Category: Venture Capital

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The Goosebump Test

Ever since I started my career in VC, I’ve been trying to understand the concept of “intuition”. Yet, it wasn’t after I’d seen over 500 pitch decks and met over 100 founders before I began to have an inkling of what intuition meant. In fact, embarrassingly so, when I first started at SkyDeck, Berkeley’s startup accelerator, I thought every other startup I met was gonna be a winner. After all, it was rather rare that a founder wouldn’t be excited about their idea at the first meeting. I was told again and again by investors, one of the key drivers for a startup is the founder’s passion. I thought, well, the numbers might not be there yet. But with this founder’s excitement, they’ll get there eventually. And quickly, I mistook “hopefully” as “eventually”. Two words with very different meanings.

You don’t have to be a full-time investor to know that I was quite off the mark. I soon and quickly learned that passion can be faked, especially in the first meeting. And on that journey, I realized how important having a large and deep sample size was. Large, in the sense of number of founding teams I was meeting. Deep, in the sense of spending longer hours with these teams. Of course, realistically, I couldn’t spend more time with everyone I met, but that also meant I shouldn’t just spend half an hour with them and call it a day. My general rule of thumb became I was going to meet every founder at least twice, and at least a week apart. This gave me:

  1. Time to cool my head from the excitement of the meeting
    • Am I more, less, or just as excited to meet them in meeting two as I was in meeting one?
    • If I were [insert my mentor’s name], would I do the deal? Why or why not?
      • Sometimes, it was really helpful to put myself in the shoes of someone’s who’s way more experienced than I am.
  2. Time to approach the opportunity more analytically
    • Does it align with the macro trends I’ve seen?
    • Do they have some early semblance of product-market fit? Why can that be an early proxy for it?
    • Would I be a power user?
    • Is their origin story enough to compel them towards this idea for the next 7-10 years? Are they meant/”destined” to do this?
    • Would they be able to succeed without me? Without funding?
    • Is venture funding a path they need to take towards growth? What about equity crowdfunding? Bootstrapping? Reaching profitability via a tweak in their business model?

Of course, there were, are, and will be exceptions.

Alfred Chuang of Race Capital recently shared his “co-founder test”: “People asked me so well, how do you determine this is a company you want to invest in. In early stage, I say if this company I want to co-founded with, that I will, in any moment jump on my own two feet in the building, the company would have found this, I don’t do it. Wow. Right. That’s where the conviction come from. Right? This is the ultimate gut test, you don’t pass that gut test, you don’t do it. So I urge the founders on either side to say, Well, think of me as your co-founder. If you don’t think of me as a co-founder, don’t do the deal with me.”

I recently tuned into one of Basecamp‘s Jason Fried‘s latest interviews, in which he describes how he chooses to pursue projects based on feel. Particularly when he gets the goosebumps. Similar to him, and I’m sure many others, I regret far more of what I say yes to than what I say no to. It’s not that I jump in knowing I will regret my decision. In fact, I’m usually pretty sure I won’t. Nevertheless, in only a rare few circumstances, is it a full-body yes, as Tim Ferriss would call it. VCs, as with any investor or buyer, aren’t immune to buyer’s remorse.

When imagining what could go right – the greatest, most impactful possible upside, does it send happy chills down my spine? Am I riffing off their energy and actively throwing ideas out? Am I unconsciously trying to hit my limit on words per minute? If so…

Some investors call it intuition. Others call it conviction. I’m gonna need my own pretentious phrase. Let’s call it the goosebump test.

My goosebumps will undoubtedly evolve over time. It will react to new stimuli, based on my accumulated knowledge and experience. It will also learn from the scar tissue that will form in the future. While I will try to follow my goosebumps as much as I can, they will undoubtedly also fail me at times. Just like how I wouldn’t be as excited now by some of the startups that got me excited back at SkyDeck, I imagine there will be a healthy handful that I do now that my body will learn from in the future. And I will continue to do my best to codify my learnings and share my scar tissue for myself and on this blog over time.

Photo by Stephen Leonardi on Unsplash

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Think like an LP to Get a Job in VC

I want to preface this piece by first saying, though I have LP (limited partner) friends, I’ve never been an LP. So take everything with a grain of salt. For that matter, even I have been an LP, still take this with a grain of salt. After all it’s just my one perspective on the world. Nevertheless, I hope this perspective helps to provide some context around the venture space. As it did for me.

For years, I’ve recommended my friends who were looking at startup job opportunities to think like a VC. And having chatted a number of firms over the years about scout, associate/analyst, venture partner roles, I’ve come to a new revelation. Or rather one that I’ve practiced for a while, but haven’t connected the dots until recently.

When you’re looking for VC job opportunities, think like an LP. I’ve written about the LP calculus a few times before, like:

Here are some questions I usually consider:

  • How have you thought about your own differentiation that gets you access to some of the uniquely fund-defining opportunities you have?
  • What are the startups in your anti-portfolio? And what have you learned since from them?
  • [if their funds are wildly different in fund size (i.e. Fund I – $20M, Fund II – $100M)] How do you think about fund strategy now versus Fund [t_now-1]?
    • For context, usually each subsequent fund doubles in size. i.e. Fund I $20M, Fund II $40-50M, Fund III $80-100M
  • [If they have fund advisors, EIRs, and/or scouts] How do you pick advisors? What is your mental model for picking scouts?
    • Or one of my favorite phrasings: How do you differentiate the good from the great [advisors/scouts]?

