Tag Archives: Startups

The two goals of startup fundraising

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Money’s been flowing. VCs have been investing money at levels not seen since the bubble year of 2000. Entrepreneurs have been raising enormous amounts of money at valuations that assume years of future growth and eventual profitability. So what’s the downside of all this? That entrepreneurs mistake what they’re reading on Techcrunch as the reality for their own companies both now and for the foreseeable future. Raising money seems like a cakewalk, but that’s only because you don’t read about the failed financings, down rounds and recaps nearly as much as the unicorns and decacorns. And warning signs are emerging that the cascade of cash is about to end. The reality may be very different soon, and that’s something that we’ve emphasized to our Homebrew partner companies as they’ve hit the fundraising trail this year. Fundraising is confusing, frustrating and all-consuming at its worst and informative, exciting and rewarding at its best. But regardless of the process, we like to say that for all startups there are only two goals in the fundraising process: put money in the bank and maintain optionality.

Put money in the bank: The number one goal of fundraising is to get money in the bank so that you have the opportunity to solve the problem you set out to solve. If you’re fortunate enough to have a story or metrics that attract multiple term sheets, feel free to aggressively negotiate pricing, structure, syndicate partners, etc. But more likely is that you won’t have so many options and you’ll need to accept the terms you’re offered (more or less) so that you can live to fight another day. The number one cause of company failure is running out of money. And many times the key to winning is just surviving so that market timing finally lines up with your product or service. If you want to build a high-growth, venture-backed startup, do whatever it takes to push cash on the balance sheet. That way, you’ll be able to fund operations to hit the next set of milestones that will allow you to raise additional capital or achieve profitability.

Maintain optionality: It’s incredibly tempting to raise as much money as you can at as high a valuation as you can. All startups believe that with more money they will accomplish more in the same amount of time. But in our experience, constraint is what yields innovation and results. More money typically yields more spending. Companies often end up trying to solve problems by hiring more people and burning more cash. In the meantime, the bar for the next financing has been set much higher because investors expect to see greater results given the larger amount of money and the higher price at which it was raised. Everytime you raise money, consider that you’re cutting off possible paths in your financing/exit decision tree with every increase in dollars raised and valuation. While every founder envisions building a unicorn, the odds are that if your company is successful, that success will be at an exit value much lower than $1 billion. So why not approach your financing in a way that maximizes your options for raising more money when you have additional data that gives you the confidence to take more risk and double down on the business? Or why not maintain the option of accepting an acquisition offer or going public at a fair valuation and still generating incredible wealth for you, your employees and your investors? With a currently mixed exit environment (even for unicorns) and historical exit data skewing much lower than $200 million, maintaining optionality through your financing can be the difference between surviving or winning and the failed financings, down rounds and recaps that no one wants to talk about.

Raising large amounts of money has been glorified. Being able to do it quickly and painlessly has become the expectation. But the reality is very different and likely to become more so as the market adjusts to a reality with few exits and difficult to justify valuations. So just remember that at the end of the day, only two things matter when it comes to fundraising. Put money in the bank and maintain optionality. Give yourself the ability to control your startup’s destiny and take on more risk only when you feel ready.

Startups are hard. Don’t go it alone.

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I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that with the continuous growth in the number of startups (we’re seeing between 150 and 200 new seed opportunities per month at Homebrew), we’re also seeing a related trend in the growing number of companies being started by solo founders.  I’ve taken a particular interest in this because Hunter and I have a strong bias against investing in solo founders (although we have done it once so far).  This clear shift in the market caused me to reflect on why we prefer founding teams over founding individuals.  In fact, we prefer teams that have known each for a long time and ideally have worked together before.  While solo founders can absolutely build great companies, I think we’re right that having a founding team materially increases the chances for success.  Building a great company is hard enough.  It’s even harder to do it alone.  In no particular order, here’s why having co-founders can be helpful:

Idea validation: If you can’t convince someone else to join you in pursuing your idea, maybe it’s not worth pursuing.

Pressure to perform: Having a co-founder makes you responsible to someone else, which in turn puts pressure on you to deliver results, probably faster than you might otherwise.

Emotional outlet: In startups the highs can be high but the lows can be low.  And the inevitable trough of sorrow can be a lonely place.  Surviving the anxiety and emotion of a startup can be much easier when the burden is shared.  It’s great to see much more dialogue about the emotional challenges of being a founder.  One way of fighting depression and other forms of emotional distress is by having a co-founder with whom you can be open and honest about your fears, struggles and insecurities.

