a time-limited equity stake in his management company, Abstract, to a consortium including Kevin Hartz, Michael Ovitz, and Bill Ackman, and has since regained 100% ownership.
Abstract raised its first institutional fund, a $100 million vehicle, at the end of 2018.