Over the weekend, my friend sent me a great podcast for me to unwind. In it, I found an unlikely hero soundbite. “Your library holds a lot of value that you may not know until the story arrives. […] No one’s selling characters ’cause they’re one story away from this character becoming a hit.” While its context is related to why Marvel won’t sell any of its superheroes, Alex Segura‘s, co-president of Archie Comic Publications, anecdote proves just as insightful to the world of venture.

Discovering first-time early-stage founders is hard. The same is true for finding the next killer GP or venture firm. AngelList’s Rolling Funds are democratizing access to capital, lowering the barrier to entry for emerging fund managers. And really the success of a fund is determined by its MOIC – multiple on invested capital. 5x and up would be ideal. And that, like I mentioned in my last blogpost, boils down to the fund’s top one or two winners. Loosely analogized to a fund’s unicorn rate (percent of portfolio that are unicorns). In other words, the “one [investment] away from this [fund] becoming a hit.”

To see if a fund can consistently find those stories boils down to its systems. Often times, you’re joining a fund that has yet to have a runaway success. Or a fund that has a fund returner. So, instead, you’re looking at their thesis and if their thesis allows them to be:

  1. The best dollar on the cap table of a startup in their scope
  2. Forward-thinking enough to see where the market is heading, rather than where it’s been
    • And by definition of being forward-thinking, taking bets/risks that few other VCs would, yet calculated enough to make logical sense given the trajectory of the market. In other words, is the thesis grounded on first principles, yet able to capture their second-order effects?
    • That, in turn, requires you as a VC applicant to have decent literacy in the market the firm is betting in.

As James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, wrote, “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.” What are their mental models? Fund strategy? How do they think about portfolio construction? About capital allocation? And more importantly, time allocation?

If you’re looking to learn more about GP-LP dynamics, I highly recommend Samir Kaji’s Venture Unlocked podcast and Notation Capital’s Origins podcast.

Photo by Micheile Henderson on Unsplash

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Why Should the Investor NPS Score Exist?

I’ve written about product-market fit on numerous occasions including in the context of metrics, pricing, PMF mindsets, just to name a few. And one of the leading ways to measure PMF is still NPS – the net promoter score. The question: On a scale of one to ten, how likely would you recommend this product to a friend?

As investors, while a lagging indicator, it’s a metric we expect founders to have their finger always on the pulse for their customers. Yet how often do investors measure their own NPS? How likely would you, the founder, recommend this fund/firm/partner(s) to your founder friend(s)?

Let’s look for a second from the investor side of the table…

Mike Maples Jr. of Floodgate pioneered the saying, “Your fund size is your strategy.” Your fund size determines your check size and what’s the minimum you need to return. For example, if you have a $10M pre-seed fund, you might be writing 20 $250K checks and have a 1:1 reserve ratio (aka 50% of your funds are for follow-on investments, like exercising your pro rata or round extensions). Equally so, to have a great multiple on invested capital (MOIC) of 5x, you need to return $50M. So if you have a 10% ownership target, you’re investing in companies valued around $2.5M. If two of your companies exit at $200M acquisition, you return $20M each, effectively quadrupling your fund. You only need a couple more exits to make that 5x for your LPs. And that’s discounting dilution.

On the flip side, if you have a $100M fund with a $2-3M check size and a 20% ownership target, you’re investing in $10-15M companies. Let’s say your shares dilute down to 10% by the time of a company’s exit. If they exit at unicorn status, aka $1B, you’ve only returned your fund. Nothing more, nothing less. Meaning you’ll have to chase either bigger exits, or more unicorns. But that’s hard to do. Even one of the best in the industry, Sequoia, has around a 5% unicorn rate. Or in other words, of every 20 companies Sequoia invests in, one is a unicorn. And that means they have really good deal flow. Y Combinator and SV Angel, who have a different fund strategy from Sequoia, sitting upstream, have around 1%.

Erik Torenberg of Village Global further elaborated in a tweet:

And, Jason M. Lemkin of SaaStr tweeted:

Why does a VC’s fund strategy matter to you as the founder?

A fund with a heavily diversified portfolio, like an angel’s or accelerator’s or participating investors (as opposed to leads), means they have less time and resources to allocate to each portfolio startup. The greater the portfolio size, the less help on average each startup team will get. That’s not to say you shouldn’t seek funding from funds with large AUMs (assets under management). One example is if you have an extremely passionate champion of your space/product at these large funds, I’d go with it.

I wrote late last year about founder-investor fit. And in it, I talk about Harry Hurst‘s check-size-to-helpfulness ratio (CS:H). In this ratio, you’re trying to maximize for helpfulness. Ideally, if the fund writes you a $1M check, they’re adding in $10M+ in additive value. And based on a fund’s strategy (i.e. lead investors vs not, $250K or $5M checks, scout programs or solo capitalist + advisory networks, etc.), it’ll determine how helpful they can be to you at the stage you need them.

If you were to plan out your next 18-24 months, take your top three priorities. And specifically, find investors that can help you address those. For example, if you’re looking for intros to potential companies in your sales pipeline and all a VC has to do is send a warm intro to their network/portfolio for you, bigger funds might be more useful. On the other hand, if you’re struggling to find a revenue model for your business, and you need more help than one-offs and quarterly board meetings, I’d look to work with an investor with a smaller portfolio or a solo capitalist. If you’re creating a brand new market, find someone with deep operating experience and domain expertise (even if it’s in an adjacent market), rather than a generalist fund.

