Really, a VC fund is going to put a partner on your board for a $25k investment? Is this a real VC fund, meaning they have at least tens of millions in outside investors' money?

I've never heard of a true VC fund doing anything like that before. Usually VCs look upon seed rounds (and for them a seed round means $100k minimum) as just a way to generate series A deal flow. So they don't care about the valuation or the board composition. At most they ask for right of first refusal on future rounds over a certain threshold. So it's weird that they seem to be trying to push so hard about such things so early.

I suppose I'd take the deal if it were a super-duper fund like Sequoia or KP. For most startups it would be worth giving them 10% of your co for nothing just to brag that you had them as investors. On the other hand, they'd never do something like this. And the fact that anyone is is ipso facto evidence that they're a bush league firm.

Obviously you can't mention the name here, but if you want to send me an email (my username at ycombinator) I'll talk to you about it privately. I have to deal a lot with VCs, so wildly novel types of VC behavior are very interesting to me.

Compare to these VC seed programs with about the same dollar amounts:

http://www.hcp.com/summer/, http://www.lightspeedvp.com/summergrants.aspx

I know Lightspeed and Highland are VCs that have incubator programs, but neither of them takes any equity for it.