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Oak Investment Partners

Leadership

Venture Capital Is Not All Equal

December 16, 2014 Leave a comment

Like people, VCs come in all styles, so here are 5 characteristics to consider as you interview potential investors.If you want to raise venture capital to fund your new company and your great idea, plan out your vetting process first, because all VCs are not the same. Some are really helpful, but some are horrible and damaging to your company.

  1. Pick someone who has the same Vision and Values as you. You are (hopefully) in your venture because you believe you can change the world (if you are doing it to get rich, stop now, because you don’t get rich in the startup world by trying to get rich, you get rich by building
    something) and it’s very important your investors want you to change the world too. There are many tough moments of truth when building a company, and none more so than when you get an offer for your company before you think you are ready–before you have built the strategy and value that you believe is possible. That moment is when you find out whether your investor truly shared your vision on how to change the world or was just telling you she did.
  2. Pick a partner who can do heavy lifting for you when you need it. Great venture partnerships have a rich, deep network to help you recruit, develop partnerships, find initial customers, manage sticky HR issues and even find office space. Andreessen Horowitz are changing the game with the amount of help they give their ventures. They have teams of people to help you: recruiters, sales people, marketing people and they’ll get you started with office space. Ben Horowitz’ book, “The Hard Thing About Hard Things,” is packed with advice on building a company and is a good example of the type of advice you can get from a great VC who’s built their own company in the past.
  3. Avoid the money-based VC who’s motivated by running a portfolio–often former investment bankers. Find someone who walks the talk and truly builds great companies. If you can, find a VC who has been doing it for more than 10 years and who has a great track record–and interview their CEOs–or find one who’s been a CEO, built a good company and taken it public. When you work with someone from a leading firm like Benchmark, Oak, Sutter Hill, Sequoia, Greylock or the new kids on the block, Andreessen Horowitz (and they’ve been a CEO or a VC for many years), you get access to a level of wisdom and advice that you simply won’t get from the a small firm with relatively inexperienced investors.
  4. Don’t get greedy. Yes, valuation and how much of your company you need to give away is important. But it is just as important that you get great advice and that your management team and employees make money too when you are successful. If you get greedy and aim for the highest valuation, a couple of bad things can happen. First, you can end up with investors who don’t have the experience you need (one of my friends has a Saudi Prince as an investor–very difficult to get alignment on strategy), but second, you can find yourself in a situation with such a high preference and threshold valuation on your company that unless you are the next Facebook, only your investors will make money when you sell (and maybe not even them). There are many hot startups in San Francisco today who will face this problem when they try to get to liquidity. A great VC will coach you through this and not be greedy either.
  5. Pick someone you enjoy being with. Building a company is an intense, emotional experience. Most companies take many years to mature and if you are going to meet with your board every month for 5 years, and at dinners and strategy discussions in between, it certainly makes the
    journey more fun if you enjoy interacting with them. Of course, in the end, you do need to get funded and you may need to take what you can get, but if you have the chance to be selective, the right investor is more important than the highest valuation because you’ll build a better company and change the world (and make more money for you, your team and your investors along the way).
Leadership

What makes a great venture capitalist

November 8, 2012 Leave a comment
The venture capital world lost a master last week. Paul Wythes of Sutter Hill died at age 79 – he was a pioneer of the industry in California and a gentleman.

Reading his obituary in Business Week I was struck by two things he said
in an earlier interview that capture key characteristics of a great VC. I have little time for the celebrity VCs who court the press and like to take attention and credit for their companies. I believe the VC who is there with advice when you need him, leaves you alone when you don’t and provides unwavering support as you ride the roller coaster is what a founder or CEO really needs.

First, I love the description of Paul’s deal flow process:

Wythes
described the early days of his industry in the San Francisco Bay area. 

“What
I’d do is get in the car and drive down to Mountain View or Sunnyvale
— not so much the East Bay in those days — and look for signs,” he
said. “The sign of the company would say, ‘Technology,’ and I stopped
the car, go in and say to the lady in the lobby, ‘I’m so-and-so from
Sutter Hill, here’s my card, and I’d like to meet the CEO.’” 

The
best chief executives “always spent the time with you,” he said,
“because they were smart to realize that someday they may need venture
capital.”

He had an unassuming way about him that would be disarming to a CEO. When I did a short stint as an EIR at Sutter Hill he didn’t have to spend any time with me, but he did, just because he loved the business of building technology companies.

