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We’re kicking off a series of founder interviews focused on product-market fit — what those founders did right, what they did wrong, and what they’ve learned along the way.

It’s a topic the Eniac team is passionate about, having worked with more than 200 founders as they try to find PMF. And as we wrote last week, while we could talk all day about definitions and tips, we believe there’s nothing more valuable or educational than getting the stories from the founders themselves.

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If there’s one thing we’re focused on at Eniac Ventures, it’s helping our founders find product-market fit.

The term gets thrown around so often that it’s easy to assume every founder knows exactly what it means. But like many simple, powerful ideas, PMF can take on different meanings depending on who’s using it.

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At Eniac, we’ve been studying recent changes in the seed market — and what we’ve found surprised us, especially when it comes to valuations.

To understand the market, we pulled deal data on recent quarters from PitchBook, as well as conducting our own Seed Sentiment Survey. Some of the changes are obvious: The market has slowed, with seed capital deployment falling 39% in Q1 2023 compared to two quarters earlier. In addition, the number of deals tracked by PitchBook at every stage has fallen by more than 45% year over year (the biggest drops are at Series C and D).

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When I look at all the startups I’ve built or backed during my career as a founder and investor, I’ll admit they can seem a bit disconnected, covering everything from social to robotics to genomics to gaming. But as I reflect on my investments, on my own startups, and on how I want to spend my time moving forward, I’ve realized that many of those seemingly disparate dots are connected through a concept that I’m calling foundational [open] ecosystems — and the companies they spawn.

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As a seed investor, I’m always thinking about how to find the next unicorn before they’ve even built a product. Recently, I’ve realized that I’m looking for a new category of founder, which I’ll describe as “low code, higher go-to-market” — founders who may not have exceptionally strong technical chops, but make up for it with their strength in areas like sales, storytelling, and fundraising, as well as deep knowledge and connections in specific industry verticals.

Of course, it’s always been valuable to have someone with those skills leading a startup. (And we’re grateful to Alloy’s Laura Spiekerman for recently sharing so many relevant go-to-market insights with our founders.) But in the past, those teams would still need a technical co-founder. Now, many of them can get started without one, even if they can’t code at all.

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Birthdays have a way of sneaking up on you, especially as you get older. So I was amazed to realize it’s been 13 years (and three days) since we incorporated Eniac on November 19, 2009.

Of course, that’s not the only date you can point to as Eniac’s beginning. You could go back more than 25 years, to those early days when Hadley, Tim, Vic, and I — Eniac’s co-founders and general partners — first met as engineering students at the University of Pennsylvania.

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It’s been seven days since Eniac Ventures hosted 300 co-investors in our office as part of New York Tech Week, and I’m still buzzing.

Part of that, of course, is just the relief of putting on a successful event (and let me give another huge thank you to everyone on the Eniac team who made it happen!). But the party, and the incredible energy that we all felt throughout Tech Week, solidified my sense that the NYC has reached a real critical mass — not just of amazing startups and founders, but investors who can back them.

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At Eniac, we’re constantly obsessing over how we can be one of the most founder-friendly VC firms around. And not just when we write someone a check: We have introductory meetings with a huge swath of startup founders, and we’re always looking to improve that experience for every one of them.

This isn’t something that’s standardized across the firm; we all have different styles. But across the board, our hope is to be helpful even when we don’t invest. As former founders ourselves, we know how frustrating it can be when you put a lot of time and energy into a pitch, then don’t get any value out of it at all — no intros, no feedback, maybe not even a real answer.

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As Hadley noted in a recent tweet, one big danger facing startup founders is the premature belief that you’ve found product-market fit.

Understanding that idea is critical for startup success, so it’s worth revisiting Marc Andreessen’s 15-year-old post, in which he defined PMF as “being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market” and claimed that founders “can always feel when product/market fit isn’t happening.”

So how can someone be wrong about finding product-market fit?

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Yes, we know there’s something a little mysterious — or even frustrating — about the Eniac website: You can learn about our team and our investments, but you won’t see a list of who led which deal, or all the boards each partner sits on.

This isn’t an oversight, and we’re not doing it to be secretive. Instead, it’s a key piece of the Eniac strategy, one that our partners put in place when the firm was founded in 2010.

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