Charles Hudson (Precursor Ventures) - The State of Seed Investing, The Early Stage Ecosystem, and Why Consumer Has Been Out Of Favor with VCs
Charles Hudson is the Managing Partner and Founder of Precursor Ventures. Precursor Ventures is an early-stage venture capital firm focused on investing in the first institutional round of investment for the most promising software and hardware companies. Some of their investments include The Athletic, Goodr and Co-Star.Prior to founding Precursor Ventures, Charles was a Partner at SoftTech VC and Co-Founder and CEO of Bionic Panda Games, an Android-focused mobile games startup. He also was the VP of Business Development for Serious Business (acq. Zynga) and Director of Business Development at Gaia Interactive.You can follow Charles on Twitter @chudson. To follow along behind the scenes of the show, you can follow @mikegelb and @consumervc.A couple books that impacted Charles professionally are The New Geography of Jobs by Enrico Maretti and Who Gets What and Why by Alvin Roth . A book that impacted him personally is The Wright Brothers by David McCullough.On this episode you will learn -How did Charles make his way into Venture Capital? How did Precursor come together? How does Charles think about the early investment landscape? His due diligence and decision making process. How he thinks about domain expertise. Why are there two different seed markets with radically different round sizes and valuations and what does seed look like today? What are some of the differences in the diligence process when investing in consumer vs. enterprise startups? How he thinks about pivoting in the early stages? How he thinks about portfolio composition? Advice for founders that are in tertiary or secondary markets or have a network of VCs when fundraising? What consumer trends is he most focused on? What is one thing that he would change when it came to venture capital? What is one piece of advice for founders of consumer companies?