To My Co-Lead Seed VCs Who Lost Conviction: This Is What I Needed From You.

April 4, 2025.
This is an exposé.
(Of myself).

I failed to generate revenue for the first four years after incorporating this company in April 2019, fresh off my 26th birthday.

My lead seed VC’s eventually recommended I shut it down and return the remaining capital.

Btw:
I can’t code.
I’m a “solo founder” (GPT = my better half).
I made 20+ mis-hires
I had a clinical psychopath hunting me down.
I’m a 32 y/o brown woman.
I went to Stanford Emory.

In hindsight, I understand why my investors made the call they did.
Based on what they could see — it was the rational choice.
But that visibility was limited.

They missed what I could see from where I stood.

And what I saw was this: SwayID wasn’t dying. It was forming.

This essay is a personal audit and a proposed lens for reevaluating how we assess founder judgment — especially when traction is nonlinear, timelines are stretched, and value creation is still crystallizing.

This isn't meant to indict, shame, or reverse past calls.

It’s an invitation to think differently — for VCs, for LPs, and most of all, for me.

One that also names a quiet crisis in venture:

This kind of friction between founders and their investors happens all the time. Not necessarily right. Not necessarily wrong. But definitely embarrassing.

Fortunately, I lost the capacity for shame (as long as I’m in integrity) at age 20—when I got publicly eviscerated on Shark Tank.

(Side note: building on one of my favorite PG essay, “How To Think For Yourself”, I highly recommend intentionally getting publicly humiliated as much as possible as young as possible as a means to becoming a habitual independent thinker.)

This piece introduces a post-seed investment framework I call 🔺The Seedmuda Triangle”—a diagnostic tool for evaluating a founder’s ability to solve complex, layered problems in sequence, under real world constraints.

It’s the only framework I’ve found reliable enough to assess my own progress—and keep moving forward despite compounding external pressure to shut it down. It’s how I’ve stayed focused on applying NFX’s Find the Fast Moving Water principle to unlock outsized ROI with SwayID since Q4 2022.

This is a map for navigating the nonlinear chaos of early stage building—while tethered to forces that can’t see the current.

⚠️ Why This Matters: The AI-Era Distortion Risk

Naming the critical, under-examined phenomenon:

Our disregard for time is accelerating.

As AI speeds up our ability to produce, it also warps how we evaluate progress.

Ie: Twitter is flooded with screenshots of startups going from $0 to $3M in 3 months. How are we evaluating this new breed of “traction”?

• Quality of revenue?

• Defensibility of revenue?

• Enduring value creation?

• Solving a problem worth working on for the next decade?

What’s the point of venture capital?

My understanding: to extract outsized returns by funding founders to solve impossible puzzles as early as possible.

Consequence of deviating from this point:

Killing the wrong companies.

My opinion isn’t theoretical.
It’s lived.

I took my first institutional VC check in 2020 as a paper napkin idea stage as a 27 y/o and worked with these same institutional investors on this same company for the next 4 years.

If you're an LP considering investing in early stage VC firms, you currently have two options:

✅ Invest only in blue chip firms like Sequoia or a16z who win no matter what.

❌ Don’t invest in early stage venture at all.

🔺The Seedmuda Triangle Framework To Assess Founder Judgment

🔺The Seedmuda Triangle framework is based on the assumption that a seed stage founder (post-investment) can be evaluated by 3 simple judgment calls:

1. Solve the Right Problem

2. Build the Right Product to Solve It

3. Design the Right Company to Scale It

Note: Sequencing is key. If a founder gets pulled out of sequence (ie: hires and scales before clarity on the right problem to solve) they go under.

Here’s what every pre-seed and seed VC I’ve interacted with misses:

They’re not tracking the sequence or quality of a founder’s judgment.
They’re tracking surface-level traction curves aiming for a “hockey stick” traction curve.

But here’s the real cost of that:

When you demand traction before judgment is fully formed, you’re not observing success.

You’re funding performative traction.

You’re paying seed-stage founders to cheat.

To manufacture metrics.

To buy fake users, inflate screenshots, burn ad spend with no LTV—
—because they’ve been taught that’s the only way to raise a Series A.

