Last week, I had an incredible fireside chat with GC’s Niko Bonatsos, who has played a key role in some incredible investments, from Livongo Health to Snap to Wag! and most recently, Saturn. In all honesty, I took much of that experience to scratch my own itch. As always, we ran out of time before we ran out of topics. But I was lucky enough to ask one of which I happened to be losing sleep over. “How do you balance speed and diligence in the increasingly competitive market of venture?”
COVID changed us
In the midst of the pandemic, COVID became a forcing function for investors to deploy capital without ever meeting founders in-person. Frankly, they couldn’t meet anyone in-person. Even if they wanted to, investors, like everyone else, was subject to a series of lockdowns, curfews, and eventually the vaccine.
Yet, as life returns to a sense of normality, many investors have gotten comfortable investing virtually. And for a handful, only virtually. At the same time, in today’s increasingly competitive venture market, capital’s become more of a commodity. And I’ve heard a number of LPs find speed to be a competitive advantage. As a product of speed, investors compete on shortened timelines. It’s a given for angels and super angels out there who have to have conviction on a fairly limited set of data. But how do top-tier funds compete in that same market yet maintain the same discipline as before?
I got my answer from Niko.
“We try to pre-empt the stuff we really care about. It basically translates to us being prepared, having frontloaded a lot of the diligence for the companies and opportunities we care about. We have a more educated conversation with the founders, and are the first ones to get to a term sheet than anyone else. That’s something we do a lot more often. And we’ve leaned into seed, which is the new series A.”
Moreover, with all the diligence they do prior to sourcing, funds, like General Catalyst and Founders Fund, have started to incubate startups where they couldn’t find solutions to problems they found.
Slowing things down
Earlier this week, over a lunch, I posed the same question to Fort Ross‘ Ratan Singh, from whom I got a slightly different variation. “VCs are doing their homework before every meeting and going in with a thesis so that they can deploy fast. VCs used to play catcher and do all their homework after the meeting. But now it’s changed, so they can say yes faster.
“While speed is a differentiator, things are moving too fast today. I met every founder I’ve invested in in-person. Even during the pandemic, I invested in seven founders, and every single one I’ve met in-person.”
To which, I had to ask, “What do you find out from meeting a founder in-person that a virtual meeting lacks in?”
Without missing a beat, Ratan said, “It’s in the small things. The way they interact with their teammates. The way they treat each other. As we finish our chat and walk back to the car, are they still an intelligent being outside of the script? A Zoom call is a 30-minute scripted call. There’s a deck. There’s the presentation they prepared. An in-person interaction is more than that.”
Ratan’s comment reminded me of something Sequoia’s Doug Leone said in his interview with Harry Stebbings recently. “It takes about thirty minutes for someone to relax, which is why I refuse to interview someone for thirty minutes.” Similarly, while a 30-minute coffee chat may just be 30 minutes, the time it takes to shake hands, order your cup of coffee, have the conversation, finish it, and walk back to your car or wait for your Uber helps anyone, not just a VC, understand so much more depth to your character.
If you stay ready, you don’t gotta get ready 😎
— Ruben Harris – rub3nharris.eth (@rubenharris) October 13, 2021
As if he didn’t drop enough mics in our lunch, Ratan left me with one last hot take, “In VC, you’re either asked to stay, or you’re asked to leave.” In today’s ever-changing climate, having deep domain expertise and pre-empting diligence keeps you if not ahead, at least on the curve of evolution. And for many investors, it’s one of their best bets to be asked to stay – either by the firm’s senior partners or your LPs.
Thank you Niko and Ratan for looking over earlier drafts.
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In the past decade or two, there have been a surplus of talent coming into Silicon Valley. In large part, due to the opportunities that the Bay had to offer. If you wanted to work in tech, the SF Bay Area was the number one destination. If you wanted to raise venture money, being next door neighbors to your investors on Sand Hill Road yielded astounding benefits. Barring the past few months where there have been massive exoduses leaving the Bay to Miami or NYC, there’ve been this common thread that if you want to be in:
Entertainment, go to LA
Finance and fashion, go to NYC
Tech/startup ecosystem, go to the Valley.
While great, your early audience – the innovators on your product adoption curve – should not be overly concentrated there. All these markets carry anomalous traits and aren’t often representative of the wider population. Instead, your beachhead markets should be representative of the distribution of demographics and customer habits in your TAM (total addressable market).
Strategically boring markets aren’t limited to just physical geographies. They’re equally applicable to underestimated virtual real estate. You don’t have to build a mansion on a new plot of land. Rent an Airbnb and see if you like the weather and people there first.
As Rupa Health‘s Tara Viswanathan said in a First Round interview, “Stripping the product down to the bare bones and getting it out in front of people for their reactions is critical. It’s rare for a product not to work because it was too minimal of an MVP — it’s because the idea wasn’t strong to begin with.”
As she goes on, “If you have to ask if you’re in love, you’re probably not in love. The same goes with product/market fit — if you have to ask if you have it, you probably don’t.”
Test your market first with the minimum lovable product, as Jiaona Zhang says. You don’t have to build the sexiest app out there. It could be a blog or a spreadsheet. For example, here are a few incredible companies that started as nothing more than a…
The greatest incumbents to most businesses out there really happen to be some of the simplest things. Spreadsheets. Blogs. Facebook groups. And now probably, Discord and Slack groups. There are a wealth of no-code tools out there today – Notion, Airtable, Webflow, Zapier, just to name a few. So building something quick without coding experience just to test the market has been easier than ever. Use that to your advantage.
Patrick Campbell once wrote, quoting Brian Balfour, CEO of Reforge, “It’s much easier to evolve with the market if your product is shaped to fit the market. That’s why you’ll achieve much better fit between these two components if you think market first, product second.”
Think like a designer, not like an artist
The biggest alphas are generated in non-obvious markets. Markets that are overlooked and underestimated. At the end of the day, in a market teeming with information and capital and starved of attention, think like a designer, not like an artist. Start from your audience, rather than from yourself. Start from what your audience needs, rather than what you want.
As ed-tech investor John Danner of Dunce Capital and board member at Lambda School, once wrote, “[the founders’] job is to find the absolute maximum demand in the space they are exploring. The best cadence is to run a new uncorrelated experiment every day. While demanding, the likelihood that you miss the point of highest demand with this approach is quite small. It is incredibly easy to abandon this kind of rigor and delayed gratification, eat the marshmallow and take a good idea and execute on it. Great founders resist that, and great investors do too.”
