I was thinking more about my post from yesterday titled Addressing The VC Seed Investor Signaling Problem. There were a bunch of good comments that caused me to realize that I wrote the post from the perspective of a VC, not an entrepreneur. As I mulled the comments over, I realized something very specific.
If a VC invests in a seed round but then doesn’t invest in the next round, there is a signaling problem, regardless of what the VC does with their investment.
When I read the post carefully, I realized that I implied that the VC firm’s strategy of selling back their seed investment might address part of the signaling problem. In hindsight, it doesn’t address this at all. It addresses a different problem – the free rider problem.
Most VC’s hate when other VC’s act as free riders. A free rider is defined as someone who invests in an early round but then doesn’t participate in future rounds. Note that I explicitly said “other VCs” and not angel investors. Most VCs expect that angel investors will only invest in the first round or two, so they get exempted from free rider status. I also exempt “super angels” / “seed-only VCs” from this – if you clearly define your role as an investor in the first round or two, and you never participate in later rounds, then you won’t end up being classified as a free rider. But, once you start participating in later rounds, the expectation of your financial participation changes.
Early stage VCs are often expected to play at least pro-rata in following rounds. When companies are successful, the early investors often (but not always) back off their pro-rata. But, when companies go sideways or struggle, the early investors are often expected, by their co-investors – to continue to participate pro-rata until the company either succeeds or fails. In many cases, the consequences for not participating are significant and you can get a taste for this from the post on the term Pay-to-Play that my partner Jason and I wrote in 2005.
The firm that I mentioned in the previous post addresses the free rider problem by saying “look, we’ll make it easy, we don’t support going forward so we’ll sell back our equity to the company, entrepreneurs, or angels and get out of the way for new VC investors.” While this doesn’t address signaling, it does eliminate the free rider – in this case the VC that is not going to participate going forward.
When things are going great, none of this matters. But when things aren’t, they matter a lot. If I shift from the perspective of a VC to the perspective of an entrepreneur, I would only want VCs as seed investors who have a proven track record of consistently following their seed investments with future investments. This will never happen 100% of the time – there are definitely seed investments that don’t make it. In addition, there are often cases where the entrepreneur doesn’t have choices and has to work with whoever shows up with a check. But to hand wave over the issue is illogical.
Now, as a VC, I don’t want to co-invest with free riders. I’m exempting angels, super angels, and “seed-only VCs” from this. But if I co-invest with someone, I want to know that they are going to work with us to continue to fund the company, not walk away 50% of the time “because” – well – whatever “because” means.
The collision between signaling and free riders is what creates a lot of dissonance. In the current wave of seed and angel investing activity, we haven’t hit a hard down cycle yet. We will. When we do, these two issues are going to pop to the forefront. Anyone who participates in the early stage investment ecosystem (entrepreneurs, angels, and VCs) should make sure they spend some time thinking about this and incorporating it into their own strategy, before it is upon them.
One of the most common criticisms of VC investors making seed investments is something that has become known as “the signaling problem.” The explanation of this problem is that VCs create a “negative perception” about a company if they make a seed investment but then don’t follow through and make a next round investment. Another way to say this is that a VC creates a “signaling situation” with their seed investment – if they don’t follow on in the next round they are “sending a signal” that something is wrong with the company (hence the label “signaling problem.”)
Last week I spoke with a partner at a large VC firm whose firm has been around for a long time. They have a new seed program (as of a few years ago) after eschewing seed investments from 2002 to 2008. The partner that I talked to told me that they are doing 30 seed investments out of their newest fund.
I was surprised on two levels – the first is that they have a very visible anti-seed reputation. I pointed out that their market reputation was that they didn’t do seed investments nor did they do many Series A investments. He said “we changed that a few years ago.” I suggested that their web site didn’t talk about their seed program; he responded “yeah, we need to work on our web site.”
The second, more important thing, was that I couldn’t make the math work on their fund. I asked them how many of the seed investments they expected to follow with regular first round investments. He said “half of them”. So – 15 of their investments in the fund would come from their seed program. I asked how many other investments they’d have in the fund. He said 30. So they’ll end up with 45 active investments in the fund (high for their fund size) of which 33% came from seed investments.
I then asked how they were going to deal with the “signaling problem” for seed investments they didn’t follow on with. Here he said something that made me pause: “We’ll sell them back to the founders, the company, or the angels at somewhere between $1 and our cost.” I probed on this (as in “seriously, can you give me some examples?”) Without naming names he explained three situations in the past two years where they’ve done this. And, in each case, his firm had decided not to follow on, took themselves out of the cap table, and the three companies were able to raise additional financing (in one case from a different VC firm.)
I thought this was a pretty clever way to deal with this issue. While it doesn’t eliminate the problem created by the signaling issue, it addresses part of it. I don’t know if this firm will follow through on unwinding their positions in 15 of the 30 seed investments they make. I also don’t know how they’ll feel when one of the 15 they decided not to follow goes on to be massively successful and their seed piece, if they had kept it, would have returned a meaningful amount of money to them. But if they do take this approach it seems like they should shout it from the rooftops as part of their VC / seed positioning statement.