Skill diversity: No one person, no matter how brilliant, has all of the skills needed to make a startup successful. Having co-founders with complementary skills can make it much easier for each person to say no to everything but the tasks most critical to achieving success.

Hiring strength: Multiple people on the team means a broader network from which to recruit, a diversity of skills with which to evaluate candidates and a more pronounced culture for potential hires to experience.  Having co-founders just makes hiring easier.

Sounding board: Co-founders lie awake at night worrying about the same things as you. They’re just as committed to the mission as you. And they’re equally invested in seeing all parts of the company work as you.  And so they will challenge you, scold you and push you (and often hug you) unlike anyone else at the company can or will.

It’s important to note that having a co-founder just for the sake of having one, or randomly meeting one at a “dating” event, isn’t the answer.  Having the wrong co-founder can be more damaging than going to alone.  There’s lots more to say about finding the right co-founder(s), but it starts with having shared vision, shared experience, trust and complementary skills.  It means having alignment on goals, culture and values.  It doesn’t necessarily require equal equity or compensation, but it does mean early agreement on those things.  Finding the right co-founders can be challenging, but we strongly believe that the startups most likely to become the best companies are founded by teams that belong together.

Successful startups say “no”

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“The difference between successful people and very successful people is that very successful people say “no” to almost everything.” – Warren Buffett

We’ve been spending the past few weeks at Homebrew helping several of our portfolio companies work through their planning for 2015.  It’s no surprise that during these conversations incredible ideas for new products and features, partnerships, revenue streams, technologies, etc., emerge.  So we and our founders all remind ourselves about the value of doing just one thing (or a very small number of things) exceptionally well.

Often times it’s easier for companies to choose to do lots of different things.  New initiatives are fun and energizing and get lots of attention while the effort required be truly exceptional at one thing can be an exhausting grind.  But being adequate at lots of things almost always comes at the expense of being excellent at the most important thing.  Great companies are born of focused excellence.  Google was the best at search before it expanded into new product areas and markets.  Facebook was a powerful social network before venturing into mobile communications and virtual reality.  Narrowing from lots of good ideas to just the most critical ones is the lifeblood of a successful company.  We constantly remind our teams that startups rarely die from lack of ambition, only from a lack of focus.  And we insist that there’s incredible power in saying “No” to the things that distract them from being best in the world at whatever they are doing.

So what are examples of  things that startups should be saying “No” to so they can focus on what really matters?

  • Settling for the good enough hire: It’s tempting to fill the hole on the team that seems like the obstacle to progress.  But hiring people with enough aptitude but the wrong attitude is guaranteed to impede and even reverse progress in the long run.  These kinds of early hiring mistakes can cripple a company.
  • Building new products or more features: There’s that one customer that is willing to pay a lot for just one new feature.  Or if you just add this small feature that will solve your user growth problem.  Or you’ve got early customers that love your product so you want to give them more to love before growing the customer base.  Do any of these help you deliver the simplest offering for the core use case you’ve identified?  Are you sure that you’re not iterating toward a local maximum versus placing a bet that might unearth a global maximum?
  • Short term revenue: Revenue can be found in lots of places, such as consulting contracts, project development work, one-time ad sponsorships, etc. But does generating revenue in an ad hoc way help you build a business that will scale and be sustainable?  Is the revenue you’re generating the income stream you want to bet on long term?
  • Potential investors: The dirty little secret about “coffee meetings” with investors is that even though they’re positioned as relationship building, you have to treat them like you’re actively fundraising.  Because most investors are judging you and your business in every interaction (a few are genuinely trying to be helpful or to get to know you).  So the easiest thing to do is politely pass on that coffee and stay focused on the business until you really want to be fundraising.
  • Big company partners: Big companies offer the promise of distribution, revenue, resources and many other things. But the vast majority of the time you get stuck in a never-ending cycle of meetings, negotiations and more meetings.  And if a partnership is struck, the likelihood of it amounting to anything is next to zero.  In the meantime, you’ve taken up a ton of time, resources and mental energy that has a real opportunity cost.  More often than not, these types of relationships can be all consuming for small companies and can distract them from your ultimate goals.
  • Corporate development: See Paul Graham’s excellent post.
  • Networking events: Just build a great company.  Your network will grow because you’re creating something incredible, not because you drank beer and ate cold pizza with a bunch of entrepreneurs in a converted warehouse somewhere.