Spend more time researching and talking to your potential market, rather than focusing on where, how, and what you want your platform to look like. Obsess over split testing. Be scrappy.
Don’t fail the marshmallow test
We’re in a hype cycle now. Speed is the name of the game. And it’s become harder to differentiate signal from noise. Many founders instantly jump to geographically sexy markets. Anomalous markets like Silicon Valley and LA. But I believe what’ll set the winners from the losers in the long run is founder discipline. Discipline to spend time discovering signs of early virality, rather than scale.
For instance, if you’re operating a marketplace, your startup is more likely than not supply-constrained. To cite Brian Rothenberg, former VP of Growth at Eventbrite, focus on early growth loops where demand converts to supply. Ask your supply, “How did you hear about our product?” And watch for references of them being on the demand side before.
Don’t spend money to increase the rate of conversion until you see early signs of this growth dynamic. It doesn’t matter if it’s 5% or even 0.5%. Have the discipline to wait for organic conversion. It’s far easier to spend money to grow than to discover. Which is why startup life cycles are often broken down into two phases:
Zero to one, and
One to infinity
Nail the zero to one.
In an increasingly competitive world of ideas, many founders have failed the marshmallow test to rush to scale. As Patrick Campbell shared in the same afore-mentioned essay, “Product first, market second mentality meant that they had a solution, and then they were searching for the problem. This made it much, much more difficult to identify the market that really needed a solution and was willing to pay for the product.”
The more time you spend finding maximum demand for a big problem, the greater your TAM will be. The greater your market, the greater the value your company can provide. So, while building in anomalous markets with sexy apps will help you achieve quick early growth, it’s, unfortunately, unsustainable as you reach the early majority and the late majority of the adoption curve.
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I was doomscrolling through Twitter when I stumbled on Samir Kaji‘s recent tweet:
A reason that emerging managers have done so well in early funds is not due to smaller funds sizes but because when gp/thesis is often strongest. Return atrophy usually happens when thesis drift happens at a magnitude that is more significant and faster than firm evolution.
I’ve written before that the difference between an emerged fund manager and an emerging manager is one’s raised a Fund III and the other hasn’t.
In Fund I, you’re selling a promise – a dream – to your LPs. That promise is often for angels, founders, and other GPs who write smaller checks. You’re split testing among various investments, trying to see what works and what doesn’t. More likely than not, you’re taking low to no management fees, and only carry. No reserve ratio either. And any follow-on checks you do via an SPV, with preference to your existing LPs. You’re focused on refining your thesis.
In Fund II, you’re pitching a strategy – the beginnings of pattern recognition of what works and what doesn’t. You’re thesis-driven.
Fund III, as Braughm Ricke says, “you’re selling the returns on Fund I.” On Fund III and up, many fund managers start deviating from their initial thesis – minimally at first. Each subsequent fundraise, which often scales in zeros, is a lagging indicator of your thesis and strategy. And across funds, the thesis becomes more of a guiding principle than the end all, be all of a fund. There are only a few firms out there that continue to exercise extreme fundraising discipline in. Which, to their credit, is often hard to do. ‘Cause if it’s working, your LPs want to put more money into you. And as your fund size scales, so does your strategy.
Subsequently, it becomes a race between the scalability of a fund’s strategy and fund size.
Softbank’s mistake
In 2017, Softbank’s Vision Fund I (SVF I) of $100B was by far the largest in the venture market. In fact, 50 times larger than the largest venture funds at the time. Yet, every time they made a bad bet, the media swarmed on them, calling them out. The reality is that, proportionally speaking, Softbank made as many successful versus unsuccessful bets as the average venture fund out there. To date, SVF I’s portfolio is valued at $146.5 billion, which doesn’t put it in the top quartile, but still performs better than half of the venture funds out there. But bigger numbers warrant more attention. Softbank has since course-corrected, opting to raise a smaller $40B Fund II (which is still massive by venture standards), with smaller checks.
While there are many interpretations of Softbank’s apparent failure with SVF I (while it could be still too early to tell), my take is it was too early for its time. Just like investors ask founders the “why now” question to determine the timing of the market, Softbank missed its “why now” moment.
Bigger funds make sense
I wrote a little over a month ago that we’re in a hype market right now. Startups are getting funded at greater valuations than ever before. Investors seem to have lost pricing discipline. $5 million rounds pre-product honestly scare me. But as Dell Technologies Capital‘s Frank told me, “VCs have been mispricing companies. We anchor ourselves on historical valuations. But these anchors could be wrong.” Most are vastly overvalued, yet future successes are grossly undervalued.
Allocating $152 billion into VC funds, LPs are excited about the market activity and that the timeline on returns are shorter. Namely:
Exits via SPAC,
Accelerated timelines because of the pandemic (i.e. healthcare, fintech, delivery, cloud computing, etc.)
And secondary markets providing liquidity.
We’ve also seen institutional LPs, like pension funds, foundations, and endowments, invest directly into startups.
Moreover, we’re seeing growth and private equity funds investing directly into early-stage startups. To be specific over 50 of them invested in over $1B into private companies in 2021 so far.
As a result of the market motions, the Q2 2021 hit a quarterly record in the number of unicorns minted. According to CB Insights, 136 unicorns just in Q2. And a 491% YoY increase. As Techcrunch’s Alex Wilhelm and Anna Heimputs it, “Global startups raised either as much, or very nearly as much, in the first two quarters of 2021 as they did in all of 2020.”
Hence, we see top-tier venture funds matching the market’s stride, (a) providing opportunity for their LPs to access their deal flow and (b) meeting the startup market’s needs for greater financing rounds. Andreessen recently raised their $400M seed fund. Greylock with their $500M. And most recently, NFX with their $450M pre-seed and seed Fund III.
In his analysis of a16z, writer Dror Poleg shares that “you are guaranteed to lose purchasing power if you keep your money in so-called safe assets, and a handful of extremely successful investments capture most of the available returns. Investors who try to stay safe or even take risks but miss out on the biggest winners end up far behind.” The a16z’s, the Greylocks and the NFXs are betting on that risk.
Fund returners are increasingly harder to come by
As more money is put into the private markets, with startups on higher and higher valuations, unicorns are no longer the sexiest things on the market. A unicorn exit only warrants Greylock with a 2x fund returner. With the best funds all performing at 5x multiples and up, you need a few more unicorn exits. In due course, the 2021 sexiest exits will be decacorns rather than unicorns. Whereas before the standard for a top performing fund was a 2.5%+ unicorn rate, now it’s a 2.5% decacorn rate.
