BoxGroup’s David Tisch builds his seed approach around founder quality, optimism and fast replies, while accepting that early stage picks often fail.
David Tisch’s approach to seed investing starts with a short list: write checks, back exceptionally smart founders, stay open to possibility and respond quickly when founders ask for help. The simplicity is deliberate. At a recent VC Best Practice lunch hosted with Stifel Bank and KPMG, the BoxGroup co-founder described a firm built to keep those principles from getting buried under process.
His first two rules came from mentors. Brad Feld’s phrase “investors invest” was a reminder that people who take meetings without committing capital can consume founders’ time without helping them move forward. Feld also urged investors to back people. Tisch’s point is that newcomers often fixate on ideas because they’re easier to assess than a founder’s judgment and ability. Developing a sharper read takes repeated exposure to founders and their work.
Pattern recognition comes from meeting founders
Tisch built that experience by seeing a large number of people early in his career. From 2007 to 2009, he ran a skunkworks at KGB, the 411 company, which was generating enough cash to hire during a difficult period for the wider economy. He said he interviewed many people who later became founders in New York’s startup scene.
He then led three Techstars programs in New York, reviewing all 5,500 applications and conducting every first round interview himself. Many applicants weren’t strong candidates. That volume, Tisch’s account suggests, helped the promising founders distinguish themselves.
The bar has since shifted. A decade or more ago, startups were often less polished, and a capable team could stand out simply by knowing how to build a company. Accelerators, startup schools and founder advice have made the basics more widely understood. Today, many people can put together a competent pitch and team. The harder question is whether they have the ambition and ability to take on something far bigger than a conventional career move.
Tisch said he’s less interested now in the founder who can build a solid company, sell it for $30 million and move into a senior product role. He described his preference as a “binary implosion”: founders with the potential to create an unusually large outcome, even though the risk of failure is substantial. The test he wants his team to apply is direct: would they feel foolish letting this person leave without backing them, regardless of the idea?
Process should help the firm say yes
BoxGroup has removed several familiar steps from its seed decisions. The firm doesn’t write investment memos, hold formal votes, set ownership targets or require a minimum check size. Tisch also said the firm avoids drawn out diligence unless someone has firsthand information about a founder that needs to be raised.
His measure for each process is whether it helps the firm invest in the strongest founders. If not, he sees it as a barrier. That view informs his objection to fixed ownership targets. A firm demanding 10% ownership may be unable to invest alongside a founder’s preferred backers, since the founder might not be willing to give up that share. Tisch argues that a smaller check, made early or alongside another financing process, can let an investor participate without restricting the founder’s options.
His criticism of seed memos follows the same logic. He sees them as documents that can make it easier to explain why a company might fail, whether to protect the writer or support a career move. But a list of risks doesn’t tell an investor whether a company could succeed. Tisch said he can identify reasons any funded company might not work. For him, the task is to understand how it might.
Optimism needs room for evidence
BoxGroup’s two funds have different roles in its decision making: the seed fund is meant to say yes, while the opportunity fund is meant to say no. In seed discussions, Tisch said, team members shouldn’t raise negative arguments unless they’ve met the founders or have a credible reference. The firm calls that rule “no grenades.” Tisch approaches each of the roughly 40 meetings he takes for an investment hoping to find a reason to back the founder.
The firm’s experience with Etched illustrates the cost of dismissing an unfamiliar idea too quickly. Tisch passed on the company in 2023 because he found it hard to believe that two 18 year olds at Harvard could build a chip company. He later described the lesson as suspending disbelief: an idea’s unfamiliarity isn’t proof that it can’t work.
That optimism sits alongside a blunt view of the odds. Tisch said BoxGroup fails on about 70% of its early stage investments, a rate he believes is typical across the field. He doesn’t claim to have become a much better picker over the past decade. Instead, he says he sees better opportunities. He also recalled that if he’d backed every company he met during his first fund, its returns would have been ten times higher.
The article’s author makes a similar point from personal experience, naming Datadog, Wise, Plaid and Hugging Face as companies they might have backed if they’d invested in everyone who reached their inbox and exchanged an email with them. Tisch summarized the challenge this way: “We see amazing things and we were picking mediocrely.” The observation is a reminder that missing an exceptional company can be as consequential as backing a weak one.
Fast replies are part of the work
Tisch’s fourth rule focuses on a basic operational detail: answer founders promptly. Founders work with urgency every day; investors don’t face the same pressure unless they choose to. BoxGroup’s service commitment, he said, is to try hard to handle founders’ requests quickly. Sometimes the answer is that the firm doesn’t know or can’t help. A timely answer still lets the founder plan.
Tisch said delayed replies damage founders’ experience when someone has decided an issue is important enough to raise with an investor and then waits 48 hours to hear back. For an early stage company, a small task can hold up a decision or leave a founder without needed information. Responsiveness is therefore a practical way for an investor to support a team, even when the investor can’t solve the problem directly.
There’s a personal dimension to that work ethic. Tisch started BoxGroup with his own money, and the firm relied on personal capital for years before bringing in outside limited partners. That financial head start gave him room to build. The author also points to a separate reason for Tisch’s reputation in New York: he answered founders’ emails late at night over many years, even when he didn’t have to.
Tisch credits his focus on effort to a high school hockey coach, a former mechanic from Saugus, Massachusetts, who coached wealthy students in Scarsdale. The coach taught him that effort is the part of a career a person can control. Resources can help, but someone else can always work harder.
The four rules remain concise: invest, find the smartest people, stay optimistic and answer founders quickly. Tisch sees a widening range of technical fields attracting young founders, including chips, nuclear technology, brain-computer interfaces and printed circuit boards. New kinds of companies may now be within reach of startups. The odds haven’t improved just because more ideas are possible, which makes his core lesson practical: keep the process focused on founders and act when a promising one is in front of you.
