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Raising money

Leadership

Stop focusing on your startup valuation!

June 17, 2020

It never ceases to amaze me how hung up entrepreneurs get on the valuation of their startup as they raise money. It came up in a coaching session again yesterday.

In the abstract yes, valuation matters. It tells you how much of your company you are going to sell in order to raise money. It sets a baseline for you which you will (hopefully) exceed on your next raise. It’s a validation that your work has value.

But it is NOT a measure of pride, or ego, or size.

Your valuation, like a stock price, is a reflection of the perceived value of your company at the moment in time when you are raising money. There will be times when the startup market is hot and you can command more, there will be times when it has cooled because of an economic downturn, or a global pandemic, and your valuation will be lower. Or the market your idea is in is hot, or not.

What matters more than valuation is: Are you getting the right amount of money to give your idea life? Think about the next one, or two, major milestones you need to achieve to prove your idea will work and is scalable. Then figure out how much money you need to raise to get 90-120 days past the critical proof point. Add to that number to allow for the unexpected and that is how much you must raise. Once you have that you are looking for an investing partner who shares you vision and will be with you on the journey.

The other consideration is what value opportunity are you creating for your employees? The higher the valuation on funding the higher their option strike price and so the less money they will make when you finally reach liquidity. Now, if your company is a rocket ship, the difference between an option price of 50 cents or a dollar doesn’t matter, but at a later stage the difference can matter and when there is a preference stack on your company getting greedy can wipe out your employees’ opportunity. We’ve seen this happen with unicorns who achieved huge valuations only to have them come down dramatically on sale or IPO. So don’t lose sight of the need to make your employees money as well as yourself.

I have written before that all venture capital firms are not equal. Some are good, some are awful. The same applies to angels btw. I have seen short-sighted angels do more damage to young companies and entrepreneurs than I would have thought possible by focusing on their cut and not the long term health of the company.

It is more important to a) raise the money you need and b) find a long term investing partner than finding the best possible valuation. If you own 40% of your company but it is worth $20M at the end you have short changed yourself and the impact your idea can have if, instead, you own 15% and it is worth $1B.

Photo: Stone canon balls Jordan © 2017 Penny Herscher

Career Advice

So you want to raise money – chose your investor carefully

October 27, 2018

At least once a week I take a call, or a coffee, with an entrepreneur who wants advice on how to raise money. We talk about her product and market, the stage of her business, how good is her story and what her vision is. And then we talk about the tactics of raising money. How to get a warm intro to reputable investors, how to think about angel vs. seed vs. venture, how much to raise, what a strong pitch looks like – the usual tactical coaching.

Yesterday I was delighted that the entrepreneur I was coaching also brought up how to assess the quality of the investors. The quality of the firm and the individual. She’d had a bad experience in the past and simply did not want to have a poor quality individual in her deal.

Many entrepreneurs never realize how important this question is: all money is green but it is not all equally valuable. Investors, like human beings, come in all styles and since building a company is a marathon not a sprint you want to be running with someone who is enjoyable to be with and who will help you win the race.

First, 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 that your investors want you to change the world too. There are many, 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 he did.

It’s also important to pick a partner who can do heavy lifting for you when you need it. Great venture firms have a rich, deep network to help you recruit, develop partnerships, manage sticky HR issues and even find office space.

Avoid the money based VC (often a former investment banker) who’s motivated by running a portfolio, who wants to tell you what to do but has never done it himself. Find someone who walks the talk and builds great companies. Find a former entrepreneur who has really done it him or herself. If you can, find a VC who has been doing it for more than 10 years and has a great track record – and talk to their CEOs – or find one who’s been a CEO, built a good company and taken it public. All this is visible on their web bios.

And pick someone you enjoy being with. Most companies take many years to mature and if you are going to meet with your board a couple of times a quarter for 5 years it certainly makes the journey more fun if you enjoy interacting with them.

Sadly there are many entitled, think-their-shit-doesn’t-stink VCs in Silicon Valley. I could fill a book of stories of men who think they are rich because they are smart and that they don’t have to be courteous or helpful. Who are openly rude, dismissive and condescending. For comic relief – one of my most bizarre meetings was with a young VC whose firm had been in early at Google and he spent the whole meeting behind his desk checking the Google stock price and telling me how much money he had made. He was not the partner in the deal, just in the partnership, and yet he still thought it was all about him and I should be impressed!