The truth is that in the ever-evolving game of venture capital, there are really only a small handful of companies that really matter. A top-tier investor once told me last year that number was 20. And the goal is an investor is to get in one or some of those 20 companies. ‘Cause those are the fund returners. Take for example, Garry Tan at Initialized Capital, earlier this year. He invested $300K into Coinbase back in 2012. And when they went public, he returned $2B to the fund. That’s 6000x. For a $7M fund, that’s an incredible return! LPs are popping bottles with you. For a half-billion dollar fund, that’s only a 4x. Still good. But as a GP, you’ll need a few more of such wins to make your LPs really happy.
I also know I’m making a lot of assumptions here. Fees and expenses still to be paid back, which lowers overall return. And the fact that for a half-billion dollar seed fund, check sizes are in the millions rather than hundreds of thousands. But I digress.
There is more capital than ever in the markets, but less startups are getting funded. The second quarter of this year has been the biggest for seed stage activity ever, measured by dollars invested. Yet total deal volume went down.
Each of these startups will take a larger percentage of the public attention pie. Yet, most startups will still churn out of the market in the longer run. Some will break even. And some will make back 2-5x of investor’s money. Subsequently, there will still be the same distribution of fund returners for the funds that make it out of the hype market.
In closing
As funds scale as a lagging indicator of today’s market, the discipline to balance strategy and scale becomes ever the more prescient. We will see bigger flops. “Startup raises XX million dollars closes down.” They might get more attention in the near future from media. Similarly, venture capitalists who empirically took supporting cast roles will be “celebretized” in the same way.
The world is moving faster and faster. As Balaji Srinivasan tweeted yesterday:
But as the market itself scales over time, the wider public will get desensitized to dollars raised at the early stages. And possibly to the flops as well. Softbank’s investment in Zume Pizza and Brandless turned heads yesterday, but probably won’t five years from now. It’s still early to tell whether a16z, Greylock, NFX, among a few others’ decisions will generate significant alphas. I imagine these funds will have similar portfolio distributions as their smaller counterparts. The only difference, due to their magnitudes, is that they’re subject to greater scrutiny under the magnifying glass. And will continue to stay that way in the foreseeable future.
Nevertheless, I’m thrilled to see speed and fund size as a forcing function for innovation in the market. There’s been fairly little innovation at the top of the funnel in the venture market since the 1970s. VCs meet with X number of founders per week, go through several meetings, diligence, then invest. But during the pandemic, we’ve seen the digitization of venture dollars, regulations, and new fund structures:
Quoting a good friend of mine, “It’s a good time to be alive.” We live in a world where the lines between risk and the status quo are blurring. Where signal and noise are as well. The only difference is an investor’s ability to maintain discipline at scale. A form of discipline never before required in venture.
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There’s a comical number of debates around where the team slide goes in a pitch deck. In fact, this blogpost may end being more of a meme than have any substantive value. Nevertheless, here’s to hoping that by the end of this essay, there’s some semblance of a call-to-action for you. The “too-long-don’t read” answer for the order of your team slide is… it depends.
Why “why you” is important
First, let’s start from the “facts”.
The earlier your company is, the more your team matters to an investor. The more mature your company is, the less it matters.
If your investor doesn’t understand your answer to the “why you” question, you’re not winning any gold medals, much less a check.
Investors have, effectively, three questions they want answered in the intro meeting.
Why now?
Why this?
And, why you?
“Why now” tells an investor why they should look into the space. “Why this” tells an investor why they should look at the solution. But if we’re being completely honest, if an investor is a specialist and not a generalist, and even if they were the latter, you’re not the first person who’s brought up the exact same “why now” and “why this”. Even if you answer the first two questions perfectly, there’s still no reason as to why you should be the one to take this product to market. Investors, if they were more blunt, would just thank you for your market research.
On the other hand, if you can answer the “why you” question, you give them a reason to have a second conversation with you. And the whole goal of the intro meeting is to have the second meeting. Not to get the check. Don’t skip steps. As a footnote, your mileage will vary with angel investors and micro funds. For them, speed is their competitive advantage, not their check size nor possibly their network or resources. While they will try to be helpful, they’re not a platform – yet. If you answer the “why you”, in the worst case scenario, your investors won’t regret backing the startup. You just weren’t lucky. But they’d probably be willing to back you again if you started another business.
The reason why so many VCs regress back to metrics and traction is because you’ve failed to answer the “why you” question.
Founders haven't sold them on the "why you" so they regress to finding answers for "why this" and "why now", which typically come in the form of lagging indicators like rev and traction
Based on the above “facts”, the younger your startup is, the earlier you should put the team slide. To give investors context as to who you are. This matters a bit more for partnership meetings, as well as if this is a (relatively) cold pitch. That is, to say, if you AND your co-founders don’t have a prior relationship with the people you are pitching to, move the team slide to the beginning.
Eniac Ventures, an incredible seed-stage firm, recently wrote, “We believe that it should probably be slide 1 or 2. That’s because investors want to become familiar with the people behind the product early on, whether we’re flipping through the deck or you’re pitching us directly. When the team slide is second, it also gives you a great opportunity to walk investors through your background and impress upon them why your unique set of experiences makes you and your team the best one to build and scale the product.”
In closing
But, that might not be the case for you. The investors you pitch might have a different set of priorities. I always go back to the question: When going into the meeting, if the investor could only ask one question, what is the one question they need the answer for to give them enough of a reason to take the second meeting?
Then your pitch deck should be in that order of priority.
If you’re tackling a problem most people care little about or where it’s non-obvious, talk about the problem first.
If it’s not a revolutionary product and it already makes sense, talk about why you and your team are the best equipped to tackle this problem.
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“I never got a check for sending the pitch deck before the meeting.”
And so began my deep dive into the contrarian thinking that led to the above statement.
Why the pitch deck might not work
As an armchair expert on films I like, my favorite films have never fit my rubric of the perfect story. Rather, my rubric of the perfect story was shaped by my favorite films.
A pitch deck, like any other rubric, is a pre-ordained set of words and pictures that follow “industry’s best practices”. The problem, solution/product, why now, market size, team, traction, competitors, business model, and financial projections. Most pitch decks don’t deviate too far from the afore-mentioned order. Nevertheless, at the end of the day, rubricsare lagging indicators of what worked. They rarely serve as predictors of what will work, yet we prescribe a disproportionately high amount of trust to their predictive qualities.
