Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 12, 2014

They often create the biggest tensions between investors who are investing at different stages in the business. These tensions seep out in some angels or seed funds publicly or semi-privately deriding later-stage VCs for their “bad” behavior. I have seen bad behavior from later-stage VCs, believe me.

Technical Review 336

Technical Review Later Stage Early Stage LP 336

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 24, 2021

The culture is driven by the 20-something irreverent founder with huge technical chops who in a “David vs. Goliath” mythology take on the titans of industry and wins. But markets have changed and I think investors, founders and experienced executives who want to join later-stage startups can all benefit from playing the long game.

Venture Capital 363

Venture Capital LP Valuation Later Stage 363

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 4, 2013

What stage? Should I trust my instincts for founders and products or should I be more focused on the market size or business plan? When you are raising a large, later-stage round given by this time you’ve likely got a fairly large business to run. Your skills are much appreciated later in our business.

Early Stage 361

Early Stage Deal Flow Investment Bankers Technical Review 361

Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 31, 2019

The reality today is that capital is more available than ever and entrepreneurs have become more sophisticated, so founders are looking for more than just cash from their venture backers. I’ve seen many founders not fully grasp how the venture capital business works and what incentives investors have.

Lean 108

Lean Venture Capital Conversion IPO 108

YoungUpstarts

JUNE 1, 2016

by Krista Morgan, CEO and co-founder of P2BInvestor. Full disclosure – any kind of financing comes with costs, whether it’s interest payments, equity, and/or your very valuable time which, as an entrepreneur, is the thing you will always wish you had more of. Purchase order financing. Asset-based lending. Angel Investors.

Finance 100

Finance Angel Investor Cofounder Later Stage 100

Up and Running

DECEMBER 9, 2014

They cover funding for small businesses from the initial funding stage to later stages of growth, and other areas in between. Bates: Good morning and welcome to our CEO panel, “How to Fine-Tune Your Small Business Finances From Funding to Growth” which I think is the direction that we would all like to be going.

Small Business 95

Small Business Finance Forecast Metrics 95

Steve Blank

MAY 9, 2017

The founders were simply wrong about their assumptions about customer needs. It turns out the term “visionary founder” was usually a synonym for someone who was hallucinating. Founders Need to Run the Company Longer. So, almost like clockwork 20 th century startups fired the innovators/founders when they scaled.

Restful 222

Restful Silicon Valley Puerto Rico San Jose 222

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 27, 2013

In this period (less than 2 years) he has brought on incredibly talented senior execs is sales, marketing, product management, client services, finance, vp engineering and more. It consists of a highly intelligent and opinionated founder – Nick Halstead. In his spare time he raised nearly $30 million. It is really working.

Advisory Board 365

Advisory Board CTO Hire Fractional CTO Los Angeles 365

David Teten

MARCH 18, 2021

(co-written with Stephane Nasser , co-founder of OpenVC , an open-source initiative to collect and analyze all VC theses.). OpenVC is a new, open-source initiative to collect and analyze all publicly available VC theses, to help founders more efficiently find the right investors, and vice-versa. Technical founders .

Technical Review 78

Technical Review Cofounder Venture Capital Deal Flow 78

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 4, 2013

What stage? Should I trust my instincts for founders and products or should I be more focused on the market size or business plan? When you are raising a large, later-stage round given by this time you’ve likely got a fairly large business to run. Your skills are much appreciated later in our business.

Deal Flow 347

Deal Flow Early Stage Investment Bankers Technical Review 347

David Teten

JANUARY 21, 2021

This essay is part of a series on alternative VC: I: Revenue-Based Investing: a new option for founders who care about control. III: Why are Revenue-Based VCs investing in so many women and underrepresented founders? VI: Revenue-based financing: The next step for private equity and early-stage investment.

Equity 78

Equity Revenue Cofounder Colorado 78

Steve Blank

JUNE 15, 2010

So if you’re the founder of a startup, you may want to consider who you take money from. Is Your VC Founder Friendly? What startup stage do they typically invest in? How many of their founders are still with their company? Will they tailor your vesting to your contribution as a founder? Is it for your technology?

Founder 231

Founder Vesting Later Stage Early Stage 231

This is going to be BIG.

SEPTEMBER 30, 2012

Did I mention it only took the founder a month? David's firm most recently participated in the $77 million second round financing of SoFi, a one year old startup focusing on student loans. I suppose, more specifically, the bubble ended in the last two weeks of September--right after this financing. This is a relationship game.

