Founders are often puzzled by how VCs derive valuations for competitive Series A rounds. A competitive Series A round is an equity round where a company generally raises greater than $5 million led by a top-quartile venture capital firm. During these Series A rounds, it is not uncommon for founders to receive multiple term sheets from lead investors at different ...
The other day, Mark Suster wrote a critically important post titled One Simple Paragraph Every Entrepreneur Should Add to Their Convertible Notes. Go read it – I’ll wait. Or, if you just want the paragraph, it’s: “If this note converts at a price higher than the cap that you have been given you agree that in the ...
What angels may worry about when investing in convertible notes Much has been written about the advantages and disadvantages of raising funding using convertible notes versus equity, both for startups and for investors. At Kima Ventures, we often choose to invest using convertible notes due to the speed, simplicity and cost of the transaction but, ...
Bill Gross has founded a lot of startups, and incubated many others — and he got curious about why some succeeded and others failed. So he gathered data from hundreds of companies, his own and other people’s, and ranked each company on five key factors. He found one factor that stands out from the others ...
The median pre-money valuation of seed stage deals has increased since 2010, as the US economy has emerged from the recent recession. The following table shows the pre-money valuation of seed stage deals from several sources over the past five years: Payne’s survey data was provided by 30 angel groups from all regions of the ...
Tech entrepreneurs take note: Convertible notes are not free money and, if not structured properly, can prevent you from raising additional financing. Investors speaking at the TechCrunch in San Francisco this week had this gem and a few other choice observations about early-stage financing for start-ups. “We’ve had companies come in for their Series A ...
Venture math can be tough. Terms like convertible note, discount and cap can complicate a seemingly easy process. A convertible note is a debt instrument typically used when a company first begins to raise capital. The valuation of the company is determined at a later date, after a Series A investment. This is when a note converts to ...
My last 2 posts were about things to avoid, so I thought it might be helpful to follow up with something more positive. Having been part of or observed about 50 early stage deals, I have come to believe there is a clearly dominant set of deal terms. Here they are: – Investors get either ...
This post is part of a series of posts called “Pitching a VC” that explains how to get access to VC’s, what to say when you get there and what will happen afterward. A friend of mine who lives in Silicon Valley called me lastt week to talk about his new company. He’s been a ...
One of the more contentious things in the negotiation between an entrepreneur and a VC over a financing, particularly an early stage financing, is the inclusion of an option pool in the pre-money valuation. As my friend Mark Pincus likes to say, “it’s just another way to lower the price”. I’ll accept that critique. And ...