While there’s no one-size-fits-all and there are exceptions, here are two ways I think about helpfulness, in other words, value adds:

  1. The uncommon – Differentiators
  2. The common – What everybody else is doing

The uncommon

Of course, this might be the more obvious of the pair. But you’d be surprised at how many founders overlook this when they’re actually fundraising. You want to work with investors that have key differentiators that you need at that stage of your company. By nature of being uncommon, there are million out there. But here are a few examples I’ve seen over the years:

  • Ability to build communities having built large followings
  • Content creation + following (i.e. blog, podcast, Clubhouse, etc.)
  • Getting in’s to top executives at Fortune 500 companies
  • Closing government contracts
  • Access/domain expertise on international markets
  • In-house production teams
  • They know how to hustle (i.e. Didn’t have a traditional path to VC, yet have some of the biggest and best LPs out there in their fund)
  • Ability to get you on the front page of NY Times, WSJ, or TechCrunch
  • Strong network of top executives looking for new opportunities (i.e. EIRs, XIRs)
  • Influencer network
  • Category leaders/definers (i.e. Li Jin on the passion economy, Ryan Hoover on communities)
  • Having all accelerator portfolio founder live under the same roof for the duration of the program (i.e. Wefunder’s XX Fund pre-pandemic)
  • Surprisingly, not as common as I thought, VCs that pick up your call “after hours”

The common

Packy McCormick, who writes this amazing blog called Not Boring, wrote in one of his pieces, “Here’s the hard thing about easy things: if everyone can do something, there’s no advantage to doing it, but you still have to do it anyway just to keep up.” Although Packy said it in context to founders, I believe the same is true for VCs. Which is probably why we’ve seen this proliferation of VCs claiming to be “founder-friendly” or “founder-first” in the past half decade. While it used to be a differentiator, it no longer is. Other things include:

  • Money, maybe follow-on investments
  • Access to the VC’s network (i.e. potential customers, advisors, etc.)
  • Access to the partner(s) experience
  • Intros to downstream investors

That said, if an investor is trying to cover all their bases, that is a strategy not to lose rather than a strategy to win, to quote the conversation I had with angel investor Alex Sok recently. As long as it doesn’t come at the expense of their key differentiator. At the same time, it’s important to understand that most VCs will not allocate the same time and energy to every founder in their portfolio. If they are, well, it might be worth reconsidering working with them. It’s great if you’re not a rock-star unicorn. Means you still get the attention and help that you might want. But if you are off to the races and looking to scale and build fast, you won’t get any more help and attention that you’re ‘prescribed’. If you’re winning, you probably want your investor to double down on you.

Even if you’re not, the best investors will still be around to be as helpful as they can, just in more limited spans of time.

Finding investor NPS

You can find CS:H, or investor NPS, out in a couple of ways:

  • The investors are already adding value to you and your company before investing. Uncommon, but it really gives you a good idea on their value.
  • You find out by asking portfolio founders during your diligence.
  • Your founder friends are highly recommending said investor to you.

Then there’s probably the best form of validation. I’ve shared this before, but I still think it’s one of the best indicators of investor NPS. Blake Robbins once quoted Brett deMarrais of Ludlow Ventures, “There is no greater compliment, as a VC, than when a founder you passed on — still sends you deal-flow and introductions.”

In closing

“How likely would you, the founder, recommend this fund/firm/partner(s) to your founder friend(s)?” is a great question to consider when fundraising. But I want to take it a step further. NPS is usually measured on a one to ten scale. But the numbering mechanic is rather nebulous. For instance, an 8/10 on my scale may not equal an 8/10 on your scale. So your net promoter score is more so a guesstimate of the true score. While any surveying question is more or less a guesstimate, I believe this question is more actionable than the above:

If you were to start a new company tomorrow, would you still want this investor on your cap table?

With three options:

  • No
  • Yes
  • It’s a no-brainer.

And if you get two or more “no-brainers”, particularly from (ex-)portfolio startups that fizzled off into obscurity, I’d be pretty excited to work with that investor.

Photo by Laurice Manaligod on Unsplash

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A Strategy to Win Versus A Strategy Not to Lose w/ Alex Sok

For a number of friends and founders I’ve chatted this with, I’ve been a big fan of the concept of “winning versus not losing”. Ever since I heard back in 2018. In an interview with Tim Ferriss, Ann Miura-Ko of Floodgate said, “This is probably the hardest piece – knowing the difference between a winning strategy versus a strategy not to lose. […] Not losing often involves a lot of hedging. And when you feel that urge to hedge, you need to focus. You need to be offensive.”

There are a few great examples of what differentiates winning and not losing from both Tim and Ann in that interview. For instance, a lack of focus by going after two different market segments is a strategy not to lose. “The reason why that’s really hedging is you have two completely different ways of selling to those organizations and you’re afraid to pick one because maybe you have some revenue in both.”

My college friend recently connected me with entrepreneur, designer, angel investor, Alex Sok. Both of us found unlikely common ground in using sports analogies to relate to building a company. Me, swimming (e.g. here and here). Alex, football. Specifically, American football. Having been a quarterback for his school’s football team back in the day, he said something quite fascinating, “You can’t win in the first quarter, but you can lose in the first quarter.” And you know me, I had to double click on that.

I was previously under the assumption that you only needed a strategy to win, but not to lose. But as all generalizations that start with the word “only”, I was wrong. And Alex contextualized it for me – that sometimes you do need to think about how not to “lose”.

Winning versus not losing

“You can’t win in the first quarter, but you can lose in the first quarter.”