“Fundraising is hard”
“You can do everything right – you go through all the steps, do the CRM, get the emails, get the introductions, give the pitches – you do it textbook, and you won’t get a dollar. Fundraising is hard.”
Naturally, I had to ask James what he did to secure funding without sending the pitch deck. James shared, “I never really think about ‘fundraising’, like I mentioned when we chatted I do try to keep track of things but that’s more so that I don’t over-email folks. I never write one email and then send it to a lot of people. Every email I write, I write personally.”
Pitch with emotion
“How do you close somebody? It’s not with spreadsheets and numbers. It’s with emotion. A good pitch gets people over the activation energy [necessary] of actually investing in your business. There are plenty of companies who are making $10 million a month and didn’t raise a dollar. There are plenty of companies who didn’t make a dollar ever and raise a $100 million bucks.”
Every pitch is a story. And often times, the best narrative you can tell isn’t in a 10-megabyte presentation filled with numbers and letters or a Docsend link, based on a rubric that your audience decided. There’s rising and falling action. There’s also you, the underdog, who embarks on a hero’s journey to change the world. What does the world look like today? What will it look like without you tomorrow? Against seemingly impossible odds and guided by the fortune of luck (timing, why now?) and grit, why is the future you envision, with you in it, inevitable?
You can also see it in action in their pitch that got a16z to lead their $68M Series A.
“Always bring the value”
“People are busy, especially the people you’re pitching. Teach them something. They wanna learn. They wanna walk out of that meeting and remember you and make their life a little bit better. And one way to do this is to bring value that they didn’t have before.
“This is also a self-selector. If you don’t do this, they’re not going to call you back. You want to be interesting. You want the other person to walk away thinking that was fun.
“Unfortunately, this is what a lot of founders don’t do. They treat these meetings like work. ‘We’re going to walk in with a strategy. We’re going to stick to the script.’ The other people on the other side never ask any questions. They say ‘see ya later’ and you never hear from them ever again.”
In many ways, this is what many investors call the ‘secret sauce‘. Do you know something that the other person doesn’t? Can you connect the dots in a way that the other person has never thought about? Have you inspired the other person where after the meeting and the ‘A-ha!’ moment they do something about it?
For people who are obsessed and really passionate, their passion is often contagious. One doesn’t have to be an investor or a subject-matter expert to know and feel that. And when inspired, the other person acts as an extension of the energy you brought to the conversation. It could be in the form of work, writing, invites, or intros. These second-order effects might not always come immediately. But rather eventually. This is what James calls “manufacturing serendipity”.
On asking for intros
I asked James, “Did you ever ask for the intros or did they come quite organically?”
And what he shared truly set him apart from 99% of founders I’ve met with. “People always say ‘how can I help?’ Some don’t mean it. And this works for them too because quickly, you figure who’s who. But always have an answer. Not like ‘intro me to some people.’ But ‘hey, I saw you know so and so, and I’d love to chat with them – would you mind introducing me?’ Having one to two things is the sweet spot.
“Do all of the leg work. Help them help you as much as possible. Everyone wants to be the hero that helps someone else, but people have lives – and if you’re the one that is getting the value, bring the value as much as possible.” Provide the person making the introduction with all the context and reasons for the other person to say yes.
It echoes much of my personal template I tell folks if they want an intro to an investor that consists of three parts – no more, no less:
The one metric they’re nailing (ideally so much better than the rest of the industry
Short 1-2 lines on what you’re building and why
What makes that one investor the best dollar on your cap table – why it has to be her or him, and no one else
The metric gives the investor a reason to click open the email. The blurb shares the context. And the last, and, in my opinion, the most important part gives the investor the reason – the story – they need to be a hero. You might notice how much a founder is raising isn’t “required material”. Capital is secondary to the story you pitch. While based on some hard facts, startup investing is often an emotional decision. As James said, “Money doesn’t build products; people do.”
In closing
There’s a lesson I took from my time at SkyDeck, and have continued to preach ever since. “Always be fundraising.” And I don’t mean ask for money in every waking moment. In fact, you shouldn’t. Not only are you at risk in sounding like a broken record, you will end up sacrificing time you could be spending on building your product. But always be pitching. Always be getting other people excited about what you’re working on and why that’s so important. Not why should the world be excited about your product, but why that person in particular should be.
Build relationships. Build a fanbase before you need to fundraise. Add value in every conversation. And the ripple effects would come back tenfold. James went on to say, “I would meet with anyone, [and] still do. If they liked what I was doing, they’d intro me either to an investor that might be into it or another company that had an investor that might be into it.”
James truly has a magnetic energy. Every time we chat I learn something indispensable. After all, one of our conversations inspired this blogpost, which I imagine is the first of many more to come. So, it came as no surprise as he’s getting interest left and right on his new venture.
*Some quotes were edited for clarity and my lack of a photographic memory. Sorry.
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In the venture world, there’s this concept of the anti-portfolio. A portfolio for incredible startups you had the chance to invest in, but chose to pass on. Usually the startups that qualify to be in this anti-portfolio have already reached mainstream – either having gone public and/or have reached unicorn status. For anti-portfolio references, I highly recommend checking out Bessemer‘s or tuning into Samir Kaji’s Venture Unlocked podcast, where he asks each guest about their anti-portfolio.
But having chatted with a number of incredible investors, what’s more important than names on an excel sheet is the lesson or lessons we take away from passing on the greats. Those lessons are the very answer to one of the most insightful questions an LP (limited partner) can ask. “How does your anti-portfolio advise your current investment thesis?”
In a similar way, life is a mixed bag of engineered serendipity and endured scar tissue. Our past mistakes inform our future decisions. You learn how to handle kitchen cutlery after cutting yourself a few times. You learn to walk after stumbling. And you learn to communicate after making a fool of yourself. We are a product of the scar tissue we’ve accumulated.
I’m in my first inning in the venture world, and admittedly, way too early to have any true hall-of-famers in my anti-portfolio. So rather than looking into the past from the present, I thought I’d look into the “past” from the future. A “past” that has yet to come, but will be defining of my future. Something Mike Maples Jr calls backcasting. Starting from the future and making my way back to today, along the way, figuring out what I need to do to get to that future. If you’ve been following this blog for a while, you know I’m a big fan of his mental model. “The future doesn’t happen to us; it happens because of us. […] Breakthrough builders are visitors from the future, telling us what’s coming.”
Rather than what startups are in my anti-portfolio, what startups would I love to have in my anti-portfolio?
On a similar note, for non-investors: Ten years from now, what are mistakes you’d want to have made that you tell yourself that it was a decade well-spent?
