I love tennis. When I was a kid (age 10 – 14) I was a serious junior player until I burned out from too many 10 hour, 100 degree plus days of banging my racquet against the ball (and the fence, and the ground, and my head) in the Texas heat. I still love to play and – instead of fighting to win – I’m delighted to go for every shot and see my old amazing strokes and ball placement every one out of ten shots.
I came home late tonight after a long day. Amy had Tivoed the Johansson vs. Roddick US Open Match. She told me I had to see it (she’d watched the first two sets but was happy to rewind and watch again with me.) I settled into the couch and within 15 minutes the stresses and challenges of the day were gone. Johansson’s first two sets were absolutely unbelievable. Roddick played like the US Open champion that he is, but Johansson just creamed him.
In the third set, Roddick caught fire and crushed Johansson’s spirit. You could see Johansson lose it – all the momentum shifted to Roddick. The NY crowd – which is always great at night – came alive. The fourth set was more of the same – Roddick won something like 20 service points in a row. Johansson started making him work for points again, but Roddick looked invincible.
Johansson had never played a fifth set in a major tournament, but he came alive again in the first game of the fifth set. Suddenly, the damn Tivo recording ended (based on the pre-set time) and we were done. Grrrrr. We wandered downstairs to look up the results on the web – both of us were sure that Roddick had won.
We were greeted with the headline “Johansson Stuns Roddick.” 6-4 in the last set. Outrageous. Delicious tennis – Federer vs. Henman and Johansson vs. Hewitt for the mens semis. Even if you aren’t into tennis, it’s worth a look tomorrow and over the weekend as these guys are incredible athletes. Oh – and the women are awesome as well – I’d love to see Capriati win this one.
The famous “Do No Evil”, of course. Given some of the recent negative chatter on Google, I’ve been thinking of what bold move they could do that would cause most of the technology industry to stand up and cheer for them. How about buying SCO?
1. It’s cheap, only $60m or so.
2. Fire everyone (ok – maybe it’s $100m when you get done with all the winddown costs and golden parachutes).
3. Open source / GPL all of the SCO products in exchance for settling all the lawsuits.
4. Be done with all the SCO nonsense.
Disclaimer: I’m not a shareholder of either Google or SCO nor do I have any non-public information about either company.
Author: Seth Levine, Mobius Venture Capital
Brad’s given me permission to co-opt his blog for the day. I work for Brad (and had a great time recently up in Alaska “working”) which gives me an unusual vantage point from which to consider some of his posts on the world of VC. After reading several of these posts (and of course living in this world with him) I came up with the great idea of suggesting to Brad that he write a post about deal splits and the notion of what investing “pro-rata” actually means. Brad had an even better idea which was to have me write the post (which, of course, made my original idea seem not quite so brilliant).
The question of what “pro-rata” means in the context of a deal seems, on its surface, pretty straight forward. Simply put this question asks how much each investor intends to invest in a financing round. However, as is often the case when you get two VCs in a room and ask them to decide on something, actually agreeing on what this is becomes another matter all together. One investor’s view of the meaning of “playing their pro-rata” is often different from that of another. Unfortunately, in many cases this isn’t discovered until late in a financing process leaving an entrepreneur scrambling to reset expectations and either make up a gap in a capital raise or placate an investor who believed they would get the chance to invest more in a round. Ask most VCs and they’ll tell you everyone knows what pro-rata means (try this – its can be amusing); end up with confusion around this in the 11th hour of a financing and you’ll realize that this is definitely not the case.