Throwing the ball deep for your running back to make the touchdown is a strategy to win. On the flip side, if you don’t convert on the third down, you’re going to lose. You may not win, but if you don’t, you could very much lose. Not all mistakes carry the same gravitas. Some mistakes can be detrimental; most mistakes aren’t. Just because you’re making sure that you convert on the third down does not mean you can’t still swing for the fences.

For founders, losing in the first quarter is akin to:

  • Burning through your seed funding in six months;
  • Hiring four professional executives before you get to product-market fit;
  • Not talking to your customers;
  • There is no one in the room who can tackle the biggest risk of the business (i.e. no engineer when you’re building an AI solution, or no one who can do sales when you’re an enterprise tech company)

You’re still aiming high, but that doesn’t mean you should burden yourself with an astronomical burn rate.

“Game plans will have to vary depending on your market or product. Key fundamental traits that increase the probability of failure will always be present. It’s important to identify which ones matter most in relation to the game plan,” says Alex. “A tough defense or go-to-market means being more focused on identifying which channels to pursue and then doubling down if it works out.”

On the flip side, “an aggressive defense or burgeoning industry might mean taking more chances but setting up plays wisely to take advantage of their aggressive, risk-taking nature. This will force the defense to settle down and play you more honestly. In startup terms, that might mean steady progress and growth with a few deep shots to achieve escape velocity from your competitors.”

Not to get forget about winning

You’ve probably heard of the saying, “If you want your company to truly scale, you have to do things that don’t scale.” Especially in the zero to one phase. From idea to product-market fit. Many of us in venture break down the early life cycle of a company by zero-to-one and one-to-infinity. The first “half” is doing things that don’t scale. Figuring out what frustrations your customers are going through. Getting that pedometer up on the street yourself. Daniel Kahneman wrote in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, “Acquisition of skills requires a regular environment, an adequate opportunity to practice, and rapid and unequivocal feedback about the correctness of thoughts and actions.”

Here are a few examples:

In the early days of Airbnb, Brian, Joe, and Nathan used to visit early Airbnb hosts with a rented DSLR to photograph their houses.

For Stripe, the founders manually onboarded every merchant to deliver “instant” merchant accounts. Of course, the Collison brothers took it a step further to mint the term “Collison installation”. Usually when founders ask early leads “Will you try our beta?”, if people say yes, then they say, “Great, we’ll send you a link.” Rather, Patrick and John said, “Right then, give me your laptop” and set it up for them right then and there.

At Doordash, they found restaurant menu PDFs online, created landing pages, put their personal number out there for people to call, and personally executed deliveries within the day.

To get his first 2000 users, Ryan at Product Hunt wrote handcrafted emails to early users and reporters to grow what started off as an email list.

Similarly, in football, teams often spend the first half of the game feeling out their opponents. Their strengths, their weaknesses. And the back half, doubling down on where your opponents fall short on. While not your opponents, founders should be spending the first half feeling out their market. Be scrappy. Nothing that’ll make you lose in the first quarter, but make mistakes. Give your team and yourself a 10-20% error rate. One of your greatest superpowers as a small team is your ability to move fast. Use it to your advantage.

Paul Graham once wrote, “Tim Cook doesn’t send you a hand-written note after you buy a laptop. He can’t. But you can. That’s one advantage of being small: you can provide a level of service no big company can.”

In closing

Alex said, “In order to be a dominant offense, you have to force the defense to cover every inch of the field.” If you only throw long, then your opponents will only need to cover long. If you only throw to the left, they only have to cover left. But if you have a diversified strategy, your opponents will have to cover every inch of the field. And to win, all you need is for your opponents to hesitate for half a second. And with a laser-focused strategy, that’s all you need to break through against your incumbents. Your incumbents often have bigger teams, can attract more talent, have deeper pockets, and the list goes on.

As a small team, you’re on offense. You can’t cover every inch of the field, and neither do you need to. You just need to be a single running back who makes it past a wall of linebackers. To do that, you need focus. As Tim Ferriss recently said on the Starting Greatness podcast, “the biggest risk to your startup is your distraction.” And it’s not just you and your team, but also the investors you bring on. Sammy Abdullah of Blossom Street Ventures wrote that the question you need to be asking yourself about your investors is: “Are you going to distract me from running the business and will you be candid with me when I have a problem?”

Focus. If you’re focusing on everything, you’re focusing on nothing. You have no room to hesitate, but it’s exactly what you want your competitors to do. That half a second on the field is about two years in the venture world. Or until you can find your product-market fit. Until you reach scale. Until you reach the “one” in zero-to-one. ‘Cause once you’re there, you just need to put your head down and run. And it’s the beginning of something defensible. Of something you can win with.

If you’re curious about taking a deeper dive on product-market fit, I recommend checking out some of my other essays:

Photo by Joe Calomeni from Pexels

Thank you Alex for helping me with early drafts of this essay!

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#unfiltered #42 The Miracle that Catalyzes the Hero’s Journey

In the venture world, the word timing is thrown around in a very canonical way. Many investors and founders mythologize the concept of timing around a business. While there is some science and data that might be able to point in the general direction, success is a lagging indicator of timing. And arguably, the only way anyone can really determine if the timing is right or not is in hindsight. Investors that said they knew the exact timing of the market may just be attributing their success to survivorship bias.

