Seed investing is a referral business that mostly refuses to measure the thing it runs on.
The economics are simple. At seed, the best deal flow comes from founders you've already backed — the ones who'd work with you again and say so to the next founder before the round is even public. Reputation among founders isn't a soft asset, it's the pipeline.
And yet almost no fund measures it directly. Kae Capital does. They track founder NPS, and the number they publish — 88 — is high enough to be awkward if it weren't real.
I'm less interested in the score than in the decision to keep it. Measuring founder satisfaction turns a vague claim — “founder-first”, the most exhausted phrase in venture — into something falsifiable. It's the difference between asserting a culture and instrumenting one.
What makes this worth a second look is the feedback loop. A seed fund with genuinely high founder regard isn't just well-liked; it's compounding access it hasn't seen yet. The next good founder arrives through the last one. The metric and the returns aren't two things — one leads the other.
Most funds say they're good partners. The observable version of that claim is whether the founders who've worked with you would do it again, and whether you're confident enough to count.