And even more revealingly he said:

“Venture capitalists don’t create successful companies, entrepreneurs
do,” he said, according to Gupta’s book. “Some venture capitalists and
some venture-capital firms today think it’s exactly the reverse, but
they are the ones that have it reversed. I think if you can be
supportive of a company as a venture capitalist, and be in the
background, not up front making it look to the world like the venture
capital firm made this company successful, it’s much better.”  

Amen to that.

I’ve been lucky enough to work with two old-school style firms who take the approach Paul described. Mayfield — and Gib Myers — funded Simplex and they were quietly unwavering right up to and through my IPO. Oak Investment Partners — and Bandel Carano — have funded FirstRain and again have been supportive and unwavering, this time through the challenge of the great recession.

Great VCs know the founders and entrepreneurs are doing the heavy lifting, and they put the company out front and support it completely, right up until the day the company either reaches liquidity, or the VC decides to write it off. There is no middle ground. The Sutter Hill masters know this too.

So when you’re interviewing VCs for your deal, remember All Venture Money Is Not Equal, and look for a VC like Paul.

Boards

Today’s tech bubble: Sell or IPO your company?

July 25, 2011 Leave a comment

If you had the chance to sell your tech company for a great price would you – or would you play the long game?

This is a decision successful entrepreneurs end up facing and is a question for some tech entrepreneurs right now as we go through what is arguably another bubble – and there are some very interesting cases to think about – and think what would you have done?

Consider the Huffington Post: A success story to most people – purchased by AOL for $315M in February at a 6.3X multiple of $50M in revenue and very small profits. The last investor, Oak Investment Partners, tripled their money in just over 2 years which is a great result for a late stage investment decision. And yet, as Jeff Bercovici of Forbes writes in his somewhat damning review of the HuffPo/AOL honeymoon, the difference in interests that can appear between investor and entrepreneur in very visible in this case.

Fred Harman, the Oak partner who made the HuffPo investment, told Forbes “Our goal was an IPO rather than building up the company to be acquired by another media company” and that he and the HuffPo CEO Eric Hippeau “were still inclined to roll forward as an independent company out of the belief that The Huffington Post could continue to rapidly scale and be the dominant social news company on the Web”. But for Arianna, AOL meant personal liquidity and a much larger stage and budget to build her dream with.

(full disclosure: my current company FirstRain is funded by Oak. They like to swing for the fences – as do I)

In contrast look at Zillow, which went public last week and, on 2010 revenue of $30.5M, now commands a valuation of greater than $1B. Is this valuation a surefire sign of a tech bubble? On Seeking Alpha screener.co writes that “The vast difference in valuation between a recent tech IPO and similar publicly traded competitors is not limited to Zillow” – Pandora’s valuation is almost as shocking as Zillow’s and outrageous in comparison to their comp RealNetworks. So long term public valuation (and so the team’s return) is at risk here.

In the enterprise social media space, Radian6 decided to sell to Salesforce instead of taking the long road. At a valuation of $326M and 10X revenue Techcrunch thinks SFDC overpaid but 10X trailing revenue is a terrific valuation for an enterprise software company and being integrated into Salesforce takes all the return risk out for the founders – plus SFDC smartly put additional options on as an earnout over 2 years (not unusual when a public company buys a private company and wants to keep the founders around). But also consider that maybe Salesforce creates a larger platform with deeper pockets for the Radian6 team to execute their vision on.

And waiting in the wings we have Groupon. They did not sell to Google last Fall for $6B and, if they can get over the questions about their business model and profitability, hope to IPO for $20B – and are lining up enough banks to make it happen.

All this leads to questions of timing – are today’s valuations fashion driven because tech IPOs are hot now? – and what would you do if it was you? I’ve been there, it’s a gut-wrenching decision.

If you sell:
+ You get secured liquidity and wealth for you and your team (especially if you are bought for cash)
+ You play on a larger stage, often with a larger budget
+ You may get access to many more customers on a larger platform
+ You create long term job security for your core tech team
– You lose final authority on strategy and budget
– Many members of your team (non tech) may lose their jobs
– You lose the essential joy of building your own venture

If you go public:
+ You get significant capital to grow your business with
+ You stay in charge (for now…)
+ Your investors get a great return in 6 months (after the lockup comes off)
+ You may get a significantly higher return over a longer time period
+ You continue to drive the strategy and M&A to execute you and your team’s vision
– Limited liquidity for you or your team for the foreseeable future
– You are running a public company (no picnic!)
– Your return is not secure, you are subject to volatile markets

… and there are many more pros and cons…

One of the best pieces of advice I got was to, in the end, focus on how my management team is successful and makes money from their hard work. Not my ego or my net worth. Not my investor’s return. My team, the ones who built the company with me. If they make money, everyone else will make enough.