To analogize it, it’s the same as knowing when to invest in the market or in a particular stock. Everyone wants to buy at the lowest, sell at the highest. Your ROI is positively correlated with the sell price, and negatively correlated with the buy price. But when is the lowest? No one really knows for certain. We can guesstimate a timeframe with reasonable confidence, but that’s the best we can do. The same is true for measuring timing in the market. Yet there is one thing that I’ve come to learn in my years in the venture world that’s as close as you can get to the “true” timing of the market. A miracle.

Let me explain.

One miracle

Every startup needs one miracle to succeed. One. No more. No less. Elad Gil said in an interview with James Currier at nfx, “Every startup needs to have a single miracle… If your startup needs zero miracles to work, it probably isn’t a defensible startup. If your startup needs multiple miracles, it probably isn’t going to work.” He further elaborates, “If you have more than one, you have compounding small odds and that means you’re very, very likely to fail.”

Before that miracle, if you’re truly creating a revolutionary business, by definition, you’re in the non-consensus. You have more non-believers than you do believers. If it were an obvious business, then everyone would do it. If everyone does it, economically-speaking, the ROI is low. In a situation, where every kid sells lemonade with the exact same recipe by the street corner, everyone is fighting for the exact same customers. Eventually, it’ll lead to a race to the bottom.

That single miracle is going to be that trial by fire. The true test of grit and founder obsession. That trial, whenever it is, predictable or not, determines if your product will stay a niche idea (and possible fizzle into obscurity) or a business that will change the world. For you and your business, that miracle could have been catalyzed by the pandemic, the GME short squeeze, ’08 recession (if you’re an older business), the inauguration, or something yet to come. The question is: How do you respond in the face of adversity?

Why is that miracle important?

Tim Ferriss once said, “Your superpower is very often right next to your wound, like your biggest wound. […] They’re often two sides of the same coin.” If you can survive and conquer that trial, the miracle – your superpower – becomes one of your strongest moats. The lessons you learned, the trust you (re)built, and the legacy you begin to construct. Those lessons – those earned secrets – while not impervious, will ideally be incredibly hard to obtain for others without walking through fire. A metamorphic journey from a vulnerable caterpillar to a beautiful monarch. What Joseph Campbell calls the “hero’s journey“.

And in the longer time horizon, that you are no longer just the protagonist of that miracle, but that you are also a producer of miracles for others. You are then capable of minting miracles systematically. Be it your customers, your team members, and your investors.

Why #unfiltered?

You might be wondering why I tagged this essay as #unfiltered. Frankly, it’s a new unrefined hypothesis that I’ve been playing around with. While it’s been inspired by others, I believe there’s more nuance I still need to uncover as well. That I’ll need to test a bit more to see if it can be a more robust thesis.

Going forward, I will continue to ask founders questions like:

  • What is the origin story of this idea?
  • If you were to fail in 18 months, what would be the most likely reason why?
  • Conversely, if you were to wildly succeed in that same time frame, what would be the biggest contributor?
  • Why are you a different person today than when you started this business? Who/what catalyzed this/these change(s)?
    • Examples of who: customers, team, partners, investors
    • Examples of what: black swan events, market trends, socio-economic habits, new technologies, an inflection point in your life when you faced impossible odds, failures, etc.

But I’ll be particularly looking for the earned secret among a miracle of adversity. Simply put, I’m looking to hear this song play in the background. The beginning of a mythical legend in the making.

Cover photo by Jon Ander on Unsplash

#unfiltered is a series where I share my raw thoughts and unfiltered commentary about anything and everything. It’s not designed to go down smoothly like the best cup of cappuccino you’ve ever had (although here‘s where I found mine), more like the lonely coffee bean still struggling to find its identity (which also may one day find its way into a more thesis-driven blogpost). Who knows? The possibilities are endless.

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Should you take VC money or just money money?

Not too long ago, I came across a question on Quora that I had to double click on: Why should founders care about VC brand? Money is money, isn’t it? While the question itself seemed to have a come from a less-informed perspective, I found it to be a useful exercise to once again go through the checklist of founder-investor fit.

Money, frankly, is just money. A Benjamin will look the same and work the same as any other Benjamin out there. Assuming you don’t need anything else other than money, I’d recommend other sources of funding other than venture funding, i.e.:

  • (Equity) crowdfunding,
  • Rev share,
  • Angels – high net-worth individuals who write checks in the 1000s to 10s of 1000s of dollars;
    • Also worth looking into, but are representative of the VC model, are super angels and solo capitalists. Many of whom might be leading their own rolling funds (more context) now;
  • SBA Loans;
  • Friends/family – small sums of money, unless your dad is Chamath Palihapitiya;
  • ICO;
  • Government (public) and private grants – really small sums of money, but money nonetheless;
  • Accelerators/incubators – less upfront capital. But the partnerships they have with other startup services save you a lot of money (i.e. AWS, Adobe Suite, etc.);
  • Selling domain names (yes, I have a friend who initially funded his business by doing that, but other than that, I’m kidding);
  • And I’m sure I missed some others out there.