The best way to illustrate the complexity of this concept is to take a look at a couple of examples. Take the case of a Series A round for ProRata Corp. Assume the post money on the deal is $8m and each investor, having invested $2m each, ends up owning 25% of the business. Fast forward to the Series B financing and consider two scenarios. In the first scenario there is no outside investor and the company raises $6m. Logically, each investor would contribute $3m to the financing, as each was responsible for 50% of the prior financing round. Note that this would leave them each owning just under 36% of the business post financing – meaning that by some definitions they actually played above their pro-rata amount because they have each increased their ownership in the business. Now consider the same case where a new investor is brought into the mix in the Series B. Assuming this investor takes $2m of the $6m round, is the pro-rata for the remaining investors $2m (half of the remaining $4m)? It could also be $1.5m (which, in the $6m round would allow the investor to retain their 25% ownership). Of course in that case there would be a shortfall. I know this sounds crazy, but this exact situation happened to us about a month ago (and plenty of times prior to that). Each of Mobius and the other existing investor was talking about contributing our pro-rata amount to the financing – our believing that this meant that the two existing investors would split the remainder of the round based on their relative ownership percentage; the other investor believing that they would retain their ownership percentage in the business. In that case Mobius made up the difference – we were strongly supportive of the business and happy to increase our ownership – however if we had not been in a position to do so, the company would have been left with a gap in their financing plan.
This example was actually pretty straightforward. Things start to get much more complicated for a company that has raised multiple rounds of financing, has shareholders who own several classes of stock (common, junior preferred, senior preferred (perhaps with a change in their conversion ratio due to anti-dilution), warrants, etc.). In those cases, what constitutes pro-rata? Even in our relatively simple example where all of the new money in a round is coming from existing investors this a complicated question. Do the shareholders split the round based on their total as-converted common ownership? Do they only count their senior preferred in the calculation? Do they include their entire preferred ownership position? The different methods of calculating pro-rata in this case can lead to vastly different views on investment amounts. This is important by itself, but becomes even more so in the case where a company is doing a down round financing where failure to participate pro-rata will lead to losing preference rights or some other penalty. Interestingly within venture funds this is also an issue, as funds that have made cross fund investments (that is investments in the same company from more than one of their funds over time) also need to determine how to split an investment between funds.
There is no neat conclusion here. The concept of pro-rata participation is something that sounds in theory like it should be pretty straightforward, but in practice rarely is. Out of this confusion, the important point for entrepreneurs and investors alike is to make sure they have a discussion about participation amounts early in the investment process. Discrepancies in expectations can always be dealt with more constructively if there is time to spare, rather than at the last minute.
My friend Jim Lejeal just launched his blog.
Jim is a very accomplished entrepreneur. His first company – Link-VTC – was acquired by Frontier Communications (now part of Global Crossing). His second company – Raindance Communications – went public (I was an investor/board member in Raindance). Jim’s current company is Oxlo Systems – I’m also an investor/board member.
In addition to being a successful entrepreneur, Jim has also been an active angel investor and board member for early stage companies. One of his angel successes was Dante Group (now owned by webMethods), which he introduced to us and helped guide the founders through a venture financing. He’s also on the board of a couple of my companies (Gold Systems and Rally Software).
Jim has seen the process of creating companies through many phases (initial startup, early financing, product development, growth, IPO, exit) and many angles (entrepreneur, angel investor, VC, board member). Jim’s also a great, honest soul that is very introspective (and a pretty good poker player), so I expect his blog to be full of insight for anyone interested in creating companies
Welcome Jim!
I’m a cell phone junkie. For years, I switched every six months or so as the newest thing came out and I had to try it.
I’ve been in love with my Sidekick since the first one came out. Now – it’s one of our investments – so I was obviously biased to liking it – but I loved it. Nine months ago I got an early beta of the Sidekick II. I’ve been using it since and it’s incredible. My beta model has a lot of miles (and minutes) on it and it’s held up extremely well as both a phone and a data / email device. I’m still in love (to the extent you can be in love with an inanimate object, which the nerds in the crowd understand, but my wife Amy doesn’t and just looks at me with amusement whenever I say something like that.)
Mark Cuban – of Broadcast.com and the Dallas Mavericks fame – just wrote a rave review of his new Sidekick II. He feels the same way I do – “To all you corporo types out there that like the Blackberry, you have no idea what productivity is like ‘till you play with one of these bad-boys.”
To all the folks at Danger and T-Mobile – congrats on an amazing new Sidekick.