The DGQ series is a series dedicated to my process of question discovery and execution. When curiosity is the why, DGQ is the how. It’s an inside scoop of what goes on in my noggin’. My hope is that it offers some illumination to you, my readers, so you can tackle the world and build relationships with my best tools at your disposal. It also happens to stand for damn good questions, or dumb and garbled questions. I’ll let you decide which it falls under.
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Not too long ago, I quoted Phil Libin, founder of All Turtles and mmhmm (which has been my favorite virtual camera in and most likely post-pandemic), who said: “I think the most important job of a CEO is to isolate the rest of the company from fluctuations of the hype cycle because the hype cycle will destroy a company. It’ll shake it apart. In tech the hype cycles tend to be pretty intense.”
Hype is the difference in expectation and reality. Or more specifically, the disproportionate surplus of expectation. A month ago, Sarah Tavel at Benchmarkwrote: “Hype — the moment, either organic or manufactured, when the perception of a startup’s significance expands ahead of the startup’s lived reality — is an inevitability. And yet, it’s hard not to view hype with a mix of both awe and fear. Hype applied at the right moment can make a startup, while the wrong moment can doom it.”
Right now, we are in a hype market. And hype has taken the venture market by storm.
We’ve all been seeing this massive and increasing velocity and magnitude of capital deployment over the last few months. Startups are getting valued more and more. In the past, the pre-money valuations I was seeing ranged from 2-on-8 to 3-on-9. Or in not so esoteric VC jargon, $2M rounds on $8M pre-money valuations ($10M post-money) to $3M rounds on $9M pre-money valuations ($12M post-money). These days, I’ve been seeing 5-on-20 or 6-on-30. Some of which are still pre-traction, or even pre-product.
Founders love it. They’re getting capital on a discount. They’re getting greater sums of money for the same dilution. Investors who invested early love it. Their paper returns are going through the roof. When looking at IRR or TVPI (total value to paid-in capital – net measurement on realized and unrealized value), higher valuations in their portfolio companies are giving investors jet fuel to raise future funds. And greater exit values on acquisition or IPO mean great paydays for early investors. Elizabeth Yin of Hustle Fundsays “this incentivizes investors to throw cash at hyped up companies, instead of less buzzy startups that may be better run.”
Sarah further elaborated, “In the reality distortion field of hype, consumers lean in and invest in a platform with their time and engagement ahead of when they otherwise might have. They pursue status-seeking-work, not because they necessarily get the reward for it relative to other uses of their time, but because they expect to be rewarded for it in the future, either because of the typical rich-get-richer effect of networks, or just in the status of being an early adopter in something that ends up being big.” The same is true for investors investing in hyped startups. It’s status-seeking work.
Frankly, if you’re a founder, this is a good time to be fundraising.
Why?
Capital is increasingly digital.
There is more than one vehicle of early stage capital.
There are only two types of capital: Tactical capital and distribution capital.
1. Capital is increasingly digital.
Of the many things COVID did, the pandemic accelerated the timeline of the venture market. Pre-pandemic, when founders started fundraising, they’d book a week-long trip to the Bay Area to talk to investors sitting on Sand Hill Road. Most meetings that week would be intro meetings and coffee chats with a diverse cast of investors. Founders would then fly back to their home base and wait to hear back. And if they did, they would fly in once again. This process would inevitably repeat over and over, as the funnel grew tighter and tighter. And hopefully, at the end of a six-to-twelve month fundraise, they’d have one, maybe a few term sheets to choose from.
Over the past 18 months, every single investor took founder meetings over Zoom. And it caused many investors to realize that they can get deals done without ever having to meet founders in-person. Of course, the pandemic forced an overcorrection in investor habits. And now that we’re coming out of isolation, the future looks like: every intro meeting will now be over Zoom, but as founders get into the DD (due diligence) phases or in-depth conversations, then they’ll fly out to meet who they will marry.
It saves founders so much time, so they can focus on actually building and delivering their product to their customers. And,
VCs can meet many more founders than they previously thought possible.
This has enabled investors to invest across multiple geographies and build communities that breathe outside of their central hub or THE central hub – formerly the SF Bay Area. Rather, we’re seeing the growth of startup communities around the nation and around the world.
2. There is more than one vehicle for early stage capital.
While meetings have gone virtual, the past year has led to a proliferation of financing options in the market as well. Capital as jet fuel for your company is everywhere. Founders now have unprecedented optionality to fundraise on their terms. And that’s great!
Solo capitalists
Individual GPs who raise larger funds than angels and super angels, so that they can lead and price rounds. The best part is they make faster decisions that funds with multiple partners, which may require partner buy-in for investments.
Rolling funds
With their 506c general solicitation designation, emerging fund managers raise venture funds faster than ever and can start deploying capital sooner than traditional 506b funds.
Micro- and nano-VCs
Smaller venture funds with sub-ten million in fund size deploying strategic checks and often leverage deep GP expertise. No ownership targets, and can fill rounds fast after getting a lead investor.
Equity crowdfunding
Platforms, like Republic and SeedInvest, provide community-fueled capital to startups. Let your biggest fans and customers invest in the platform they want to see more of in the future. With recent regulations, you can also raise up to $5 million via non-accredited and accredited investors on these platforms.
Accelerators/incubators
Short three-month long programs, like Y Combinator, 500 Startups, and Techstars, that write small, fast checks (~$100K) to help you reach milestones. Little diligence and one to two interviews after the application. Often paired with an amazing investor and/or advisor network, workshops, powerful communities, and some, even opportunity funds to invest in your next round.
Syndicates/SPVs
Created for the purpose of making one investment into a company a syndicate lead loves, syndicates are another ad hoc way of raising capital from accredited investor fans, leveraging the brand of syndicate leads and deploying through SPVs. Or special purpose vehicles. I know… people in venture are really creative with their naming conventions. In turn, this increases discoverability and market awareness for your product.
SPACs and privates are going public again
Companies going public mean early employees have turned into overnight millionaires. In other words, accredited investors who are looking to grow their net worth further by investing in different asset classes. Because of the hype, investing in venture-scale businesses tend to be extremely lucrative. These investors also happen to have deep vertical expertise, high-value networks, as well as hiring networks to help startups grow faster. More investors, more early stage capital.
Growth and private equity are going upstream
Big players who usually sat downstream are moving earlier and earlier, raising or investing in venture funds and acceleration programs to capture venture returns. And as a function of such, LPs have increased percent distributions into the venture asset classes, just under different names.