At Homebrew, our primary goal with Fund I has been to overdeliver on our brand promise to the founders who’ve chosen to partner with us.  We prioritize our time and efforts such that the needs of our companies come first.  We often choose to pass on meeting with new startups, speaking at conferences, attending happy hours, etc., because none of those are immediately and directly in service of our founders.  And we’ve found that because we’ve made making these types of choice a habit, they get easier to make over time.

Saying “no” absolutely requires discipline and grit, because “yes” doesn’t disappoint someone or necessitate a difficult conversation.  But there is real value in saying “no” because it orients startups towards spending their limited time and resources on doing just one thing incredibly well.  And if you can do one thing exceptionally well, chances are you’ll have the opportunity to try another in time.

Any other things startups should say no to in the interest of focus and pursuing excellence?

No surprises: The key to the founder/VC relationship and avoiding the “Oh shit” board meeting

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In the VC business, there is a running joke about the “Oh shit” board meeting – the first one that takes place after an investment has been made.  That’s when all of the bad news that was hidden during the diligence process gets uncovered and the VC is faced with the reality of the business for the first time (and the founders are faced with the reality of the partner they just “married”!)  At Homebrew, when we partner with a startup in support of the founders’ vision, we expect to share in the good, the bad and the ugly.  And we expect to share in it well before we invest.  After all, startups aren’t all rainbows and unicorns (see what I did there? 🙂 ).  Bad hires get made, product releases fall flat and revenue doesn’t materialize.  These challenges are not the exception, they are the rule, particularly at the seed stage.  So we believe that the key to successful relationships between founders and their VCs is one simple rule: No Surprises.  And the application of that rule starts well before a formal partnership is formed between VCs and a founding team.

Accordingly, when we evaluate potential investment opportunities at Homebrew, we try to make the diligence process beyond the first meeting feel like a series of working sessions, which in part help expose potential surprises for both sides.  We find that this approach provides us with both a better understanding of how the founders think and a deeper appreciation for the nuances of the business.  Most importantly, it helps both sides get a feel for what it would be like to work together.  In these sessions, we tend to be pretty open and direct about what we find compelling and concerning about the startup.  We ask the entrepreneurs to be equally honest about not just their business, but also about the possibility of working with us.  What questions or concerns do they have?  What kind of help are they seeking from investors?  Are they concerned about forming a board and having board meetings?  Nothing is off limits in those sessions, because the last thing we want is for either side to go into a long-term relationship based on misinformation or misaligned expectations. We build the relationship on No Surprises.

On an ongoing basis, information needs to be shared openly and in a timely manner.  As major investors in your company, it’s failure if we’re hearing significant news for the first time in a monthly email update or at a board meeting.  No Surprises means that everyone has the same information at the same time so that they can react as a cohesive team.  And the No Surprises rule should apply to both sides.  Entrepreneurs should never be surprised by their VC, whether it’s related to personnel, business metrics, follow-on decisions or anything else. Trust is fundamental in startups, but it’s possibly even more important in an effectively permanent founder/VC relationship.  And living by the No Surprises rule helps keep that foundation of trust pristine.

So do yourself a favor when talking to investors.  Establish the No Surprises rule for both sides.  You’ll avoid the “Oh shit” board meeting and have a great long-term partnership as a result.

Homebrew’s investment interests: Local Marketplaces

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Local offline-to-online marketplaces are just beginning to impact the lives of individuals and small businesses, enabling them to save time and money and generate new revenue streams.  Where there was previously friction, opacity or scarcity, local marketplaces are providing convenience, transparency and abundance.  Homebrew is focused on supporting seed stage companies like these that are building the Bottom Up Economy.  Our prior experience working with and investing in companies such as OpenTable, Angie’s List and several less successful marketplaces has helped inform how we evaluate and support investments in this segment.  Here are some of the other key things we look for in startups employing a local marketplace model.