On the other hand, most founders who raise VC funding want something more than just monetary capital, including, but not limited to:

  • Mentorship/advisorship –
    • Ex-operators who can give you tactical advice,
    • Former founders who can empathize with you,
    • VCs who can check your blind side and had previous portfolio founders who have gone through what you’re going through now,
    • People who have access to resources that will aid you on the founding journey (ideally not distract you),
    • And frankly, people who’ll be there for you when you have to make the tough calls,
    • Highly recommend Harry Hurst’s tweet about the CS:H ratio (check size: helpfulness, which I elaborate on here) as a mental model to figure out which VCs depending on fund size/check size can help you the founder the most at the stage you’re at.
  • Network – downstream investors, sales pipeline, potential hires (eng, executives, growth, product, marketing, etc)
  • Brand/PR –
    • If you’re trying to fill up a round, a brand name investor can easily help you fill in the rest of the round with their network and their participation alone. They’ll also help you raise downstream capital – directly or indirectly.
    • It’ll be easier to find customers. With a brand name VC, you also get quite a bit of media attention from Forbes, TC, NY Times, and so on. Customers are more likely to trust you knowing that you’re backed by a recognizable brand, especially the folks on the other side of the chasm on the adoption curve.
    • It’ll be easier to hire world-class talent. Your business, in their mind, is less likely to go out of business tomorrow. And while you’re not looking for candidates who seek stability, it does give the candidates you do want to hire a peace of mind and confidence that you have external validation.

There’s a saying that the difference between a hallucination and a vision is that other people can see the latter. It’s really a chicken and egg problem. I’m not saying a VC’s brand will guarantee the success of your startup, but I do believe it will help, with the underlying assumption that you pick the right VC. Whereas it used to be a differentiator a decade ago, all VCs these days say they’re founder-first or founder-friendly. But unfortunately not all are. They might be if things are going well. But the true tells are what happens when things don’t go well. Here are some of my favorite questions to ask portfolio founders before you work with a VC. And how to find founder-investor fit.

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One of the Toughest Job Requirements to be a VC

I passed on a deal.

Every time I think it’s easier to say “pass on the good to make space for the great”, the world says you’re wrong. Last week, once again, I realized how hard it was to say “No”.

We’d been chatting for a few months now. They were raising a pre-seed. And they checked most of the boxes I look for in an epic founding team:

  • Spent time in the idea maze and deep domain expertise,
  • Had a unique insight which led to innovation in their business model,
    • Because I didn’t know their market well enough, I hesitate to say if this was an earned secret or just a lesser-known fact that an outsider would never hear about. The difference between, what Kanyi Maqubela at Kindred Ventures, a mystery and a secret.
  • Consistently followed through with their promises and commitments (to me),
  • Dreamed big – big TAM, big vision,
  • Hustled to build relationships with some of the largest enterprise customers in their sector (though, yet to close any contracts),
  • Onboarded some incredible talent,
    • As I heard on my buddy’s podcast recently, “you can only learn from experience, but it doesn’t have to be yours.

I’ve written more here about what I look for.

Over the past few months, I asked for more time in hopes to find something more. Admittedly, I could think of a million excuses. And I have. I could have said:

  • They’re too early, since I rarely do pre-seed deals these days.
  • Or it’s the lack of traction.
  • Maybe that they could be more articulate about their go-to-market and product-market fit.
  • Maybe it’s the fact that at an early stage, that they have both a CEO and president. In other words, competing personalities in leadership.
  • Surprisingly large team for pre-seed startup.
  • Or, simply, I don’t know their space well enough, albeit adjacent to mine.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized I was just making excuses. I could circumvent most of these “reasons” with just a little effort on my part. And the fact that I was introduced to them by someone I really respect in the industry didn’t make it any easier. In fact, that alone was one of the strongest driving forces for me to want this deal to work out. The truth is, I just wasn’t excited about the product. And I had been spending time – arguably wasting theirs – trying to find my excitement. But I couldn’t, no matter how hard I tried.

I know it may be completely self-serving here. Call it immaturity or naivete. As a scout, I live by a self-imposed rule that every deal I refer, I want to be their greatest champion – their greatest evangelist – when I do so. In other words, if I had the capital, I would invest in each and every one I refer. On the same token, every deal I refer is just the start of an exciting long-term relationship. Post-referral, during diligence, post-investment and even if the deal doesn’t close. But for this startup, I just felt myself dragging my feet through knee-deep water just to meet with them over time.

Thinking I was in over my head, I hit up two mentors of mine in the space to give me the reality check I thought I needed. I thought and was, borderline, hoping they’d say, “You’re a sucker to bring personal emotions into an investment.” Or “Suck it up. Stop being a millennial/snowflake.” But neither did. I also told another friend last night and she replied, “It’s what makes you human. And I think people need to know about this side of VC.”

So, I’m writing this now in hopes that it will contextualize some of the decisions we make on this side of the table. I made the decision with the expectation that I’d be forgotten or passed on by them when they raise a future round. If they ask me again, it’ll be an honor and a privilege. And maybe my disposition will change in 1-2 years’ time. But it’s naive of me to expect that. Nevertheless, I still wish them the absolute best, and I hope they become the rock-star success they set out to be.

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The Smoke Signals of a Great Startup From the Lens of the Pitch Deck

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Founders often ask me, what slides on my pitch deck do I have to make sure I get right? The short answer, all of them. Then again, if you’re focusing on all of them, you’re focusing on none of them. So I’ll break it down by fundraising stages:

  1. Pre-seed/seed (might as well include angels here too)
  2. Series A/B

Since I spend almost no time in the later stages, I’ll refrain from extrapolating from any anecdotes there.

If you’re using DocSend, you already have the numbers for your deck viewership in front of you. As DocSend’s CEO Russ Heddleston said in his interview with Jason Calacanis, VCs often spend ~3.5 minutes on your deck. Though I’ve never timed myself, it seems to be in the same ballpark for myself as well. After all, it’s the deck that gets the meeting, not the deck that determines if you get funding or not.