Pipe
Pipe‘s existed before the pandemic, but founders have turned their eye towards different financing options, like Pipe. They turn your recurring revenue into upfront capital. Say a customer has an annual contract locked in with you, but is billed monthly. With Pipe, you can get all that promised revenue now to finance your startup’s growth, instead of having only bits and pieces of cash as your customers pay you monthly. Non-dilutive capital and low risk.
3. There are only two types of capital: Tactical capital and distribution capital.
There’s an increasingly barbell distribution in the market. Scott Kupor once toldMark Suster that: “The industry’s gonna bifurcate. You’re going to end up with the mega VCs. Let’s call them the Goldman Sachs of venture capital. Or the Blackrock of venture capital. And on the other end, you’re going to end up with niche. Little, small people who own some neighborhood whether it’s video, or payments, or physical security, cybersecurity, physical products, whatever. And people in the middle are going to get caught.”
Those “little, small” players have deep product and go-to-market expertise and networks. Their checks may be small. But for an early stage company still trying to figure out product-market fit, the resources, advice, and connections are invaluable to a startup’s growth. They’re often in the weeds with you. They check your blind side. And they genuinely empathize with the problems and frustrations you experience, having gone through them not too long ago themselves. Admittedly, many happen to be former or active operators and/or entrepreneurs.
On the flip side, you have the a16z’s and Sequoias on their 15th or 20th fund. Tried and true. Brilliant track record with funds consistently north of 25% IRR. Internal rate of return, or how fast their cash is appreciating annually. LPs love them because they know these funds are going to make them money. And as any investor knows, double down on your winners. More money for the same multiples means bigger returns.
The same is true for historical players, like Tiger, Coatue, and Insight, who wire you cash to scale. They assume far less risk. Which admittedly means a smaller multiple. And to compensate for a lower multiple, they invest large injections of capital. By the time you hit scale, you already know what strategies work. All you need is just more money in your winning strategies.
You find product-market fit with tactical capital. You find scale with distribution capital.
Product-market fit is the process of finding hype. When you stop pushing and start finding the pull in the market. Scale is the process of manufacturing hype.
The bear case
But there are downsides to hype. Last month, Nikhil, founding partner at Footwork, put it better than I ever could.
If I could add an 8th point to Nikhil’s analysis, it’d be that investors in today’s market are incentivized to “pump and dump” their investments. Early stage investors spike up the valuations, which leads to downstream investors like Tiger Global, Coatue, Insight, and Softbank doubling down on valuation bets. Once there’s a secondary market for private shares, early stage investors then liquidate their equity to growth investors who are seeking ownership targets, or just to get a slice of the pie. This creates an ecosystem of misaligned incentives, where early stage investors are no longer in it for the long run with founders. Great fund strategy that’ll make LPs happy campers, but it leaves founders with uncommitted, temporary partners.
Sundeep Peechu of Felicis Ventures has an amazing thread on how getting the right founder-investor fit right is a huge value add. And getting founder-investor fit takes time, and sometimes a trial by fire as well. After all, it’s a long-term marriage, rather than a one-night stand. Those who don’t spend enough time “dating” before “marriage” may find a rocky road ahead when things go south.
By my count, ~30% of Felicis companies that have done well had trouble raising Series As in some fashion.
As an example, Matterport which went public last week had little appetite at the A. Non-recurring revenue, hardware business and selling to real estate was a triple whammy.
On a 9th point, underrepresented and underestimated founders are often swept under the rug. In a hype market, VCs are forced to make faster decisions, partly due to FOMO. With faster decisions, investors do less diligence before investing. Which to the earlier point of misaligned incentives, has amplified the already-existing notion of buyer’s remorse.
When VCs go back to habits of pattern recognition, they optimize for founder/startup traits they are already familiar with. And often times, their investment track record don’t include underrepresented populations. To play devil’s advocate, the good news is that there is also a simultaneous, but comparatively slow proliferation of diverse fund managers, who are more likely to take a deeper look at the problems that underestimated founders are tackling.
What kind of curve are we on?
When many others seem to think that this hype market will end soon, last week, I heard a very interesting take on the current venture market in a chat with Frank Wang, investor at Dell Technologies Capital. “VCs have been mispricing companies. We anchor ourselves on historical valuations. But these anchors could be wrong.
“We’re at the beginning of the hype and I don’t see it slowing down. VC has been so stagnant, and there hasn’t been any innovation in venture in a long time. Growth hasn’t slowed. And Tiger [Global] and Insight [Partners] is doing venture right. Hypothetically speaking, if you invest in everything, the IRR should be zero. They are returning 20% IRR because they seem to have found that VC rounds are mispriced. So, there can be an arbitrage.
“There will be a 20% market correction in the future, but we don’t know if that’s going to happen after 100% growth, or correct then grow again. The current hype is just another set of growing pains.”
Part of me is scared for the market correction. When many founders will be forced to raise flat or down rounds. The fact is we haven’t had a serious market correction since 2009. It’s going to happen. It’s not a question of “if” but rather “when” and “how much”, as Frank acutely points out.
Investors who deploy capital fast win on growing markets – on bull markets. Or investors who deploy across several years, or what the afore-mentioned Mark Suster defines as having “time diversity“, who win on correcting markets – bear markets. Think of the former as putting all your eggs in one basket. And if it’s the winning basket, you’re seen as an oracle. If not, well, you disappear into obscurity. Think of the latter as diversifying your risk appetite – a hedging strategy. More specifically, (1) being able to dollar-cost average, and (2) having exposure to multiple emerging trends and platforms. You’re not gonna lose massive amounts of capital even in a bear market, but you also will be losing out on the outsized returns on a bull market.
Only time will tell how seriously the market will correct and when. As well as who the “oracles” are.
In closing
At the end of the day, there are really smart capital allocators arguing for both sides of the hype market. Like with all progress, the windshield is often cloudier and more muddled than the rearview mirror. As Tim Urban once wrote, “You have to remember something about what it’s like to stand on a time graph: you can’t see what’s to your right.“
And as founders are going to some great term sheets from amazing investors, I love the way Ashmeet Sidana of Engineering Capitalframes it earlier this year. “A company’s success makes a VC’s reputation; a VC’s success does not make a company’s reputation. In other words to take a concrete example, Google is a great company. Google is not a great company because Sequoia invested in them. Sequoia is a great venture firm because they invested in Google.”