Focused use case: We believe that scale is the outgrowth of doing one thing really well. Accordingly, we prefer to see local marketplaces that nail a specific, focused use case rather than take a broad platform approach from the outset.  Homejoy is a great example of a company that has had relentless focus on a single use case, cleaning your home.  An early competitor, Exec, offered a platform where all kinds of services, including home cleaning, could be requested but suffered as a result.  One of the primary benefits of focusing on a narrow use case is that customers don’t need to think about how or why to use the marketplace.  Focus makes that abundantly clear.

Premium experience for sub-premium price: Great local marketplaces enable customers to have a new experience that is magnitudes better than the old. But the best marketplaces deliver that new, better (i.e., premium) experience for a sub-premium price.  Uber and Lyft are the prime examples of delivering infinitely better experiences than hailing taxis and typically at only modestly greater costs (even cheaper in an increasing number of cases).  One of our Homebrew family companies, Shyp, is similar in that it delivers an incredible shipping experience at standard retail rates.

Necessities over luxuries: There are local marketplaces for all kinds of products and services, but we prefer marketplaces that are focused on necessities rather than luxuries. Necessities tend to have higher transaction frequency, greater word-of-mouth and less susceptibility to economic downturns.  Everyone needs to eat, wash their clothes and get to work.  But not everyone needs to fly in a private jet, rent a yacht or hire a Michelin star-winning chef.  Those can be wonderful services and they can be delivered in compelling ways, but our view is that products and services that are truly need-based lead to more vibrant. liquid marketplaces.

Organic distribution: Word of mouth is the best marketing.  But there are other forms of organic distribution that can be just as powerful and cost effective.  For example, when Uber launched, taking a ride with a friend introduced many others to the experience.  When Shyp sends a package, the recipient is exposed to the delightfulness of the service.  Many of the most compelling local marketplaces have dynamics where the same person can be both customer and supplier over time.  Dog owners on DogVacay can be hosts in one transaction and customers in the next.  We love to see marketplaces that have these types of organic distribution opportunities embedded in their services.

Few emerging replacements: While we always tell startups not to fixate on competitors, in today’s world where switching costs and barriers to entry are often low, we prefer to invest in local marketplace startups that are solving problems that few others are addressing with new solutions.  For example, for better or worse, we’ve avoided investments in the various types of food delivery companies because while frequency is high, there are many replacement products available.  This makes it hard to to acquire customers cost effectively, to protect margins and to maintain significant market share over the long term.  Many markets have room for more than one “winner” but very few have room for more than two or three.

The above characteristics may be unique to Homebrew, but we also like to see things that others have recognized as important to marketplace businesses.  Many of these are well-documented by Bill Gurley in his excellent posts on marketplaces and platform transaction fees.  In the past year, we’ve seen local marketplace startups in countless areas, including tech support, parking, home services, cleaning, laundry, food, labor, property rental and transportation.  We’ve made investments in several verticals, including shipping with Shyp, legal services with UpCounsel and property management with an unannounced investment.  But we believe that there are many more use cases for which compelling products and services can be delivered via a marketplace model.  If you’re starting a local marketplace company, especially in specific labor verticals or providing B2B services, please contact me at satya at homebrew.co.

Additional posts on Homebrew investment themes:

Bottom Up Economy

Vertical Software

 

Homebrew’s investment interests: Vertical software

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Homebrew’s first fund focuses on what we’re calling the “Bottom Up Economy.”  The Bottom Up Economy thesis states that as technology becomes more affordable, flexible and accessible, many industries that have not benefitted from or been impacted by technology historically will finally do so  Software is eating the world in many cases but also enabling the world in others.  Accordingly, we spend a great deal of time getting to know entrepreneurs and companies building software solutions that disrupt industries or enable the existing industry players to compete more effectively.  And we’ve already invested in companies serving several different areas, including legal services, mental health, logistics, communications, financial services and commercial construction.  Given our focus on vertically oriented software, I wanted to share a little bit about the attributes we like to see in those startups.

Teams with a unique POV: As my partner, Hunter Walk, has written, we’re excited by teams that aredisrupting industries with love (and just enough greed 🙂 ).  Teams that have experience in the domain tend to have a strong POV about what’s broken and how to fix it.  But often times the most unique insight can come from teams outside of their target industry who are approaching things with fresh eyes.  So we prefer to work with teams that can demonstrate domain expertise without the stagnation of assuming status quo is just the “way things are done”.  What’s critical is that the teams we invest in have an insight that many others either have not seen or don’t agree with.

