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And then in the late 90’s money crept in, swept in to town by public markets, instant wealth and an absurd sky-rocketing of valuations based on no reasonable metrics. We had nascent revenues, ridiculous cost structures and unrealistic valuations. Until we weren’t. 2001–2007: THE BUILDING YEARS The dot com bubble had burst.
At an accelerator … Me: Raising convertible notes as a seed round is one of the biggest disservices our industry has done to entrepreneurs since 2001-2003 when there were “full ratchets” and “multiple liquidationpreferences” – the most hostile terms anybody found in term sheets 10 years ago.
When you raise larger rounds there is more “due diligence,” which includes: calling customers, looking at financial metrics, doing cohort analysis (looking for trends like changes in churn rates), evaluating competitor positioning and understanding more of the competency of your executive team.
He believes that one of the financial metrics taught at business schools and reinforced by Wall Street has accelerated offshoring of industries. We talked about LiquidationPreference, Voting Rights, and all of the other valuable terms crowd-funding investors don’t understand. Neither does Clayton. No minority shareholder.
3] However, if they are built bottom up, they demonstrate and make explicit a range of business model assumptions the entrepreneur is using to think about his business and its revenue model. Second a liquidationpreference and a participation. This is why a bottom up approach is more credible. First , dividends.
The don’t understand VC liquidationpreferences or multiple return expectations. Good press and industry mojo wasn’t enough to overcome the financial metrics of the business and the offers came in at more like $10 million. Sure, our revenue is growing, but is that enough to raise an internal round? It was not.
Me: Raising convertible notes as a seed round is one of the biggest disservices our industry has done to entrepreneurs since 2001-2003 when there were “full ratchets” and “multiple liquidationpreferences” – the most hostile terms anybody found in term sheets 10 years ago. There were no metrics. Him: On metrics.
As the check size increases, investors tend to look for more traction, established revenue models, proven unit-economics, and other metrics that were previously associated with later stage companies. So if the Micro-VCs are looking for Series A-like metrics, what does a company do when it’s just getting started?
With this capital, the company propels itself to $50 million+ in revenues, and to either a sale to a strategic acquirer or to an initial public offering. It is driven by the following: • The Best Metric for the Health of a Company is Cash Flow. And they hire very aggressive securities attorneys to represent their interests.
A high performing, high-growth SAAS company that may have been worth 10 or more times revenue was suddenly worth 4-7 times revenue. Anything that hints of a down round brings questions about the success metrics that have already been “booked.” The same thing happened to many Internet stocks.
Some will demonstrate strategically justifiable metrics and have fantastic ‘up round’ exits; others may see liquidationpreferences kick in which will negatively impact founders and employees; others may fulfill the adage “IPO is the new down round” , which has been the case for more than half of the public companies on our list.
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