Venture Capital 114

Venture Capital Marketing Term Sheet Software Review 114

Genuine VC

NOVEMBER 12, 2012

Dharmesh Shah had a great post up last week about the lessons learned from raising a mezzanine round of financing. However, there was one gem of a small section in there with a more widely acceptable takeaway: “It turns out that the terms from your Series A are most often cut and pasted into your later round deals.

Finance 128

Finance Mezzanine Valuation Seed Stage 128

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 27, 2021

We’ve had two companies where we had to bridge finance them several times before they eventually IPO’d We had a portfolio company turn-down a $350 million acquisition because they wanted at least $400 million. Consider: When GOAT started it was a restaurant reservation booking app called GrubWithUs … it’s now worth $3.7

Bankruptcy 294

Bankruptcy Bridge Financing Portfolio Angel Investor 294

YoungUpstarts

SEPTEMBER 3, 2018

by Shishir Dubey , founder and CEO of ChromeInfotech. Then you figure out all the finances. And lastly summarise all the above points for easy referencing at later stages. Shishir Dubey is the founder and CEO of ChromeInfotech , making mobile apps affordable and simple for small and enterprise businesses.

Mobile 113

Mobile Developer Social Media Later Stage 113

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 30, 2016

I have been evangelizing to founders for years to be more thoughtful about how startups update investors and run board meetings so I would be pretty hypocritical if I wasn’t willing to try and be more effective myself. And of course we put a few portfolio companies on stage each year to present to us and inspire us.

Community 150

Community Los Angeles LP Portfolio 150

VC Cafe

JANUARY 2, 2023

On a global level, venture financing of private companies dropped 33% year over year, from a record $733B in 2021 to $490B in 2022. As a result, I expect to see slower pace of investing across stages. Lower valuations , especially in later stage. We started to see down rounds taking place especially in growth stage.

Valuation 158

Valuation Down Round Venture Capital 158

Berkonomics

AUGUST 3, 2023

Some businesses require very little capital and the founder can self-finance the enterprise and retain 100% of its ownership and control from ignition through liquidity event (startup through sale). And even with the significant cost of credit card debt, many entrepreneurs aggressively use existing cards to finance a startup.

Private Equity 118

Private Equity Valuation Cap Table Accredited Investor 118

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 27, 2014

We both agree that the later-stage valuations are being driven up to a point that feels irrationally priced [he uses b-round SaaS valuations as an example and I am willing to be even more broad based]. He said that a16z prefers to invest earlier stage in these types of businesses. And we ended.

Valuation 309

Valuation Pre-Money Valuation Later Stage Non-Compete 309

David Teten

MAY 9, 2012

We are in the midst of two great disruptions to American business: the internet’s ongoing disruption of most traditional industries: finance, healthcare, retail, finance, fashion, etc. Founded in 1970, NAIC firms invest in venture (early stage/later stage) and private equity (growth/buyout/mezzanine/distressed/secondary funds).

Venture Capital 154

Venture Capital Programming Accredited Investor New York 154

David Teten

SEPTEMBER 5, 2014

Like many established finance & media companies, GLG knows that the tech startup sector is a growing part of the economy. Our founders realized that investors needed to learn interactively, on-demand, on very specific topics, and in an atmosphere of trust. Or, you can go straight to the source.

New York 114

New York Technical Review Networking Advisory Board 114

View from Seed

DECEMBER 6, 2018

Five years ago, as the mania around seed fundings was accelerating, Founders were very eager to announce their seed round to the world. It seemed like every other TechCrunch post was announcing a startups’s new seed financing round. Seed stage companies just aren’t announcing their rounds anymore. What’s going on?

Seed Stage 201

Seed Stage Stealth Seed Capital Later Stage 201

View from Seed

FEBRUARY 27, 2019

Given the common challenges encountered by founders as they navigate through this hiring decision, I thought I’d outline some of my thoughts below that can hopefully serve as a simple framework when it comes to making the first Analytics hire at your startup. Analytics vs. Finance?—?what’s what’s the difference (and what do you need)?

Analytics 149

Analytics Hiring SQL Forecast 149

David Teten

DECEMBER 3, 2019

Tim Friedman, Founder, PE Stack , said, “If I could offer one piece of advice to today’s managers, it would be to take the time to understand the demands of the modern institutional LP. Data companies focused on early-stage startups include Aingel , fundsUP , Preseries , PredictLeads , and Sploda. 3) Raise capital.

