Trend Spotting at the Seed Stage

“Successful investing is about getting everyone to agree with you … later.”
-Jim Grant

Successful seed investing requires a different skillset than other stages of investing. Not only do investors have to understand all the qualities of an elite founding team, business model, and market opportunity (among countless other things on the business side), but the seed investors that separate themselves from the crowd are those that are able to see trends before others spot them.

Trends play such a large role in venture capital as venture capitalists will admit that we all are sheep and like to follow what is hot. Having a thesis and validating why you are bullish on a subsector takes time and a lot of research, but a lot of the thesis can be driven be sentiment analysis of technology trends.

To this point, Chris Dixon from a16z wrote the following:

Strong technologies capture the imaginations of technology enthusiasts. That is why many important technologies start out as weekend hobbies. Enthusiasts vote with their time, and, unlike most of the business world, have long-term horizons. They build from first principles, making full use of the available resources to design technologies as they ought to exist.

Simply put, for investors to understand trends, they need to look how early adopters…