I’m not a fan of this “spray and pray” seed investing strategy for VCs. Instead, when we make a seed investment, we don’t treat it any differently than our non-seed investments. Rather than repeat our approach here, take a look at the post How I Think About Seed Investing As A VC that I wrote a month ago. That said, I found the approach of selling back the seed investment at $1 to be an interesting way to address part of the signaling problem.
My partner Seth Levine has a detailed post up today titled Trada – from the beginning that describes the creation and financing of Trada. Foundry Group is the seed investor in Trada and Seth’s post describes one example of what I think is effective VC seed investing.
The meat of the funding story follows:
“Of course coming up with the idea is the easy part. Executing against that idea is another matter. In this case neither Niel (nor I) had any interest in creating a traditional syndicate to fund the company. Instead we quickly put our heads together about a financing (we like to say it was over beers, but the truth is more mundane – we hammered out the details in a 10 minute conversation in the conference room of the Foundry office). We decided that we wanted to bring in some experts to help us with the business and together flew around pitching the business to a small handful of strategic angel investors to pull together a small syndicate that became the initial Trada investor base. Niel and I hammered out a second financing in similar fashion (again around the Foundry conference table, this time without the need for an angel roadshow). It’s a great example of how we like to work with entrepreneurs – especially those that we have a long history with. We like to be involved early (in this case before an idea for a business even existed) and we think of our angel investments as a down payment on a subsequent investment in the business (we’ realize that we need to give early businesses some time to develop).”
The short version is that the seed round was figured out in ten minutes – this was the “Series A”. A few strategic angels were added to this round. We did a second financing by ourselves at an increased valuation – this was the “Series B”. Recently Google Ventures led the a $5.75m “Series C” round.
The terms on the Series A and B were straightforward as Niel Robertson, the founder/CEO of Trada is a sophisticated entrepreneur (Trada is his third company) so he had no patience (nor did we) for silly, complex early stage terms. More importantly, the two key aspects of any deal – price and control – we able to be negotiated quickly between Seth and Niel, partly because of their long history working together which was built on mutual respect and trust.
When we funded the Series A (the seed round) of Trada, we fully expected we were at the beginning of a multi-round journey. Seth does a great job of explaining how it got started – I encourage you to read his post for an example of one of the financing cases where I think a VC can be an excellent seed investor.
Last week saw an explosion of discussion around seed investing, including plenty of negative comments around VCs as seed investors. While I agree that many VCs are crummy seed investors, I think there are some that are excellent seed investors. This prompted me to write a post titled AngelList Boulder and Some Thoughts on Seed Investing where I promised to write up some of my thoughts on how and why VCs could be good seed investors.
Before I got around to starting, there were three excellent posts that, if you are interested in this topic, are must reads. They are:
All three of these posts lay out clear points of view on the authors seed strategy. And importantly, Mark encourages all entrepreneurs to make sure they understand a VC’s seed strategy before taking money, which I strongly agree with.
Before I start talking about good and bad VC seed strategies, I thought I’d explain mine. For context, about 25% of the investments we make at Foundry Group are seed investments. But before Foundry Group, my partners and I were involved in many seed investments, both at Mobius Venture Capital. In addition, I’ve made many seed investments as an angel investor in two time periods,1994-1996 and 2006-2007, and seen many more through my involvement as a co-founder of TechStars. Our strategy has evolved from this experience and is different from my angel investor strategy (which I’ve explained in my post Suggestions for Angel Investors.)
As a VC, I do not differentiate between a seed investment and any other investment that I make. At Foundry Group, we are comfortable investing as little as $250k in a round (a seed investment for us) all the way up to $10m in a round. We think about each investment – whether it’s $250k or $10m – the same way, and commit to participating in the business for the long term.
Specifically, our seed investments are not “options on the next round.” We price our seed rounds as equity investments, always lead or co-lead (as Fred describes in Lead Investors, Dipshit Companies, and Funding Every Entrepreneur), and treat them the same way we would with a $10m investment.
I have three partners and all of us are involved in all of our investments. So, when we make a seed investment, it gets everyone’s attention. We try hard not to smother it with love, but we recognize that we usually each have something unique to add to a seed investment and try to help accordingly. As a result, we are all emotionally involved in the investment (a phrase you’ll see in later posts about this topic) which I believe is both beneficial to the entrepreneur and extremely important to the VC firm.
When we make a seed investment, we fully expect to invest at least the same amount that we invested in the seed round without thinking hard about it. One of our strongly held beliefs is that it often takes several years for a company to find its mojo and we are willing to work through the challenging first few years. As a result, we don’t believe that there is a particularly critical “go forward or not” decision point immediately following the seed round. Now, this doesn’t mean that the follow on round is blindly done – we are very internally critical of the progress a company is (or isn’t) making, but we try to firmly put ourselves on the side of the entrepreneur in this discussion and work together when things start off slowly, or differently, than expected.
