How to do seed fundraising right Fundraising is one of the key components in getting a business started, but it can also be one of the most challenging, especially if you’re a first-timer. I raised a $3 million seed round from August Capital in August 2011 and learned a few things along the way: 1) The Investor Deck Put together a concise investor deck that is no longer than 15 slides. Don’t overstuff slides with small details. 2) Terms and Structure of the Deal Decide how much money you need to raise. I have a few friends who tried to reduce the amount they needed to raise by paying themselves and/or employees only with equity. When you present your “Ask” slide, tell them how much you are raising, but don’t tell them the valuation. 3) Finding the Right Investor Once your pitch deck is ready and you know how much you need to raise, do your homework to find the right angel investor or venture capital firm for you. Don’t ignore the local investors. 4) How to Meet the Right Investor and Partner 5) The Process Good luck!
Ecosystem 101: The Six Necessary Categories To Build The Next Silicon Valley Editor’s Note: Benjamin Joffe is the founder of the Asia-focused digital research & strategy consultancy +8* | Plus Eight Star and has been living in Asia (China, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Malaysia) since 2000. Benjamin has spoken at over 100 conferences (SxSW, TEDx, LeWeb, GamesBeat, etc.) on innovation, Asia, gaming and his keynotes gathered over 250,000 views on Slideshare. I was a resident mentor at 500 Startups during the last intake and all sorts of interesting visitors come through the door. Among them came journalists from Japan and South Korea who were asking: “Can our country be the next Silicon Valley?” The topic is not new (see here articles on China, Japan, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Singapore) and investors are also pretty excited about it (see Sequoia’s latest round). While both the selection of criteria and scoring are highly subjective, they can provide a useful framework and basis for comparison to evaluate other digital ecosystems, and measure their progress.
Why Box Is Raising $125 Million to Change the Enterprise Last Updated August 2, 2010 1. Definitions "Account(s)" means a storage account for use of the Box Solution. Additional Fees means any amounts chargeable in excess of the Fees and payable by the Enterprise Customer to the Licensor for the creation of additional accounts, extra storage space, additional upgrades from time to time. "Administrator(s)" means an individual person assigned by Enterprise Customer as a primary manager for the Management Console. Agreement is alternatively referred to as Enterprise License Agreement. "Authorized User(s)" means the individual persons that are identified by an Administrator or End User as an Account or Subaccount holder and are provided with access to an Account or Subaccount on the terms provided for herein. "Box Solution" means Licensor's hosted proprietary storage solution and any related desktop applications, providing online file storage and internet file sharing among collaborative users (see below description for further details). Collaborator "Fee(s)"
Crowd Investing | Wefunder On August 31st, 2012 Oculus closed a successful Kickstarter campaign raising $2.4 million to develop their VR headset. Yesterday they announced a sale to Facebook for $2B. Let's play the "What If" game and pretend their 9522 backers were investors – how much would their investments be worth today? Probably about 145x. Assume that instead of preorders and donations, Oculus's Kickstarter campaign was for equity and raised a seed round entirely online. After their crowdfunding campaign they went on to raise a $16M Series A and then a $75M Series B. Okay great. Your $1,000 would have started as "convertible debt" until it converted the day Oculus raised its Series A. This sounds pretty small but your investment is worth about $5.1k. Six months later Oculus raised their Series B diluting your hypothetical stake by 15% to about 0.00482% of the company, but the higher valuation makes your investment worth about $20.5k.
Everything You Need To Know About The Startup Ecosystem In Russia And Eastern Europe As Dave McClure and Geeks on the Plane are touring Moscow, Tallinn and Zagreb this week, I have finally written this post summarizing the result of a year-long research project exploring the Russian and Eastern European startup ecosystem. The results will hopefully help those who weren’t invited to join the GOAP crowd to get a better sense of what is happening in the former socialist countries from Slovenia to Russia. There is a lot of action in Eastern Europe, but for lack of time I simply cannot tell all the stories. Instead I have pulled together names and links, and created a few social media lists to connect startup entrepreneurs, accelerators, and investors in Russia and Eastern Europe on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. You can find these lists below. Success stories Over the past decade the region has seen quite a few global tech and Internet success stories already. Startups To get connected with the regional startup ecosystem, adding Google+ circles is probably the easiest way.
You Don’t Need A Prototype To Raise A Seed Round Editor’s note: Editor’s note: Mike Hirshland is the founder of Resolute.VC, a seed-stage venture capital firm. Prior to Resolute, he was a General Partner with Polaris Venture Partners where he led the creation of Dogpatch Labs as well as Polaris’s investments in companies including Automattic (WordPress), Quantcast, KISSmetrics and Q1 Labs (IBM). Follow him on his Resolute.VC blog and Twitter. Back in the “old days” (as in 5 or 10 years ago) the very definition of a seed investment was investing before any product had been built or prototyped. With the institutionalization of seed investing has come a conventional wisdom that you need a prototype to raise a seed round. Assume you’re building a consumer/mobile Internet, e-commerce or SaaS product, and your team has product, development, and design chops. What does an investor gain by waiting until you bang out a working prototype? Also, and I’d argue more importantly, you’re missing the point of that first product.
