Nobody Wants To Be First

September 17, 2026 · James Wang

Pre-seed is the one round where somebody has to go first with almost nothing to go on. I spent most of last week in rooms full of pre-seed founders, and I came away thinking that Dallas has plenty of people willing to go second.

A Week In Three Rooms

It was a busy week, so here’s the quick version.

On Sunday, I spoke at the Secret Startup Series and walked a group of founders through what VCs look for. Most of them were pre-seed, which is about what I’d expect from a Dallas crowd. They were early, but they were willing to learn.

If you haven’t come across it, the Secret Startup Series is a two-week intensive for early-stage founders. Bhavna Kumar runs it, and she also leads the SMU LAUNCH Accelerator Program. The series covers a lot of the same material she’s refined with SMU students in LAUNCH, except it’s open to anyone and completely free. If you’re in the Dallas area and want to improve your startup’s chances of getting funded, I’d encourage you to check it out.

On Tuesday, I went to a Dallas chapter meeting of the American Business Network, an angel investing group. I consider myself reasonably familiar with the angel groups in DFW, and I had never heard of them. That’s a little embarrassing for me, but it’s also a useful data point, because if a group with a national footprint can operate here without me noticing, plenty of founders probably don’t know about it either. ABN runs chapters across the country, and after shrinking during COVID, it’s growing again. The meeting itself was good, and I liked the founders who pitched. ABN takes its companies on a roadshow to present at chapters around the country, so a founder who needs reach gets in front of several rooms of investors off a single application. One of the founders was Patrick Smale, the CEO of ClearSight Therapeutics, which also happens to be a Health Wildcatters graduate…

Which leads me to yesterday! I met every company in the latest Health Wildcatters cohort, and it was good to hear their stories and get a sense of where each one stands. Readiness varied quite a bit across the cohort. Some of the companies were truly pre-seed, while others had already raised $1M or more. The spread is useful in its own right, since the earlier companies get to watch founders a step or two ahead of them work through problems they’re about to hit. That proximity to other founders is one of the biggest benefits of an accelerator, and I’ve seen it pay dividends for companies time and time again.

All three rooms were full of founders and investors, and the part that stood out to me was what happens when those two groups actually try to transact.

Nobody Goes First

One of the more established angel groups in town publishes its funding criteria, which I appreciate, because most don’t. To be considered, a company needs at least six months of revenue traction, at least $250K in revenue, at least half of its round already raised, and a lead investor with terms and legal documents ready. A company that clears that bar is already well into its seed round. The angels’ role is really to fill out the back half of the raise.

To be fair, that’s a perfectly rational thing for a group of individual investors to want. My own experience in angel group meetings lines up with it. Checks get written when there’s significant traction, and there’s very little appetite for pre-seed. If I were one of forty members writing $25K checks after a screening committee, I’d probably want the same protections.

The reason comes down to aligning incentives. An angel group is a clever way to share the cost of diligence. Many people split the work of evaluating a company, and each member decides individually whether to write a check. What a group doesn’t do is share the cost of going first. In a priced round, the lead sets the price, negotiates the terms, and drafts the documents. Most pre-seed rounds skip all of that by raising on a SAFE, where the founder sets the cap and the paperwork is standard. The first check is still the expensive one, though. Whoever writes it does the deepest diligence, bets that the company is real and the cap is sane with nobody else’s conviction to lean on, and becomes the name everyone points to when things go sideways. For all that, they get the same cap as everyone who follows. So the rational move for any individual member is to wait for someone else to go first, and when everyone in the room makes the rational move, nobody goes first.

Now follow the founder through the system. Accelerators and university programs produce pre-seed founders, and the standard advice those founders get is to go meet the angel groups. The angel groups want a lead. The founder then goes looking for a lead who will take real pre-seed risk, and in DFW that’s a short list. At that point the founder has a few options. They can stall, bootstrap longer than they’d planned, piece together a SAFE round from small checks, or go find a lead outside DFW. Most founders end up doing some mix of the first three. They run through their friends and family, bootstrap until they can’t stand it anymore, and try to cobble together a round from a few angels and a university prize. If they’re lucky, that’s enough to get them to the next milestone. If they’re not, they run out of time or money before they ever see a real check.

There are real efforts to fill the gap. In 2024, Cowtown Angels launched Cowtown Seed, a group aimed specifically at pre-seed, because they saw founders going unfunded at the first check. Accelerators like Health Wildcatters invest in their cohorts, and university programs put real money on the table. The Draper Pitch Competition at UT Dallas gave out a record $330,000 this spring. All of that matters. Still, a $50K prize or an accelerator check doesn’t tell a room of angels that an experienced investor looked hard at the company and put meaningful money behind it, and in practice that’s what the groups are waiting for.

To be perfectly transparent, I don’t write pre-seed checks either. I write seed and Series A checks, so I don’t claim to be above the incentives I just described.

What I’d Do With This

If you’re a pre-seed founder in DFW, treat angel groups as the place you fill a round after someone else has started it. That follows from how they work. A group screens by committee, and a committee is good at evaluating a company someone else has already vetted and bad at being the first to believe in it. That holds even when the round is on a SAFE and there’s nothing to negotiate. Somebody has to do the real diligence and commit before the group is comfortable showing up.

So spend your early energy finding that first check. On a SAFE, nobody has to negotiate terms, so what you’re really looking for is someone whose name tells the room the company has already been vetted. That’s usually an individual who knows you, knows the space, or ideally both, and who can write a check big enough that other investors take it seriously. Use accelerators and university programs for early validation, small checks, and introductions, since that’s what they’re built to provide.

If you can’t find that first investor, bootstrapping until you have enough traction for a proper seed round may be your most realistic option here. That works best for companies that can reach revenue on a small budget, like software and services. It’s slower, but you’ll walk into that round with a better story and a better valuation than you would have gotten scraping together a pre-seed off of nothing. It works much worse for biotech and hardware, where the science burns cash long before anyone pays you, so those founders should look for a first check wherever they can find one. SBIR grants are a good source of non-dilutive funding for those companies.

The DFW Map

Here’s the list of angel groups, accelerators, pitch competitions, and university programs I know of or am involved with. Some of these will fit you better than others, so check each group’s stage and requirements before you pitch.

Angel groups

Accelerators and programs

I’m personally involved with all of these, so feel free to reach out if you have any questions.

Pitch competitions

University-affiliated

These are generally open only to students or alumni. The classes are part of a degree program, so they aren’t free resources, but they’re worth knowing about if you’re already on campus.