You’re not investing in compounding clarity.
You’re investing in early-stage theater.

Because you’ve confused signal velocity with signal quality,
you either pass an unstable “hot potato” company to Series A investors,
or kill the company before it has a chance to stabilize.

In my case, clarity didn’t move linearly.
It built painfully, invisibly—until it clicked.

My investors tried to kill the company just before the click.

(But I continued anyways)

Here’s what that curve looked like for me:

🧭 What Posture Should Investors Take?

📊 Why So Many Startups — and VC Funds — Vanish in the Fog

Naming the critical, under-examined phenomenon:
Venture-backed seed-stage companies need room to explore.
The path to finding the real problem is messy, nonlinear, and full of false starts.
The first idea is almost always wrong.

But the current venture model punishes this reality:

My bet:

The next era of early stage venture will fund founders whose companies make sense to AI before they make sense to investors.

Why?

Because AI doesn’t get flustered.
It doesn’t mistake non linear movement for failure.
It can evaluate: Is this judgment compounding?

📍 Case Study: Me (Kaeya, Founder of SwayID)

Key Judgment Call 1 of 3: Solve The Right Problem

• ❌ Jan 2020–July 2023: “Democratizing influencer marketing”

• ✅ Aug 2023: Solve the real blocker to democratized influence—legal fragility across UGC, influencer content, affiliate marketing, and mounting regulatory red tape (esp. at the Fortune 500 level)

Outcome:

• Took 3 years to identify and lock in the right problem

• October 2023: Lead seed investors made a company-killing call—recommended shutdown and capital refund (emotional decision).

• Reality: The founder had just made the correct pivot. Wrong call, wrong timing.

Correct Investor Posture:
The founder course-corrected from the wrong problem to the right one.
The rational move: stay engaged and invested.

Key Judgment Call 2 of 3: Build the Right Product to Solve It

❌ Q3–Nov 2023: Gaming-style UGC upload site (familiarity cue: Shutterstock)
❌ Dec 2023: Membership club for nano influencers (cue: Costco)
❌ Jan 2024: Gated creator discounts (cue: student discounts)
✅ Aug 2024: SwayID — Compliance infrastructure for creator marketing (cue: Vanta)

Outcome:

• Took 10 months after unlocking “Right Problem” to figure out “Right Product”

• Our lead VC’s saw multiple product pivots in unusually short time frame. Reduced it to lack of focus and directionless volatility. Decided to forfeit shares for free.

Correct Investor Posture:

The founder was running fast experiments to find product-problem fit.
The rational move was to hold the shares (not forfeit).

✅ Trifecta Decision 3 of 3: How to Operationalize the Company

📍 Current decision in progress.
Full public decision memo linked here. TLDR below:

Method: Weighted decision matrix across 6 leverage dimensions

Location Scores (/110):

Recommendation:

📍 Headquarter in Washington, D.C.

D.C. Wins by +37 to +62 leverage points over any alternative.

To keep this brief, I’ll stop here…but there analysis continues and continuously evolves and gets re-evaluated, edited as time goes on.

Summary:

Key Learnings For Seed Journey:

1. Focused sequencing on problem solving > scattered / multithreaded attempts.
   

2. Getting the right problem right is the slowest, but highest-leverage puzzle to solve.
   

3. Once the problem is identified, product clarity comes fast and remains flexible.
   

4. “Slow” ≠ “stagnant.”
   

5. Sequential clarity compounds.

Truth be told: I don’t know enough about venture capital to form definitive opinions. I wouldn’t hire me at a VC firm.

But I’ve lived this from the inside. And I’ve spent the past five years trying to understand how to keep going.

This essay isn’t gospel.
It’s a brain nude.

Me, making sense of nonsense. In public.
One judgment call at a time.

I know the clarity I have today could fall apart tomorrow.
That’s how startups work.
But that’s also why I anchor to discernment — not dogma.

This framework doesn’t pretend to offer a perfect path.
Only a way to keep walking when there isn’t one.

I’ll keep adjusting.
I’ll keep re-evaluating.

And I’ll keep trying to become the kind of founder who sees clearly — even when the world doesn’t.

Because company-building isn’t just my job.

It’s my first love.

Kaeya