But at the same time there are plenty of men, and women, who truly love working with entrepreneurs and have a very healthy respect for how hard building a company is. The challenge is you may have to kiss a lot of frogs to find your investing prince or princess. So manage your time and do your research up front.

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, have a stronger chance to change the world and make more money in the long run with the right partner.

Photo: Valetta, Malta © 2018 Penny Herscher

Career Advice

How does your investor make money?

August 2, 2018

So you want someone to give you $100,000? $1,000,000? How does that person or firm make money?

Too often I review business plans which have a great idea, a huge market, but no viable business plan that explains how the investor makes a return. I saw two this week like this (one in the US, one in Israel). Terrific technology ideas, potentially large markets, enthusiastic smart young teams but no P&L, no future financial plan and no discussion of current valuation, or even readiness to discuss it.

Before someone other than your friends and family will give you a useful amount of money they are going to want to know how much return they are going to make, and over what period of time. Unless you are a former founder with an amazing track record, or flat out lucky (and you can’t plan for luck) you will need to be able to explain the following:

  • what the size of the market is for your idea – who buys what/when/why
  • how you bring your idea to that market and how much money you make over time (your best stab at your P&L over the next 3-5 years)
  • what your idea/prototype/beta is worth now (i.e. if you want to raise $1M and you only want to give away 10% of your company then you have to justify why your current company is worth $10M today)
  • how the value of your company grows over time and possible exits – why is it IPOable at some future date or who might buy it?

You don’t necessarily have to have slides for all of this because the first thing you need to do is hook an investor on your idea but if they bite and start to ask how you see your revenue and value developing you’d better have enough of an answer to get into a good discussion. Don’t be intimidated. Remember the investor does not know more than you do about your idea (even if they act as if they do), and whatever you say will not be what happens (reality has a way of messing with even the very best of plans) but you need to have thought about how you’ll make money and be able to engage the potential investor in a discussion.

Eventually you’ll need to be able to make the argument for how revenue grows, how much cash you need to get to cash flow breakeven (i.e. self sustainable) and what the company will be worth in the future when you do. And the great VCs, if they are intrigued, will then dig in and help you figure out your first business plan and how to value your initial round.

Photo: Dante’s tomb, Ravenna Italy © 2018 Penny Herscher

Leadership

5 reasons it’s critical to truly understand your P&L

July 20, 2017 Leave a comment
In the last month I have had the experience of three small business leaders talking to me about their P&L in moment-in-time terms. Something like this… for this quarter (or this year) we’ll make $X, we spend $Y less than I thought so we’re $Z ahead. Usually followed by why $X and $Z are so great, and how they’ll spend those extra dollars they are ahead, or why their company is successful as a result. Naive.

Unless you have a steady business that has been the same for a while, is not growing and is profitable the moment-in-time view of your business tells you very little. It might make you feel good that your bottom line is black and not red, or not as red as you thought it would be, but all you’re getting is the warm and fuzzies – no insight.

So, five reasons it’s critical you truly understand your P&L over time – to be able to answer what is your revenue, costs, profit/loss and collections every quarter (or month depending on the cadence of your business) for the last year and the coming 2 years?

1. Cash

Cash is Queen for a growing business of any size; it’s the fuel for growth and the security for longevity. So you need to see how cash flows every month for the foreseeable future. Unless you are selling products for cash in the local market, every sale comes with a delay in collection. Sometimes it’s when the credit card vendor pays you for your product, sometimes it’s 90 days later when your customer’s AP department pays you, but there is typically a delay. But you are paying your people anyway, and maybe opening up new offices, hiring etc ahead of being paid for your sales.

This means the collections line item in your P&L is critically interesting. What cash are you collecting every month, and so what is your ending cash every month after your expenses? You need to have this carefully modeled over the next 18-24 months, and intimately understand it so that as your business fluctuates and changes you know what it will do to cash flow. Combine this with a need to always have at least 6 months of payroll in the bank and this will tell you how much risk you can afford to take with your business at any moment in time.

