Anyone have opinions on Soma Capital?

I've done a few angel investments on the side, and a bunch of them (including this one which I posted about on WSO) have had Soma as a co-investor.

I've met some of the Soma people (not Aneel) in passing, but most of my knowledge comes from stories I have heard from founders who have taken an investment from them.

My take is they are good people who have developed a reputation for being founder-friendly and are thus able to get into many deals (even ones that are hot or oversubscribed), which could partially explain why they have been in so many unicorns. The big question mark is that their approach to investing may not necessarily be very rigorous.

I am not sure about "seed investing all the way up to pre-IPO" - I think their bread and butter is seed stage companies.

I know for a fact that they are especially prolific investors in companies that graduate from the Y Combinator accelerator program (the popular program in which decacorns like Airbnb, Coinbase, Doordash, and others have emerged from) which runs twice a year in the winter and summer. In 2021 alone, they invested in 100 companies that graduated from Y Combinator!

Keep in mind that the average GP at a VC fund makes one, maybe two investments in any given year? So investing in 100+ companies is a completely different strategy (I wouldn't call it "spray and pray," though some less charitable people might interpret it as such). Granted, the check sizes between a traditional VC fund and a firm like Soma are very different (Soma's typical check size is $250k in each company), whereas a VC is easily investing $1M+ at seed stage).

TL;DR - good people, probably a fun place to work at, but unclear how rigorous their approach to investing is