VC firms are like seed firms in that they're actual companies,but they invest other people's money,and much larger amounts of it.VC investments average several million dollars.So they tend to come later in the life of a startup,are harder to get,and come with tougher terms.
The word "venture capitalist" is sometimes used loosely for any venture investor, but there is a sharp difference between VCs and other investors: VC firms are organized as funds, much like hedge funds or mutual funds. The fund managers, who are called "general partners," get about 2% of the fund annually as a management fee, plus about 20% of the fund's gains.
There is a very sharp dropoff in performance among VC firms, because in the VC business both success and failure are self-perpetuating. When an investment scores spectacularly, as Google did for Kleiner and Sequoia, it generates a lot of good publicity for the VCs. And many founders prefer to take money from successful VC firms, because of the legitimacy it confers. Hence a vicious (for the losers) cycle: VC firms that have been doing badly will only get the deals the bigger fish have rejected, causing them to continue to do badly.
In a sense, the lower-tier VC firms are a bargain for founders. They may not be quite as smart or as well connected as the big-name firms, but they are much hungrier for deals. This means you should be able to get better terms from them.
Better how? The most obvious is valuation: they'll take less of your company. But as well as money, there's power. I think founders will increasingly be able to stay on as CEO, and on terms that will make it fairly hard to fire them later.
The most dramatic change, I predict, is that VCs will allow founders to cash out partially by selling some of their stock direct to the VC firm. VCs have traditionally resisted letting founders get anything before the ultimate "liquidity event." But they're also desperate for deals. And the rule against buying stock from founders is a stupid one, this is a natural place for things to give as venture funding becomes more and more a seller's market.
The disadvantage of taking money from less known firms is that people will assume, correctly or not, that you were turned down by the more exalted ones. But, like where you went to college, the name of your VC stops mattering once you have some performance to measure. So the more confident you are, the less you need a brand-name VC.
Another danger of less known firms is that, like angels, they have less reputation to protect. I suspect it's the lower-tier firms that are responsible for most of the tricks that have given VCs such a bad reputation among hackers. They are doubly hosed: the general partners themselves are less able, and yet they have harder problems to solve, because the top VCs skim off all the best deals, leaving the lower-tier firms exactly the startups that are likely to blow up.
For example, lower-tier firms are much more likely to pretend to want to do a deal with you just to lock you up while they decide if they really want to. One experienced CFO said:
Not all the people who work at VC firms are partners. Most firms also have a handful of junior employees called something like associates or analysts. If you get a call from a VC firm, go to their web site and check whether the person you talked to is a partner. Odds are it will be a junior person; they scour the web looking for startups their bosses could invest in. The junior people will tend to seem very positive about your company. They're not pretending; they want to believe you're a hot prospect, because it would be a huge coup for them if their firm invested in a company they discovered. Don't be misled by this optimism. It's the partners who decide, and they view things with a colder eye.
Like angels, VCs prefer to invest in deals that come to them through people they know. So while nearly all VC funds have some address you can send your business plan to, VCs privately admit the chance of getting funding by this route is near zero. One recently told me that he did not know a single startup that got funded this way.
One of the most difficult problems for startup founders is deciding when to approach VCs. You really only get one chance, because they rely heavily on first impressions. And you can't approach some and save others for later, because (a) they ask who else you've talked to and when and (b) they talk among themselves. If you're talking to one VC and he finds out that you were rejected by another several months ago, you'll definitely seem shopworn.
So when do you approach VCs? When you can convince them. If the founders have impressive resumes and the idea isn't hard to understand, you could approach VCs quite early. Whereas if the founders are unknown and the idea is very novel, you might have to launch the thing and show that users loved it before VCs would be convinced.
It is, unfortunately, common for VCs to put terms in an agreement whose consequences surprise founders later, and also common for VCs to defend things they do by saying that they're standard in the industry. Standard, schmandard; the whole industry is only a few decades old, and rapidly evolving. The concept of "standard" is a useful one when you're operating on a small scale (Y Combinator uses identical terms for every deal because for tiny seed-stage investments it's not worth the overhead of negotiating individual deals), but it doesn't apply at the VC level. On that scale, every negotiation is unique.