In Technology Wars, Using the Patent as a Sword Soon after, Apple and Google stopped returning phone calls. The company behind Siri switched its partnership from Mr. Phillips to Mr. Ricci’s firm. And the millions of dollars Mr. Phillips had set aside for research and development were redirected to lawyers and court fees. When the first lawsuit went to trial last year, Mr. But it was too late. Mr. Alongside the impressive technological advances of the last two decades, they argue, a pall has descended: the marketplace for new ideas has been corrupted by software patents used as destructive weapons. Vlingo was a tiny upstart on this battlefield, but as recent litigation involving Apple and Samsung shows, technology giants have also waged wars among themselves. In the smartphone industry alone, according to a Stanford University analysis, as much as $20 billion was spent on patent litigation and patent purchases in the last two years — an amount equal to eight Mars rover missions. “There’s a real chaos,” said Richard A. Mr. Mr. When Mr.
The New VC Kids On The Block Helping Europe’s Startups To Pick Up The Pace In dribs and drabs, the European venture capital scene has started to look gradually more like it will develop a broader range of VCs than in the past. True, the majority of European VC funds have not performed well. But I’m not here to talk about the incumbents, but rather the new breed, which are taking cues from their American cousins in looking for businesses with potential. Time and again the continuous charge has been that Europpean VCs look only for revenues first rather than product or user traction. This new breed of European VC is at least as interested in product and more interested in building companies that can scale, rather than ones which might make tidy businesses they can, for example, sell to a European telco for pennines. The latest sign of this was the recent emergence of Connect Ventures in May this year – a fund which already has £13m in the bank but is aiming to raise £30M. Teli joined Pietro Bezza and Bill Earner at Connect.
Iterations: Finding Your Signal In The Noise Of Fundraising Editor’s Note: Semil Shah is an EIR with Javelin Venture Partners and has been an official contributor to TechCrunch since January 2011. You can follow him on Twitter at @semil. There’s no shortage of blog posts, message threads, and Coupa- & Creamery-inspired banter around the topic of fundraising for early-stage startups. And, as nearly every founder knows all too well, the mantra is “always be fundraising.” And yet, at the same time, something doesn’t feel quite right with respect to the manner in which investors and founders court each other today, what with the sheer number of companies spawned weekly, the amount of capital sloshing around, and ultimately, the time that is lost building and selling products because of inefficiencies in the inevitably torturous process of raising Series A financing. With all of this in mind, I’ve been trying to observe what first-time, early-stage founders who are potential candidates for Series A funding truly want in an investment partner.
What's the biggest mistake entrepreneurs make? Nivi · October 14th, 2007 Q: What’s the biggest mistake entrepreneurs make when they’re raising money? Entrepreneurs focus on valuation when they should be focusing on controlling the company through board control and limited protective provisions. Valuation is temporary, control is forever. For example, the valuation of your company is irrelevant if the board terminates you and you lose your unvested stock. The easiest way to maintain control of a startup is to create good alternatives while you’re raising money. Create alternatives by focusing on fund-raising: pitch and negotiate with all of your prospective investors at once. Focusing on fund-raising creates the scarcity and social proof that close deals. Q: What’s the biggest mistake VCs make? The biggest opportunity for venture firms is differentiation. Most firms offer the same product: a bundle of money plus the promise of value-add. Note: These excellent questions are adapted from Ashkan Karbasfrooshans’s Venture Hacks interview.
The Four Main Things that Investors Look for in a Startup I obviously don’t speak for all investors. But in my experience as an entrepreneur and now spending my time amongst investors I can generalize that almost all VC investments in early stage technology & Internet investments come down to just four key factors. And they’re easy to remember because they all begin with an M: management, market, money and above all else momentum. This post was prompted by an email exchange I had with a young entrepreneur. So I wrote to the entrepreneur and said, “Congrats. I do understand. I understand. Not everybody agrees that entrepreneurs should take investor meetings outside of “funding season” when they’re raising capital. But if you identify investors with whom you’d like to work here’s my advice: 1. Imagine the “typical” deal – somebody comes into a VC’s office, they’ve never met, they’re highly referred by a friend and they’re pitching a product demo and a PPT. 2. If you haven’t read my post on the bio slide before here it is. 3. 4. BUT WAIT?
WTF is Traction? A 6-Step Relationship Guide to VC This is part of my ongoing series on Raising VC. You’ve pitched several angels and VC’s. Everybody seems to like you but nobody seems to be getting out their checkbooks. Most of them are telling you that they just need to see a bit of traction before they’d be prepared to invest. Your friends and advisers tell you that this means you need revenue because in this economy VC’s will only fund businesses with revenue. The “more traction” feedback is a very typical scenario is a down market economy like the one we’re in. So if it’s not necessarily revenue that’s preventing an investment, then WTF is traction? Now there are some firms that have strict rules about not funding pre-revenue companies – that’s different. Traction really is about building a relationship with a VC over time and showing them that you can move the ball forward. Fund raising is an ongoing process and not an event on a workplan. 6 Steps to Building a Relationship with VC’s and Solving the Traction Problem: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
Torch heads for Berlin to fire up those elusive exits — European technology news