Distribution focus: We tend not to invest in software companies that are 100% dependent on selling into theC-level via a direct salesforce.  Instead, we prefer a bottom-up entry point via individuals or teams within the enterprise or small business.  The startups that intrigue us have a well-articulated plan for how to get distribution of their software in the industry they are targeting, and most often that includes a strong likelihood for organic or viral growth. No matter how slick and easy-to-use your software is,if you build it they probably won’t come.

Long-term advantage: Nearly all software is replicable, so we look for companies that are likely to have long-term differentiation, ideally via customer or data network effects.  Network effects mean that the value of the software grows as more people use it either because it allows them to interact with more people in the context of their work or it helps collect and aggregate data that informs and improves their work.  The strongest network effects enable customers to benefit from product usage that occurs even outside of their companies (i.e. industry-wide).

Acute pain: VCs are notorious for categorizing things as an aspirin versus a vitamin or need-to-have versus nice-to-have.  But there is a good reason for this.  Unless software is helping addressing an acute pain or delivering value that can’t be ignored, it likely can’t attract the attention it needs to be used or purchased given the limited time of people and budgets of companies.  We like to see software that is addressing what is likely to be one of the top 3 hair-on-fire issues.  This kind of software has a better chance of drawing attention and dollars.

Widespread pain: In addition to the pain being acute, the pain needs to be felt by a lot of people.  This is important because companies need to be able to reach “venture scale”, usage and revenue that allows for a company to be valued many times higher than the value at which a VC firm invests.  For Homebrew, our goal is to invest in companies where we can see a path to returning the value of our entire fund ($35 million) from an investment in that company.  Both the total dollars invested and the price of investment have an impact on that math, but it generally means that we need to believe that the company can eventually generate $100 million in annual revenue.  That kind of scale requires a widespread feeling of acute pain.

Painless path to first dollar: It’s obviously easier to get someone to use something that is free than it is to get him or her to pay for something.  So we like to see products that are likely to have a painless path to the first dollar payment.  It becomes much easier to extract more economic value once the customer is convinced to pay for something because at that point she clearly sees some value in the product that is greater than what she is paying.  This typically means that there is a single person who has three characteristics: 1) she feels the acute pain personally 2) she has the budget needed to buy (can just put it on her company credit card) and 3) she can pilot the product easily (self-service sign-up, no IT involvement).

While we don’t have hard and fast rules or a checklist approach to evaluating investments, we always think about the criteria above when looking at opportunities in vertical software.  If you’re taking a vertically focused approach and have a story to tell that fits with our preferences and approach, don’t hesitate to get introduced to us or to reach out directly.

Homebrew: The challenges and opportunities in starting up

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We think of Homebrew as our startup (it just happens to be one that writes checks instead of code). And we’ve definitely had to deal with the typical startup challenges while getting Homebrew off the ground, including fundraising. While cloud services, open source software and engineering outsourcing/offshoring have driven down the costs of starting a technology company, I’ve been dismayed at how little impact technology has had on aspects of company-building that have nothing to do with the the traditional technology stack, such as obtaining credit, finding office space and buying insurance. There is still tremendous opportunity to improve the costs and efficiency of creating businesses, especially small businesses that are part of the Bottom Up Economy. We’ve learned this first hand over the past few months.

I thought it would be interesting to outline all of the things that we had to do and the dollars we had to spend to get Homebrew to a point where we could focus on our “product”, investing in entrepreneurs who are enabling the Bottom Up Economy. I found that with each of the items, there is room for startups to provide a better, faster, cheaper solutions. If you’re working to address any of these opportunities, we’d love to hear from you. Here is a long but not completely exhaustive list:

– Fund formation. Legal work, including for our fundraising (akin to company formation and fundraising for startups), took us 100 days, required countless state and federal forms and cost us about $125k in legal fees (yikes!). And because we’re a VC, we had to purchase a special type of insurance called Venture Capital Asset Protection, which protects us in case we get sued while performing our duties as board directors of the companies we invest in. We obtained our policy through a broker and pay about $15k annually to cover us. Finally, we conducted a trademark search and registered our name, which required using a separate trademark lawyer and incurred about $3k in fees. While fund formation is clearly a high class problem, small businesses usually need to complete similar steps when starting up. They need to incorporate, register the business, seek trademark protection and get liability insurance. While we had the benefits of time and resources, most startups don’t. Yet, beyond a now dated LegalZoom, little seems to have been done to decrease the cost and complexity for new businesses.