I’ve seen businesses where the CEO is telling him/herself how great they are doing because of all kinds of positive indicators but the cash collections line is not changing over time, it’s not growing. You can’t hide from cash flow and so it’s a great indicator of the true underlying health of the business. Are the dogs eating the dog food and, more importantly, are they paying for it?

2. Measuring your progress

If your business is immature (less than 10 years old) then almost no matter what business plan you build for the next 24 months it will not be what you actually do. Something will change, you’ll do better, or worse, or differently than you thought. But having a 2 year outlook and then measuring yourself against it is how you’ll learn the nuances of the business and learn how to predict and measure the changes.

Going through the discipline of putting an 8 quarter plan together together to present to your stakeholders and your management team forces you to think through what assumptions you are making about your business. Don’t tell me you don’t know enough to do this yet – if you take someone else’s money, or even hire other people to work for you, then you are responsible, and that means you need to put your assumptions down on paper and fold them into a P&L model so you can measure your progress against your assumptions and course correct accordingly. You can’t correct your course if you’re not on one.

And don’t fall into the trap of comparing your business to last year’s business at the same time. While an interesting statistic it tells you nothing except whether you are growing. It does not tell you how you are doing against your plan and so how your top line and expenses are flowing into cash. See #1.

3. Learning financial management

No-one comes out of the womb knowing how to manage a P&L. Most students graduate college without ever learning how to read a P&L and a balance sheet (a crime I think) so no one expects you to just know it. If you are not a trained financial professional, but you want to lead a business team or be a CEO then you need to learn it. Step 1 take a class. Step 2 learn on your own P&L. Do the spreadsheets yourself until you understand the relationships between revenue and collections, costs and margin.

Yes you’ll need a CPA to do your books, but when it comes to forecasting the next 2 years of your business there is no reason you should not be able to build a simple model yourself. I despair of entrepreneurs who hand the financial modeling off to someone else, and never really grasp the financial dynamics and dependencies of their business.

4. Valuing your business

As I mentioned up front, unless your business is mature and not growing then how it is doing at any single point in time does not tell you much about it’s true value, except a low value such as 1X revenue, or 1X profit. If you want to establish and communicate the value of your business to, for example, a potential investor, you need to tell a story over time. Last year, and next 2 years at a minimum.

Except with mature businesses that generate cash, businesses are valued on their potential. How much revenue and profit will the business generate in the future? Is it growing, and so what does that mean for future cash flows? Should it be valued as a multiple of LTM (last twelve months) revenue or NTM profits?

Building, and deeply understanding, your business’ next 2 years of growth and being able to present it in a believable way (because you understand the dynamics so well) is how you establish value with an investor or buyer.

5.  Communicating with your employees

Your employees, or partners, are following you because they believe. Hopefully you’re paying them a fair wage, but they are probably with you because they believe in what you are trying to do. Even in a large company this can be true – people join a team because they believe in the mission.

So given they are following you, you need to keep them updated on how the business is doing so they can both help you solve problems, and celebrate with you when things go well. I am a big believer in sharing the basic P&L of your business with your leadership team at a minimum, and with your employees once it stabilizes. If they don’t have a good understanding of the future of your P&L how are you going to enable them to fully participate in the building of the business? And how will you celebrate the wins with them if they don’t know whether you are making the plans you set out or not?

I don’t buy the argument that employees are not able to handle the numbers – that it will “scare” them. Yes you don’t tell them you are running out of cash, but if you are hiring college graduates you can at least share your top line plans with them and if they don’t understand the basics of a P&L you can teach them. They will thank you for it, and be much more vested in the end results of the business if you share progress with them. I recently put together a 2 hour class on the basics of reading a P&L for a friend’s business (where most of the employees have liberal arts degrees) and it was not only great fun for me and the employees, but it gave them a starting point to understand the terrific progress the company they are working for is making.

Bottom line – whether your business is wine or weather prediction, if you are leading a team with financial targets, or are the CEO of your own venture, you owe it to yourself to learn and truly understand your own business’ P&L.