Whether you, the founder, can live up to the hype or not depends on your ability to find distribution before your competitors do and before your incumbents find innovation. Unfortunately, great investors might help you get there with capital, but having them on your cap table doesn’t guarantee success.
Nevertheless, the interpretation of hype is always an interesting one. There will continue to be debates if a market, product, or trend is overhyped or underhyped. The former assumes that we are on track for a near-term logarithmic curve. The latter assumes an immediate future looking like an exponential curve. The interpretation is, in many ways, a Rorschach test of our perception of the future.
Over the course of human civilization, rather than an absolutely smooth distribution, we live something closer to what Tim Urban describes as:
If the regression line is the mean, then we’d see the ebbs and flows of hype looking something like a sinusoidal function. As Mark Twain once said, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”
It won’t be a smooth ride. The world never is. But that’s what makes the now worth living through.
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There is an incredible wealth of people in this world who self-proclaim to have insights or secrets to unlocking insights. From parents to teachers to the wise soul who lives down the street. From coaches to gurus to your friendly YouTube ad. To mentors. To investors. While there are a handful who do have incredibly insightful anecdotes, their stories should serve as reference points rather than edicts of the future. Another tool in the toolkit. No advice is unconditionally right nor unconditionally wrong. All are circumstantial.
After all, a friend once told me: All advice is autobiographical.
The same is true for anything I’ve ever written. Including this blogpost in itself.
Over the past two weeks, as a first-time mentor, I’ve had the incredible fortune of working alongside and talking to some amazing founders at Techstars LA. At the same time, I was able to observe some incredible mentors at work. And in this short span of time so far, I’ve gotten to understand something very acutely. The dichotomy between mentors and investors. For the purpose of this blogpost, I’m going to focus on startup mentors, rather than other kinds of mentors (i.e. personal mentors). Although I imagine the two cohorts of mentors are quite synonymous.
While the two categories aren’t mutually exclusive, there are differences. A great mentor can be a great investor, and vice versa. But they start from two fundamentally different mindsets.
Investors/mentors
An investor tries to fit a startup in the mold they’ve prescribed. A mentor fits themselves into the mold a startup prescribes.
An investor thinks “Will this succeed?” A mentor thinks “Assuming this will succeed, how do we get there?”
An investor starts with “Why you?” A mentor starts with “Why not you?”
An investor evaluates how your past will help you get to your future. A mentor helps you in the present to get to your future.
An investor has a fiduciary responsibility to their investors (i.e. LPs). A mentor doesn’t. Or a mentor, at least, has a temporal responsibility to their significant other. Then again, everyone does to the people close to them.
An investor will be on your tail to hold you accountable because they’ve got skin in the game. A mentor might not.
You can’t fire your investor. You can theoretically “fire” your mentor. More likely, you’re going to switch between multiple mentors over the course of your founding journey.
An investor has a variable check size-to-helpfulness ratio. Who knows if this investor will be multiplicatively more helpful with intros, advice, operational know-how than the size of their check? A mentor has theoretically an infinite CS:H ratio. Check size, zero. Helpfulness, the sky’s the limit.
It’s also much harder to find a mentor than an investor, outside of startup communities, like On Deck and Indie Hackers, and acceleration and incubation programs, like Y Combinator and Techstars. Frankly, being a mentor is effectively doing free consultations over an extended period of time. And if you’re outside of these communities, the best way to bring on mentors is to bring them on as advisors with advisor equity. I would use Founder’s Institute’s FAST as a reference point. And Tim Ferriss‘ litmus test for bringing on advisors: If you could only ask 5-10 very specific questions to this person once every quarter, would they still be worth 0.5% of your company without a vesting schedule?
In closing
As I mentioned above, being a mentor and an investor isn’t mutually exclusive. The best investors are often incredible mentors. And some of the greatest mentors end up being investors into your startup as well. Having been in the venture world for a while, I’ve definitely seen all categories on this Venn diagram. Sometimes you need more of one than the other. Sometimes you need both. It’s a fluid cycle. And for the small minority of venture-scalable startups, it’s worth having both.
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Founders often ask me what makes a VC say yes. Or what they need to do for a VC to say yes. Or what they need to do for me to say yes. TL;DR: it depends. On firm, partner, thesis, active conversations, stealth investments, next fund fundraising schedules, reserve ratios, implicit biases, and more. In sum, a million reasons. And even if I knew all the above, I still can’t guarantee a term sheet.
So I can’t say what’ll guarantee a VC yes. A term sheet. If I could, I’d be the one writing them. Nevertheless I do my best to help brilliant founders get funded. On the flip side, here’s what aren’t educated guesses, but guarantees. Or as close as one can get to a guarantee. A guaranteed no. An anti-playbook, if I might call it that. If it doesn’t help, I hope, at the very minimum, it provides you a few minutes of entertainment.
Not treating me as a human. This is less of a reason for me to get myself worked up. There are discriminatory, dismissive, bigoted people in the world. I get it. This is more of a problem for the founder when they’re looking to scale the team. Being a dick limits your ability to grow and/or empathize with the market. If you’re fine with treating me this way, then you’re definitely going to not bat an eyelid with other future hires, team members, investors, and customers. Equally true for any VCs/angels/investors out there.
Badmouthing others. This is more of a personal turnoff. We’re all intellectuals here. And it’s okay to have differing opinions of the world. But it’s not okay to talk behind others back. If you’re gonna badmouth others, I imagine the exact same for anyone else who gets on your bad side for whatever reason, including myself. Practice good social hygiene.
Complaining about your team/product. Complaining is a bit more nuanced. It’s fine from time to time, we’re human. I don’t expect you to be the perfect human, but a first meeting with me, as with any investor, is a first date. I want to hear about the bigger picture, the vision, the dream. Impress me. If you have time to complain during a 30-minute meeting, you’re probably not spending your time wisely. And if this is an intro meeting, you have yet to build up your social rapport with me to complain. Being frustrated about the market is fine. Being honest, introspective, and vulnerable is also fine. Your mileage may differ for the last part, but I love candid founders.
Lying. That goes without saying, if you’re lying about numbers or if I somehow find out that you are, then no. If you don’t know, you don’t know. If your numbers aren’t pretty, admit it. While I might not be able to help you get funded, I’ll do my best to help. If you don’t know something, admit it as well. And find out after. Going back to the earlier point, I love candid founders who have a bias to action.
Having an exit strategy slide. This is more true for larger $100M+ funds I send deals to. Having an exit makes sense for angels, and smaller funds, but larger funds need to look for fund returners and outsized winners, and an exit of XX/XXX million is not sexy at all.