– Office space. It took us two real estate agents and about 7 months to find and move into our offices (3200 sqft at a bit over $10k per month). The good news is that in most commercial real estate markets, San Francisco included, tenants don’t pay broker fees (lots of startups don’t seem to know this….hire an agent!). However, landlords can make you jump through hoops, including providing financial statements, certificates of incorporation, etc., to sign a lease. As a startup much of this is hard, if not impossible, to provide. But it doesn’t end there, once you find office space you need to find a real estate lawyer to review your lease agreement (cost us about $2000) and get lease insurance ($2700 through an insurance broker). In both cases, we relied on our real estate agent to recommend a service provider as there wasn’t any good way of “shopping” for one. Is there anyone out there working on a Zillow or Trulia for commercial real estate?

– Office outfitting. Furniture, internet service, janitorial service, utilities, electricians, movers, painters, food and drink. These things add up, even if you’re just opting for IKEA and Costco. And they take time because there are no good sources for identifying providers, for comparing pricing and quality or for scheduling.  Even with the help of friends, all of this took countless hours, appointments and emails.  The most frustrating was furniture, which took 4-8 weeks (and counting!) for delivery with no regular visibility into a delivery status. And we know we’re not alone in struggling through these items because we hear about them regularly from founders and small business owners we meet.

– Hiring. For small businesses, hiring is still done through personal networks, walk-ins or Craigslist. Given that we were looking for more than just an employee, a true founding member of the Homebrew family, we relied exclusively on our personal networks. The process didn’t cost money but it took 5 months of interviews, reference checks and social outings to vet candidates. We were fortunate that all of that time and energy resulted in finding a great Director of Operations. Unfortunately, for small businesses, they rarely have the luxury of that much time to find a qualified employee.

– Health insurance. Our Director of Operations is an employee so the State of California requires us to carry workers’ compensation insurance. Again, we worked through a broker and obtained a policy that costs us $240 annually for one employee. We also needed health insurance for our team. This was possibly the most painful experience that we had even though we worked through a broker. The list of reasons why is too long to delineate but it includes: 1) not being able to obtain insurance without 6 weeks of payroll 2) needing to provide proof of insurance for one employee who opted out of coverage (?!?) 3) completing over 16 different forms for only two covered employees 4) having to provide partnership agreements, ownership structure and our Certificate of Formation for who knows what reasons 5) requiring a paper check for payment of the first month’s premium to initiate coverage and 6) taking over 3 months from start to finish (our insurance finally kicked in on 8/1). And all of this is for a process that is completely opaque and results in what we hope is good insurance given the $2500 per month to cover two employees and their families. The vast majority of small businesses rely on insurance brokers for finding and maintaining health care coverage and no doubt face the same questions and frustrations we did.

– Banking. As a startup in Silicon Valley there are plenty of banks that will service you, so finding a bank is not a problem. However, the process of actually opening an account takes countless paper forms and hours of back and forth with the bank. And if you want a business credit card, good luck. Homebrew is a $35 million fund with large institutional investors and we still couldn’t qualify for a credit card with reasonable limits and fees from a number of banks. After six weeks, we were finally approved for a card from Amex on the back of my personal credit card history. Imagine the pain if you’re a small business on Main Street!

– Payroll. Maybe the easiest thing we did because of our outsourced CFO and ZenPayroll (wish we could have invested but Homebrew didn’t exist then!). Most small businesses still rely on ADP or Paychex but it’s great to see a better solution available.

– Web Presence. Finding and negotiating for a web domain, designing a logo, building a website that works well on mobile, choosing a web host and setting up various online identities (blog, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, AngelList) takes time and can cost significant amounts of money. We have the benefit of having worked in technology for years (and it still wasn’t painless), but for a small business that wants to have a meaningful online and social media presence, the resources available to help understand its needs, find options and learn how to use them, are still incredibly disparate and unclear. The number of options available are limitless but the information needed to make intelligent decisions is rarely available.

– Infrastructure. We’re a completely cloud-based company so we use Google Apps for email, Google Docs for document creation, DropBox as our file system and Base for CRM. Selecting a CRM system was the most difficult of these choices because there are so many options in the market and no good way to compare them. We also chose to buy a printer/scanner/copier because as much as we want to be a paperless office, it’s hard to avoid paper completely in our business. Fortunately, we didn’t need a POS system, merchant account, accounting system (our outsourced CFO uses Xero), etc. like many small businesses do because I think I would have pulled the little that remains of my hair out trying to figure all of that out.