Photo: Photo Frescobaldi Winery, Tuscany  © 2016 Penny Herscher

My Personal Journey

How 2016 rocked my world as I talked with women entrepreneurs

January 4, 2017 Leave a comment
 I am more convinced than ever that there is a bright future for women entrepreneurs and 2016 proved it to me!

I stepped back from being a full time CEO a little more than a year ago. It was time, for family reasons, and I set out to change my life. I still work (I serve on two public company boards) but I decided to spend a great deal more time with my father and my family than I have ever been able to do before, and to prioritize my time to giving back. But I had no idea what that really meant for me – what could I do that was meaningful other than work as a CEO?

I decided that I would just say “yes” to every request for help from entrepreneurs, especially, but not exclusively, women. Not that I would be a pushover and do anything I was asked, but I would say yes to any request for a meeting from an entrepreneur who wanted advice. A first meeting at least and if I thought I could make a difference I’d keep saying yes. I wish I could say I was inspired by Shonda Rhimes’ TED talk but I did not see it until I was well into the year. Instead I was thinking of it as following breadcrumbs without knowing where they were going to lead.

It’s been an extraordinary year, it’s taken me in directions I never would have expected, and it’s changing me.

I’ve met with many amazing female entrepreneurs. Aged twenties to sixties. A psychiatrist who has figured out how to use technology to dramatically reduce the cost of cognitive testing for veterans with PTSD or the elderly with dementia, a media executive with a passion for travel who’s changing how people explore the world, a technologist who’s figured out how to measure skin tone so you can buy the right makeup for your skin, a CEO with an IoT product that can tell you all about the water leakage risks in your commercial property assets (something I did not know was a big problem), a woman revolutionizing the sex tech industry, a woman with breakthrough security technology to protect your phone, a visionary who set up the first and only incubator in Gaza… a new calendaring app, a better travel itinerary planning app, a next generation geospatial model, better on-chip failsafe technology, the artistic director of a ballet, networking technology, machine learning technology … the whole gamut! I have found I love talking with entrepreneurs and CEOs. I love listening to their stories about their businesses, what’s working, what’s scaring them, how they are getting funded.

I ask questions, ad nausea, and then focus in on one of two challenges they face and discuss with them how to overcome them. It’s fun for both of us, and I realize I can help many of them. No judgement, just the experience of being there myself more than once before. And I now believe, more than ever, it is much harder for women to get venture funding than men. I have far too many data points now!

I’ve met with women hedge fund managers who only invest in women led companies, recruiters whose only business is placing women on boards, bankers who want to do deals for women CEOs. The movement is happening. Women are, more than ever, proactively helping women. I threw a book party for Joann Lublin’s new book Earning It – the party was 3 days after our horrific election – and I saw ~60 women (eating my husband’s terrific food and drinking good wine) talking to each other about how this cannot be our future and becoming even more committed to make a different future for women.

But I also visited Israel for the first time and I was hooked. I found Israel fascinating and a historical goldmine but then I spent time in the West Bank with family who are orthodox settlers, and at the same time joined a small group trying to help Palestine with Silicon Valley technology. Wow, that is a complex area. I am reading like crazy trying to understand, but it’s also an area where young women are starting businesses and where I can help.

2016 wasn’t all about female entrepreneurs. I’ve spent 25% of the year in Europe. Driving with my Dad through France, quiet days with him in England helping him write his life story, Italy with my daughter, with my husband, with my sister. Enough time that I know I was truly present for my family, for the first time in a long time.

I am not unaware that it is a privilege for me to be able to do this, but I also now recognize that it is not only money that holds us in our jobs. It is also social status, recognition, a sense of being important. One of my new friends, now in her seventies, and who had a very big, high profile CEO job, told me one of the things she found most difficult about retiring was not being important any more. We are all, in our own ways, driven by ego and giving up the identity that defined me for most of my adult life has had it’s hard moments, like when a man asked me at a fundraiser what I do for a living and when I said I am retired he said “oh” and walked away. I’ve had plenty of “invisible” moments this year and it takes some getting used to.

We may feel it’s hard for women entrepreneurs in 2017, but the groundswell is growing. The number of smart women building businesses inspires me. The number of powerful female CEOs inspires me. And in 2017 I am open for business to help them in any way I can!

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).