At Foundry Group, we describe ourselves as being “syndication agnostic”. This means we are completely indifferent as to whether we fund something ourselves or with other VCs (e.g. each are equally happy situations.) In addition, we are equally delighted to co-invest with angels and super angels, or not. Basically, we are happy in any case, are making a decision to invest independent of anyone else, and defer to the entrepreneur on who they want to have involved.
Finally, we are deliberate about the areas we invest in (our “themes”). We see a ton of seed investment opportunities, but only invest in a few. Many of the opportunities we see are outside of our themes. We have consciously decided to only invest in areas we know well and think we can be meaningfully additive to and constrain our focus to these themes (although the themes expand and evolve with our experience.) This lens allows us to spend the vast majority of our time on companies we are either investors in or likely to be investors in, and limits our time “exploring lots of things that have a low probability of being an investment for us.”
Taking Mark’s lead from his post, I’m going to put up a more specific post on the Foundry Group blog that lays this out in a very specific way. I’ll also follow this post with some examples, as I’ve got seven to choose from: AdMeld, Gnip, Lijit, Mandlebrot, Next Big Sound, Standing Cloud, and Trada. And, in case you are wondering, here are two recent examples of how seed investments blossom: AdMeld Raised $15 Million Round from Norwest Venture Partners and Time Warner and Trada Raises $5.75 Million Round From Google Ventures.
Ah – well – another day passed and there was once again a ton of chatter around angel investing. A lot of it was prompted by AngelConf 2010 which you can watch recordings of on Justin.tv (AngelConf 2010 Part 1 and AngelConf 2010 Part 2). While there continues to be plenty of negative VC tone and “disruptive change is here” (ala traditional VC is over), there were also some great nuggets, including my favorite line from Joshua Schachter of typical VC behavior of SHITS (Show High Interest Then Stall).
But I think the two best posts to come out of yesterday are Lead Investors, Dipshit Companies, and Funding Every Entrepreneur by Fred Wilson and MoneyBall for Startups by Dave McClure. While they come at things from very different angles, they are both very insightful and important. Importantly, they are willing to use words in their posts that Goldman Sachs has apparently banned in email as of yesterday.
We are packing up the Homer house today and I’m looking forward to diving back into the fray next week in Boulder.
I got a note from Nivi, the creator of AngelList, over the weekend saying that he’d put up a special page for angel investors in Boulder. He’s looking for the local Boulder angels to add their names to the list. Gang – let’s get ’em up – if you are an angel investor and based in the Boulder area, sign up!
There’s been an enormous about of blog and news chatter about angel investors, especially seed investors and the emergence of super angel / micro VCs, in the past few months. I’m a huge fan and supporter of the super angel / micro VC phenomenon and have watched with delight as it has built momentum.
However, in the past few weeks I’ve started to see a rant start to emerge that I’ll simplify as “VCs suck as seed investors – the only path to happiness are angels or super angels or micro VCs.” This rant bugs me as I think it’s incorrect and isn’t very helpful to entrepreneurs. While I know many VCs that I would categorize as terrible seed investors, I know plenty that are excellent seed investors. And while I know many angels who are terrific seed investors, I also know some who are abysmal.
The thing that started to bug me last week wasn’t the discussions about the characteristics of what makes a VC a bad seed investor, but that the comments, including some from super angels, were becoming generalizations that all VCs were bad seed investors. As I read through them, they started feeling like statements of “hey entrepreneur, trust me, I’m just trying to save you from Mr. Evil VC and here’s the answer, the answer is me.”
As a VC who has been a very active angel investor (I’ve made over 75 angel investments), an active seed investor as a VC (I just counted and 7 of the 25 investments we’ve made out of Foundry Group since we started our fund in Q4 2007 are seed investments), a co-founder of a “mentorship-driven seed stage investment program” (TechStars), and an investor in several super angel / micro VC funds, I believe both angels and VCs can be excellent seed investors.
There is a lot more transparency than there ever has been, the structural dynamics of early stage investing are moving around a lot, and entrepreneurs have more clarity on their choices, ways to figure out who is good and who is bad, and ways to get access to great choices than ever before. Fred Wilson wrote two excellent posts on this over the weekend titled Angel vs. VC and The AngelList as well as an earlier post titled Some Thoughts On The Seed Fund Phenomenon. Until last week I didn’t feel like I had a ton to add to the discussion, but I felt like it was time to weigh in as I saw the tone shifting to “VCs are bad seed investors.”
While I completely agree with the phrase “many VCs are bad seed investors” especially around VCs simply trying to create option value for themselves or the issues around signaling risk, I felt like there wasn’t enough discussion about why and when VCs were effective seed investors. So I thought I’d take some of this on over the next few weeks. Hopefully my perspective and examples will be additive to the conversation and helpful to early stage entrepreneurs, especially first time ones.
In the mean time, if you are a Boulder angel (or seed) investor and you are still reading, sign up on AngelList already!