As a fund, we had the luxury of raising our money upfront and having ample time to work through these issues as there was no clock ticking. But for small businesses, the costs and the time taken away from selling and serving customers can mean the difference between success and shutting the doors. There is so much friction involved in the process of establishing a new business and relatively little has been done to make it easier. We hope that Homebrew can play a part in changing that. Over the past few months, we’ve put in place a lot of the foundation to support entrepreneurs participating in the Bottom Up Economy. We’re going to share as much as we can along the way – both the good and the bad – to be transparent about our work and to encourage more innovation in support of the Bottom Up Economy.

Angelgate: Much ado about nothing

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It seems that the hullabaloo over Angelgate is finally dying down but I’ve been in Austin the last couple of days and I was surprised to hear how curious people here are about all that has gone on in the echo chamber of the Valley. I’ve been sharing my not particularly unique perspectives (Mark Suster wrote a super post on the topic) with folks here and elsewhere so I thought I would publish them for a broader audience as well.

1)      If you think that some of the smartest angels in the industry were simple-minded enough to get together and attempt to collude in any real way, you just don’t understand how the angel and venture capital investing industries work. The reality is that it would be impossible to collude in a market where the supply of capital is so fragmented, especially for the best investment opportunities. Further, all it would take is one investor to break from the too large group of potential colluders to make it all fall apart. There is nothing unusual about investors getting together to talk about investment trends and overall market dynamics. That happens regularly, just as entrepreneurs regularly trade notes on the fundraising environment, firms, partners, etc. Move along, because there is nothing to see here.

2)      I agree with Ron Conway and Matt Cohler. There are professionals who invest mainly other people’s money, called venture capitalists, and there are professionals who invest their own money, called angels. These two groups have always existed, but historically there have been more similarities than differences. What has happened is that many of the “old school” VCs have gotten bigger and moved to writing larger checks in mainly growth and later stage companies or to investing only in businesses that have the potential to change industries and produce outsized returns. At the same time, the cost of starting companies has fallen and the exit environment for startups has increasingly shifted to outcomes of less than $100 million. All of this created a larger funding gap in the market than existed previously, opening the door for an entirely new generation of angels and venture capitalists (now called micro-VCs for some inexplicable reason). Markets have a natural tendency to fill gaps and that is exactly what has happened in the venture capital industry.

3)      The not newsworthy truth of the venture market is that there is far more cooperation and camaraderie than some would have us believe. As an example, we at Battery have made over 20 seed investments in the past 2.5 years and in nearly every case those investments were made in partnership with angels, “micro-VCs” and/or “old school” VCs. As long as expectations are aligned at each step in a company’s development, there is no reason that this type of cooperation won’t continue even as the market adjusts to its realities.

4)      Raising money is not for everyone. I always tell entrepreneurs that one of your primary goals in any financing should be to maintain optionality. If you want to build a business that will generate great cash flow but not necessarily grow at an incredible rate (a so called lifestyle business….a pretty good one if you ask me) or that you can bootstrap to profitability, I would highly encourage you to do so. But if you’re going to raise money, know that there are consequences to doing so. All investors, angels and VCs alike, want to help entrepreneurs but they also want to make money. So know what the expectations of your investors are when you agree to take their money. Josh Kopelman likes to say that when considering financing, entrepreneurs have the choice of taking the local train (smaller amounts of money typically associated with angels) or the express train (larger amounts of money typically associated with VCs). If you choose the local train, you can likely get off (sell the company) at any stop along the way. But if you choose the express train, you’re on board for the entire ride. And that long, tumultuous ride isn’t for everyone. Be honest about your ambitions, both to yourself and to your investors. You’ll find that the differences between angels and VCs are truly merely about expectations and not whatever nonsense that many with selfish motives and grudges like to spew.