Crazy, but not crazy and reasonable. This one is a new one, inspired by PG. It’s fairly rare, since I try to avoid putting myself in situations with crazy, especially cantankerous people. But it happens. If by any chance, you know your idea might err on the side of crazy, walk me through the logic of how you got there. Don’t just tell me “It makes sense to me” or “I know the industry better than you do.”
Lack of focus. It’s great if you want to do a million things, but saying you want to focus on everything means you’ll end up focusing on nothing. A lack of focus shows a lack of priorities. Focus and be able to back up why are you focusing on this at this point in time. I love Phil Libin‘s 4-year plan defined by one word for each year forward. You can find that plan here and here.
Asking for an intro without any context. “I saw you were connected with X on LinkedIn. Can you introduce us?” If that line pops up in the first 30 seconds of our first conversation, I’m running away. I need to know who you are, what you’re building, why it matters, and hell, why would this person you want to get introduced to is a good use of yours and their time. Build a relationship first. Don’t lead with the transaction. I am not an ATM machine. Neither are other people – investors or not.
Asking me to sign an NDA. Early on in my career, I admittedly signed a number of NDAs sent to me by founders. I love connecting brilliant people together, but if I have to get your permission each time I pass it to an investor or a potential advisor, it’s too much work for me. Frankly, I have other priorities. I get it; I’m a stranger. But I hope you can at least trust that I won’t run away with your idea or give it to a competitor. You have my word. If that isn’t enough for you, that’s fine. I’m just not your guy.
Asking the VC to do their work. “When we raise X dollars, we will do Y tasks.” I usually follow up on that statement with “What have you done so far to accomplish Y?” My least favorite founders are the ones who say something along the lines of, “We’ll worry about that when we get there.” Or “We were hoping our future investors will find someone for us.” We don’t expect you to know everything and everyone, nor do everything right, but we expect you to do some legwork to show you are learning. Show us that you’ve been scrappy, resourceful, and used what you had available to you.
Lack of self-awareness. “Where are you weak at?” If your answer is “Nothing” or “I’m good at everything”, that sends alarm bells to any investor. Which might also lead to a secondary question of “What do you need me for then?” A close cousin is one of my favorites: “What is your competition doing right?” If your answer is also “Nothing”, then you might need to do some market research and reconnaissance again. There’s a reason other customers are using your competitors’ and incumbents’ products. Find it out. On top of what they’re weak at. There’s a romanticized concept in Silicon Valley that every founder needs to be like Jobs with his reality distortion field. While it’s true you need to be able to help others see the future you’re seeing, you also have to deeply understand the realities of today of what’s stopping you from getting there.
Nothing’s changed since the last time we spoke. Investors invest on potential. A bet we make in a company is a bet that it has a chance to be as big as X tech giant in your space. Your ability to meet the demand in the market scales with the number of investment dollars in your company. That said, we expect movement. We expect deltas. And if your product really is inevitable in the market, you should be making progress with or without injections of capital. The latter, just at a slower pace. Venture capital is impatient capital. Also understand, 99% of businesses in the world don’t need VC dollars and operate incredibly well without venture investors.
You’re not obsessed about the product and the market. Building a scalable startup requires obsession. It requires you to lose sleep. You can’t just check out at 5 or 6pm. While I can’t measure that in the first meeting, a close proxy is how well you know the table stakes metrics of your business – net retention, CAC, LTV, growth, revenue, engagement rates – and more. In fact, obsessed founders usually tell me that they’ve already thought of and tried out the first 10 ideas I think of. Moreover they bring me back the results of their discovery. Obsession is contagious.
I have no idea what your product is or does. This is simple. If I walk out of our meeting and I still have no idea how to describe your product to others and why we need it in the world now, there’s no way I can confidently pitch your startup to the partners. Piggybacking off of the #14, if you’re obsessed about the product, you’ve told your story a million times and a million ways already. A few of which should have already resonated with select audiences. And even if it wasn’t to investors, you must’ve already told that same story to your customers. As a CEO/founder, you are the first and most important salesperson. In many ways, it means you have to push the sale. You have to get your customers to take action. I, admittedly, am a potential customer. A recipient of your sales strategy. And if I don’t get your pitch, it’s likely others might not as well. That said, for certain industries, like deep tech or biotech, I’m really, really dumb. So take my thoughts with a grain of salt.
This post was inspired by Jason Lemkin‘s blogpost, which I highly recommend checking out.
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There’s a notion in the venture market that LPs typically dislike GPs writing discovery checks. Though I’ve written about VCs writing more discovery checks (here and here) in the past two years, discovery checks have often been a function of investor FOMO (fear of missing out) and not playing their core game. The returns of any established fund are largely realized on big checks with ownership targets.
Of course, rolling funds, micro-VCs, and angels optimize for a different game. They’re spreading their net thinner, but also leveraging their relationships to get into oversubscribed rounds or putting really small bets into hopefuls. Proportionally speaking, if they make bad bets, they lose the same percentage of money, but on an absolute dollar amount, they lose far less. And, well, it’s much easier to return a $1M fund than a $100M fund. It’s also far less committal for LPs to invest in a small fund than a big fund intended to make their incredible returns. The small fund is the bet. The large fund for an LP is the money-making machine.
I was talking with a Venture Partner of a name-brand accelerator yesterday, and he offered a second perspective.
The reason discovery checks by larger funds don’t make any money is because it’s irregular and inconsistent. There often is no fund strategy behind it. That said, if you make discovery checks your core business, that means a fundamentally different strategy. Is that strategy consistent, predictable, and scalable? For accelerators, they’ve made writing discovery checks part of their fund strategy. Their game, at the end of the day, is “buying options.”
It’s a call option. Accelerators invest $100K for 5-10% to buy the rights for the next round. The money is being made in the follow-on, not on the initial bet. And if there’s a fund strategy to deploy 100 checks of a $100K, there’s a systematic approach to writing discovery checks. This is why many accelerators include a provision for pro rata of $0.5-1M in a future round. And they’re unwilling to budge on that, even if a founder comes back and wants to seed that allocation to downstream investors.
Why would an entrepreneur take the $100K that comes with the $500K-$1M option down the road? Accelerators and a lot of angel funds out there are willing to write you, the founder, the check faster and with less debate than other investors on the market.
There’s also a reason many accelerators focus on software rather than other potential areas of investment. A $100K check will get you much further for an asset-lite software company than a deep tech or hardware company. The same amount of cash can bring a software company to market, while a hardware company stays in R&D.
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