Nevertheless, I hope the below contextualizes the time spent beyond the numbers, and what goes on in an investor’s head when we’re skimming through.

Pre-seed/seed

Team

  1. What is the biggest risk this business is taking on?
  2. Is the person who can address the biggest risk of this business on this slide?
    • And does this person have decision-making power?

Let’s say your biggest risk is that you’re creating a market where there isn’t one. Do you have that marketing/positioning specialist – either yourself or on your team – to tackle this problem? As much as I love techies, three CS PhDs are going to give me doubts.

Similarly, the biggest risk for a hypothetical enterprise SaaS business is often a sales risk. Then I need proof either via your network/experience or LOIs (letters of intent) that you have corporations who will buy your product.

Or if it’s a tech risk, I’ll be hesitant if I see two MBAs pursuing this. Even if their first hire is an ML engineer, who owns 2% of the business. Because it doesn’t sound like the one person who can solve the biggest risk for the business has been given the trust to make the decisions that will move the needle.

This might be a bit controversial, but having talked with several VCs, I know I’m not alone here. I don’t care about quantity – number of years in the industry or at X company. Maybe a little more if you were a founding team member who helped scale a startup to $100M ARR. I do care for quality – your earned secret, which bleeds into the next slide.

Solution/product

The million-dollar question here is: What do you know that makes money that everyone else is overlooking, underestimating, or just totally missed? If you’re a frequent reader of this blog, you’ll be no stranger to this question. I’ve talked about it here and here, just to name a few.

Or in other words, having spent time in the idea maze, what is your earned secret? Here are two more ways of looking at it is:

  1. Is there an inflection point you found, as Mike Maples Jr. of Floodgate calls it, in the socio-economic/technological trends that makes the future you speak of more probable?
  2. Is it a process/mental model that you’ve built over X years in the industry that grafts extremely well to an adjacent or a broader industry?

I believe that’s what’ll greatly increase the chances of your startup winning. Or at least hold your incumbents at bay until you reach product-market fit. If you’re able to find the first insight, then you’ll be able to find the second. And by pattern recognition, you’ll be able to find the third, fourth, and fifth in extreme velocity. It’s what we, on the VC side, call insight development. And your product/solution is the culmination of everything you and your team has learned faster and better than your competitors.

Of course, your product still has to address your customers’ greatest pain points. You don’t have to be the best at everything, but you have to be the best (or the only) one who can solve your customers’ greatest frustration. So VCs, in studying how you plot out the user journey, look for: do you actually solve what you claim this massive problem in the market is?

Series A/B

Traction

  • What are your unit economics? I’m looking for something along the lines of LTV:CAC ~3-5x.
  • Who’s paying?
    • For enterprise, which big logo is your customer? And who are your 5-7 referenceable customers?
    • For consumer:
      • If it’s freemium, what percent of premium users do you have? I’m looking for at least a 3-5% here.
      • If your platform is free, how are people paying with their time? DAU/MAU>25-30%? Is your virality coefficient k>1? 30- and 90-day retention cohorts > 20%, ideally 40%.
  • What does your conversion funnel look like? What part of the funnel are you really winning? Subsequently, what might you need more work on?

The competition

95 out of every 100 decks, I see two kinds of competitor slides:

  • 2×2 matrix/Cartesian graph, where the respective startup is on the upper right hand corner
  • The checklist, where the respective startup has all the boxes checked and their competitors have some percentage of the boxes checked

Neither are inherently wrong in nature, but they give rise to two different sets of questions.

The former, the graph, often leads to the trap of including vanity competitors. For the sake of populating the graph, founders include the logos of companies who hypothetically could be their competitors, but when it comes down to reality, they never or rarely compete on a deal with their target user/customer. April Dunford, author of Obviously Awesome, calls these “theoretical competitors.”

A simple heuristic is if you jumped on a call with a customer right now and ask: “What would you use currently if our solution did not exist?”, would the names of the competitors you listed actually pop up during the call? Or with a potential customer, what did they use before you arrived? For enterprise software, Dunford says that startups usually lose 25% of their customers when the answer to the above question is “nothing”. When your greatest incumbent is a habitual cycle deeply engrained in your user’s behavior, you need to either reposition your solution, or find ways to educate the market and greatly reduce the friction it takes to go from 0 to 60.

The latter, the checklist, usually sponsors a second kind of trap – vanity features. Founders often list a whole table’s worth of “awesome features” that their competitors don’t have, but many of which may not resolve a customer’s frustration. And on the one that does, their competitors have already taken significant market share. The key question here: Do all features listed resolve a fundamental problem your customers/users have? Which are necessary, which are nice-to-have’s? Are you winning on the features that solve fundamental problems?

The question I ask, as it pertains to competition, in the first or second meeting is: What are your competitors doing right? If you were to put yourself in your competitor’s shoes, what did they ace and what can you learn from the success of their experiment?

Financial projections

  1. What are you basing the numbers off of?
  2. What are your underlying assumptions?

How fast do you claim you can double the business growth? Is it reasonable? If we’re calculating bottom-up, can you actually sell the number of units/subscriptions you claim to? What partnerships/distribution channels are you already in advanced talks with? Anything further than 2 years out, for the most part, VCs dismiss. The future is highly unpredictable. And the further out it is, the less likely you’re able to predict that.

I also say financial projections for Series A/B decks is because only with traction can you reasonably predict what the 12-month forward revenue is going to look like. Maybe 18 months, depending on your pending contracts as well. In the pre-seed/seed, when you’re still testing out the product with small set of beta users, it’s hard to predict. And pre-seed/seed decks that have projections without much traction are often heavily scrutinized than their counterparts that don’t have that slide.