Technical Review 78

Technical Review Software Review Analytics Private Equity 78

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 5, 2011

I’ve decided to take all of my private conversations and subjective points-of-view on the topic and make them public in a keynote speech at the Founder Showcase in San Francisco on June 15th. The earlier you invest the higher the chances the company won’t work out and thus you pay a lower price than later-stage investors.

Pre-Money Valuation 336

Pre-Money Valuation Valuation Silicon Valley Stock 336

Reid Hoffman

JUNE 11, 2020

Why do you call Jeff a co-founder of LinkedIn, even though he joined when the company was already five years old? When a company no longer has active co-founders, the professional managers running it will focus on business metrics — EBITDA, revenue, CAC, LTV — business-oriented MBA stuff.

Cofounder 36

Cofounder Leadership Metrics Later Stage 36

Reid Hoffman

MARCH 9, 2021

Looking back, I believe that Jeff is one of most iconic, successful founders and CEOs of all time. Jeff is also one of the few founders I know of who sets OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) for his board members. A company has many different functional areas–sales, marketing, product, engineering, finance, operations, and so on.

Leadership 42

Leadership Technical Review Cofounder Later Stage 42

Austin Startup

JUNE 26, 2019

Many people have reached out sharing knowing and kind words about our journey and choice to wind down our venture, as well as their appreciation for my choice to pull back the curtain on what is statistically a common road for many founders. It details a landscape founders like me are excited to sink their teeth into? Of course not!

Silicon Valley 54

Silicon Valley Startup B2C Sweat Equity 54

VC Cafe

OCTOBER 29, 2020

Much of the growth in funding is attributed to later stage rounds (Next Insurance $250M, Snyk $200M, Gong.io $200, Redis Labs $100M, etc etc). Anecdotally, we see a lot of activity in seed and pre-seed financing at Remagine Ventures, with sizeable deals closing very quickly. billion) which was a record year.

Venture Capital 148

Venture Capital Angel Investor Later Stage 148

Gust

SEPTEMBER 5, 2012

How to finance a new seed-stage startup? ” Ressi in particular seems to be passionate about removing the “debt” component from convertible debt seed financing transactions. .” I won’t rehash all of the customary convertible note financing deal terms and points of negotiation here. (For

Finance 134

Finance Convertible Security Equity Seed Stage 134

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 27, 2016

I was asked again in an LP meeting later in the week and then again at a founder breakfast gathering we hosted yesterday. I know that sounds trite but it’s the best way I can describe my early-stage investments. I fall in love with both the founders and the concept. Early stage. I fall in love.”

Early Stage 254

Early Stage Non-Compete LP Later Stage 254

YoungUpstarts

JANUARY 9, 2017

by Tina Hay, founder and CEO of Napkin Finance. One of the most important factors in becoming a successful entrepreneur is managing finances. Whether early or later-stage, the growth of every company most often depends on how much capital is available to fund its growth.

Burn Rate 100

Burn Rate B2C Finance Later Stage 100

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 23, 2015

For some aspiring to be tech entrepreneurs, I often suggest a two-step process, as I argued in this post that “ The First Startup Founder You Need to Invest in Is You.” The narrative of this discussion is something like this: I meet a 35-40-year-old founder with two kids and mortgage. ” (Warren Buffett).

Technical Review 150

Technical Review Liquidation Preference Silicon Valley IP 150

Feld Thoughts

JULY 13, 2014

But I’ve also invested in a number of companies that have had exits between $100m and $1b that resulted in much larger returns for me, both on an absolute basis as well as a relative basis, than unicorns have for their later stage investors. Nor do we care – we are much more focused on the product and the founders.

Later Stage 195

Later Stage Early Stage Valuation Seed Stage 195

Gust

OCTOBER 3, 2011

For a first time entrepreneur trying to figure out the arcane world of startup financing, it can be very confusing to understand the roles that different types of investors play in funding promising companies, as well as the point in a company’s life at which they enter the stage.

Finance 70

Finance Venture Capital Intellectual Property Early Stage 70

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 21, 2018

He was in a later-stage financing round and was talking with many investors. I recommended that the founder politely cancel the call because we had other great firms actually taking meetings. “If I was recently with an entrepreneur and talking with him about his fund raising process. How was I sure that would happen?

Term Sheet 217

Term Sheet Later Stage Demand Email 217