The word "venture capitalist" is sometimes used loosely for any venture investor, but there is a sharp difference between VCs and other investors: VC firms are organized as funds, much like hedge funds or mutual funds. The fund managers, who are called "general partners," get about 2% of the fund annually as a management fee, plus about 20% of the fund's gains.
There is a very sharp dropoff in performance among VC firms, because in the VC business both success and failure are self-perpetuating. When an investment scores spectacularly, as Google did for Kleiner and Sequoia, it generates a lot of good publicity for the VCs. And many founders prefer to take money from successful VC firms, because of the legitimacy it confers. Hence a vicious (for the losers) cycle: VC firms that have been doing badly will only get the deals the bigger fish have rejected, causing them to continue to do badly.
In a sense, the lower-tier VC firms are a bargain for founders. They may not be quite as smart or as well connected as the big-name firms, but they are much hungrier for deals. This means you should be able to get better terms from them.
Better how? The most obvious is valuation: they'll take less of your company. But as well as money, there's power. I think founders will increasingly be able to stay on as CEO, and on terms that will make it fairly hard to fire them later.
The most dramatic change, I predict, is that VCs will allow founders to cash out partially by selling some of their stock direct to the VC firm. VCs have traditionally resisted letting founders get anything before the ultimate "liquidity event." But they're also desperate for deals. And the rule against buying stock from founders is a stupid one, this is a natural place for things to give as venture funding becomes more and more a seller's market.
The disadvantage of taking money from less known firms is that people will assume, correctly or not, that you were turned down by the more exalted ones. But, like where you went to college, the name of your VC stops mattering once you have some performance to measure. So the more confident you are, the less you need a brand-name VC.
Another danger of less known firms is that, like angels, they have less reputation to protect. I suspect it's the lower-tier firms that are responsible for most of the tricks that have given VCs such a bad reputation among hackers. They are doubly hosed: the general partners themselves are less able, and yet they have harder problems to solve, because the top VCs skim off all the best deals, leaving the lower-tier firms exactly the startups that are likely to blow up.
For example, lower-tier firms are much more likely to pretend to want to do a deal with you just to lock you up while they decide if they really want to. One experienced CFO said:
The better ones usually will not give a term sheet unless they really want to do a deal. The second or third tier firms have a much higher break rate—it could be as high as 50%.It's obvious why: the lower-tier firms' biggest fear, when chance throws them a bone, is that one of the big dogs will notice and take it away. The big dogs don't have worry about that.
Not all the people who work at VC firms are partners. Most firms also have a handful of junior employees called something like associates or analysts. If you get a call from a VC firm, go to their web site and check whether the person you talked to is a partner. Odds are it will be a junior person; they scour the web looking for startups their bosses could invest in. The junior people will tend to seem very positive about your company. They're not pretending; they want to believe you're a hot prospect, because it would be a huge coup for them if their firm invested in a company they discovered. Don't be misled by this optimism. It's the partners who decide, and they view things with a colder eye.
Like angels, VCs prefer to invest in deals that come to them through people they know. So while nearly all VC funds have some address you can send your business plan to, VCs privately admit the chance of getting funding by this route is near zero. One recently told me that he did not know a single startup that got funded this way.
One of the most difficult problems for startup founders is deciding when to approach VCs. You really only get one chance, because they rely heavily on first impressions. And you can't approach some and save others for later, because (a) they ask who else you've talked to and when and (b) they talk among themselves. If you're talking to one VC and he finds out that you were rejected by another several months ago, you'll definitely seem shopworn.
So when do you approach VCs? When you can convince them. If the founders have impressive resumes and the idea isn't hard to understand, you could approach VCs quite early. Whereas if the founders are unknown and the idea is very novel, you might have to launch the thing and show that users loved it before VCs would be convinced.
It is, unfortunately, common for VCs to put terms in an agreement whose consequences surprise founders later, and also common for VCs to defend things they do by saying that they're standard in the industry. Standard, schmandard; the whole industry is only a few decades old, and rapidly evolving. The concept of "standard" is a useful one when you're operating on a small scale (Y Combinator uses identical terms for every deal because for tiny seed-stage investments it's not worth the overhead of negotiating individual deals), but it doesn't apply at the VC level. On that scale, every negotiation is unique.
No comments:
Post a Comment