In closing

Of course, that doesn’t mean you should neglect any slide on your deck. Rather, the above is just a lens for you to see which slides an investor might allocate special attention to. If you can answer the above questions well in your pitch deck, then you’re one step closer to a winning strategy not only in fundraising, but in building a company that will change the world.

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Rolling Funds and the Emerging Fund Manager

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In the past few months, Rolling Funds by AngelList have been the talk of the town. Instead of having to raise a new fund every 2-3 years, fund managers can now continuously accept capital on a quarterly basis, where LPs (limited partners, like family offices or endowments or fund of funds (FoF)) typically invest with 1-2 year minimum commitments. Under the 506c designation, you can also publicly talk about your fundraise as a fund manager. Whereas the traditional Fund I typically took 11 months to fundraise for a single GP (general partner of a VC fund), 11.9 if multiple GPs, now with Rolling Funds, a fund manager can raise and invest out of a fund within a month – and as quick as starting with a tweet. AngelList will also:

  • Help you set up a website,
  • Verify accredited investors,
  • Help set up the fund (reducing legal fees),
  • And with rolling funds, you can invest as soon as the capital is committed per quarter, instead of waiting before a certain percentage of the whole fund is committed as per the usual 506b traditional funds.

Moreover, Rolling Funds, under the same 506c general solicitation rules, are built to scale. Both for the emerging fund manager playing the positive sum game of investing upstream as a participating investor, and for the experienced fund manager who’s leading Series A rounds. In the former example with the emerging fund manager, say a solo GP investing out of a $10M initial fund size, 20 checks of $250K, and 1:1 reserves. Or the latter, $50-100M/partner, writing $2-3M checks. Maybe up to $7-10M for a “hot deal“, which by its nature, are rare and few in between. In the words of Avlok Kohli, CEO of AngelList Venture, Rolling Funds are what funds would have looked like if they “were created in an age of software”.

I’m not gonna lie, Rolling Funds really are amazing. Given the bull case, what is the bear case? And how will that impact both emerging and experienced fund managers?

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Predictions Are Popular

Predictions are in season. It started back during the holidays. A number of my friends, colleagues and folks online have been making predictions of what is going to happen this year. And I’m sure some are sure to hit. Many to miss. Since I’ve been reasonably active on Quora and given my role in the startup community, many people have asked me: “What are some of the best startup ideas to start in 2021? In 2022?”

Over the past year, the pandemic became a forcing function for late majorities and laggards of the adoption curve to pick up newer social and technological trends. Subsequently, accelerating many timelines. Timelines that would have otherwise been realized two, three, maybe even five years out.

  • Social is back.
    • Consumer social has been back. The pandemic has saved on average 2-3 hours of travel time per day for the average worker, job-permitting. At the same time, quarantining has reduced, if not eliminated, many in-person interactions with friends. More time means people seek to find more places to place their attention.
    • Enterprise social is here. The pandemic has forced many businesses to go remote. Similarly, there’s been a migration away from metropolitan/urban areas to save on rent, as well as an opportunity to not be shackled by geography in the past few months. Now, as well as “post-pandemic”, businesses, as well as individuals, are looking for new ways to improve efficacy, communication, and culture at work. In efforts to both retain and attract talent.
  • Impact-driven and socially-responsible businesses are hot.
  • Diversity in the board room is gaining traction. And it’s created ripple effects in the financial world. LPs are demanding venture funds to invest in diverse founders. At the same time, when diverse founders consider which investors to bring on, they look at if the checkwriters at the firm are diverse. Some investors have acted proactively; some reactively. Nevertheless, the cogs are moving.
  • E-commerce, entertainment, streaming, gaming, remote tools, edtech are all up.
  • SPACs and 2020’s string of IPOs have created many “overnight” millionaires.
  • Investing in the stock market, in alternative assets, in syndicates, and more mean more capital is being recycled back into the economy at various stages.
  • There is more capital available at the early stages. New angels. More startups. Just like pre-seed/seed is the Series A from a decade ago, more institutional investors will move upstream. Who knows, there may be a pre-pre-pre-seed round one day.
  • Innovation around the home office space is building momentum.
  • Unsurprisingly, Zoom fatigue is real, which will only led a hand in hybrid work-life models post-pandemic. Equally so, innovation around virtual meetings is only a matter of time.
  • Oculus brought down the price of a VR headset to be as much as a video game console, which means more people can and will adopt VR. Leading to larger markets and more diverse consumers for VR/AR. More startups.
  • Mental health has taken center stage, where it had previously been overlooked or disregarded.

When will the pandemic end? I don’t know.

When will we get vaccines? While experts have given us an expected date, I also don’t know.

When will “normal” return? I’m willing to bet it’s on the magnitude of years rather than months. Then again, will “normal” ever return? I might be completely wrong, but I’m willing to bet the “normal” we knew will never return. But instead, we’ll have a normal 2.0.

In truth, I can only answer what I see in my very narrow periphery. And by definition, there are a hundred-fold more that are in my blind side. And the thing is, what I’ve thought of I guarantee many other founders have already seen, tried, or are trying. What I’m looking for this year, and every year, is what I haven’t thought of yet. But when I hear and see it, it’ll click. Everything I know will make sense.

Investors are lagging indicators of innovation.

Founders are the leading indicators. Listen to them.

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