4 sources of long term differentiation and competitive advantage

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Despite the slowdown in venture investing during most of last year, it seems like venture activity picked up significantly in Q4. The data is consistent with my own experience during the quarter, where I saw a huge increase in companies seeking financing, the return of multiple competitors for every investment opportunity and incredibly compressed fundraising processes. I fear that we’re returning to an investing and startup environment much like the one prior to October 2008. One impact of this behavior is that we’ll likely see, as before, the funding of many companies in the same market or with similar offerings (many people point to location-based social networking companies such as Foursquare, Gowalla, Booyah, etc. as a good example). That’s led me to try to outline what I think are the only ways for web technology companies to truly have long term differentiation. Clearly, with time and money, talented people render most software and user experiences alone indefensible. So how do Internet and digital media companies create sustainable competitive advantage? 

Network effects: Businesses with network effects have products or services that increase in value as more customers use them. When a network effects business achieves scale, it can have incredibly lasting differentiation because recreating that network poses significant challenges to competitors. Microsoft Office, eBay and Yelp are good examples of these types of products and services. Some network effects businesses can have both positive and negative network effects. For example, as many social media businesses grow in use, the volume of content to filter and absorb can become overwhelming.

Switching costs: Products or services that make it difficult or expensive to use an alternative product or service have switching costs. Creating this kind of lock-in is a true barrier for competition. DoubleClick’s DFA product is a great example of a product that had tremendous value because it was embedded in the agency online media buying process and was used by many people within agencies.

Scale: For a product or service, differentiation can be derived from scale in customer usage, capital expenditure or data. As an example, Google enjoys incredible differentiation and competitive advantage from all three sources. Hundreds of millions of people conduct billions of searches on Google each day, leading websites that want to integrate search to turn to the de facto standard in the industry. Google has spent untold sums of money on hundreds of thousands of machines in datacenters around the world to deliver the fastest, freshest and most relevant search results to its users. The hundreds of millions of clicks generated each day on search results provide Google with a vast quantity of data and insights that help improve search quality. Any new search competitor not only has to deliver a superior consumer search experience, but it also has to spend enormous amounts of money recreating the underlying infrastructure and data that makes Google such a powerful competitive force.

Culture/People: Given that web technology itself is largely indefensible, the greatest source of differentiation and competitive advantage is often execution, and that is predicated on people and the culture in which they operate. Whether it’s the culture of innovation at Google, the culture of customer happiness at Zappos or the culture of freedom and responsibility at Netflix, I’m certain that the management teams from those companies would point to the employees and the DNA of the organizations as the primary reasons for their success. I find that when the culture of a company is well-defined, it is usually a direct reflection of the founder(s) and their conscious decision to establish a well-defined company culture from the start. I only know of a few instances where the culture of an organization was either instilled in the organization at a later point in the company’s development or successfully recast by new leadership.

When choosing what investments to make, I try to keep these sources of differentiation top of mind. It’s easy to get caught up in the appeal of a sexy new consumer application or a seemingly novel approach to a business problem. But lasting, significant equity value is often only created when one or more of these differentiating factors are at play. Are there other sources of differentiation that you would add to the list?

Tips for product management success

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I work with several early stage companies that are spending all of their time and energy focused on building great products that address real customerpain. To me, this is the most exciting time in a startup’s development. Starting from a blank page and creating something that will hopefully be in the hands of many satisfied users is both an imposing and thrilling challenge. My product management experience has given me several key insights (I think!) into what contributes to the success of a product manager. I’ll share a couple of those thoughts below and hopefully publish additional ideas over time.

I don’t think that you can be truly successful as a product manager if you haven’t experienced the customer or user’s pain firsthand.  Being close to the customer can provide unique insight into product requirements, and even more importantly, can shed light on what is not required in the product at all. Often times, customers and users will say that they want X or Y feature, but that is only what they think they want. What they need is a specific problem to be solved. Having lived with that problem can provide a product manager with the insight required to identify a true solution. All customer and user feedback is not created equal and knowing which feedback to incorporate into product plans is a necessary skill for any product manager.

A successful product manager also knows that he or she is not an engineer. Trust the engineers to do what they do and involve them early and often in product thinking. If the product manager and the management team have hired strong developers, technical leads, etc., they will not only figure out how to build the product correctly but they will help make the end product markedly better. Many product managers don’t have the confidence in themselves or in engineering to avoid micro-managing and over-documenting. But I’ve found that allowing the engineering team members to own what they are expert in leads to greater confidence in the product manager, more collaborative teams and more efficient product development. It also just makes being a product manager a lot easier!

(Thanks to Hiten Shah from KISSmetrics for inspiring this post.)