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An Inside Look at Venture Capitalists
Christopher Thomas writes: "IEEE Spectrum has a scathing review of venture capitalists this month. Authors Nick Tredennick and Brion Shimamoto paint a devastatingly cynical picture of venture capitalism from the engineers' perspective." Funny to read, but probably 100% accurate. Wow.
They're not called "vulture capitalists" for nothing. They'll squeeze you for every last bit of stock and control possible. So, before you begin talking to them prepare yourself! I would try and take my project as far along as possible before selling any shares to these people. If you want more detail on just what I'm talking about visit the bootstrapper's website which will show you how to do this. Remmember the more sales you have the stronger your negotiating position will be.
I have to disagree that Venture Capitalists will "squeeze you for everything." Unlike many in the "those that can't do--teach" category, I've actually done venture capital deals. I've also done private offerings (equity financing sold to individuals), bank financing and debentures (privately held debt) -- as well as non-traditional methods of raising cash.
At different stages of growth, different types of capitalization are appropriate. In my experience, Venture Capital is most appropriate after you've gotten a start-up off the ground and built a management team (which can be as small as two people).
Besides going for Venture Capital mid-way into your growth pattern, you need to have a business that can realistically offer very high growth. If you have a less explosive business, private offerings can work -- they can be successfully sold if the folks get 2-3 times their money back.
Other options include setting up a non-profit entity alongside your start-up, assigning a charitable or socially helpful role to it, and seeking grant monies from private foundations or corporate foundations. The grant money can help offset operating costs for your for-profit start-up by paying you a salary and covering some office expense and equipment.
Still other methods for raising capital include piggybacking with established businesses. For example, a publisher can get an endorsed promotion of a book or booklet from a large association, the association solicits orders for the book via its members' newsletter, you split the revenues with the association, and generate substantial incoming cash.
the people behind the technology, that do virtualy all the work, get crap all from buyouts too.
CEOs or so called managers will get a large pack, and the engineers will get 1/25th to 1/50th of that.
get a clue, australia took in 100000 regees in 10years, New Zealand took 7000, Norway, 15000.
Now tell me whos a white fortress, OZ will let em in , but not too many, there is alimit of turbin heads that can enter.
Besides a lot of muslims stick to themselves not intergrating into the large borg collective of the host nation. They MUST assimulate.
One question I have is... is it truly ethical to use a non-profit organization as a front for your for-profit business venture?
One idea that I've had is to do this:
This would go along with my one-man jack-of-all-trades computer sales/web design/hosting/ISP/consulting/programming/but-wai
business. But, who knows. Maybe I'm biting off more than I can chew. (Nah...)
What most people outside Australia don't know (and even many people _in_ Australia don't know, for that matter) is that less than 50% of the Australian population voted for our current, stupid, evil government.
How does this work? Well, Australia is divided into hundreds of "electoral areas" (think "voting zones" here) and whoever wins the majority of those, gets to run the country. The problem is that the cities, which have 90% of the population, make up only 30% of the zones. So what happened was that all the stupid country hicks (we certainly have those, Texas sure doesn't have a monopoly on them) voted for the current crappy government. So even though in the 5 big cities (which together comprise more than 80% of Australia's population) less than 40% (in some cases less than 20%) of the population voted for the current shitty government, they still won.
I can't wait for them to lose the next election!!
Lets take a look at the facts here ladies and gentlemens.
A bunch of geeks with no realistic views on reality when it comes to economics goes to the venture capitalists and gets loads of $$$. This money goes down the drain because there is basically no revenue coming in (atleast when it comes to dotcoms and open source companies).
Now, those same geeks are complaining ON THOSE VERY SAME VENTURE CAPITALISTS?!?!
After all, THEY are the ones who have lost BILLIONS because geeks have played around with their money without taking any responsibility what to ever!!!
... someone once said that VCs want impossible goals. How many business opportunities that existing with triple digits compound growth, clear exit strategy, and quantifiable risk? Nobody wants to be first to bake but everyone wants a double helping of the successful projects. The very nature of investments (harking back to the British India company) is to create competitive/proprietary positions which means exclusion of some sort, whether knowledge or opportunities.
... wait until someone tell them they bought 40% share of a electron microscope :-). What VCs continually forget is that they are investing in people, not business plans.
... at least every engineer has got someone else to blame for the stress :-).
Unfortunately VCs are the only people willing to invest in high risk (read unknown to them) speculative ventures. Banks are basically pawn-brokers and bean-counters, they only risk their money on assets which have a ready secondary market. But unfortunately there's none for failed (or half-finished) ideas which leads to a fair amount of cluelessness. I've just come from a dinner where someone said that the only reason a "VC" invested in their company was that they read in Red Herring that nanotechnology was going to be "big" and they thought a name like Nano-xxxx (name disguised to hide the guilty) was related
Oh well
LL
You are illiterate, aren't you. I'm impressed you can type! (Or did you dictate to your son? Hmm.)
Or nothing like the open source developers, the executives at Redhat makes like 1 billion times more money on it :)
You really can't blame someone else because you are stupid. If you give your software away or if you are willing to work cheap someone else _will_ take advantage off you.
From the article: "Your idea, your work, their company."
Well, thats because YOU did go tho THEM and SOLD your company or a part of it.
If you want it to be your company you can't sell it ofcause. There is a reason they gave you cash.
How stupid is this article???
I can attest to this from personal experience: I am one of a small group of people to have received the (questionable) pleasure of being cold-called by a VC firm. It didn't matter to them that I was still finishing my BSc in mathematics; all that was important to the VC was that 1. Distributed Computing was hot, and 2. I was responsible for a recent distributed computing project.
Of course, calculating Pi isn't likely to be commercially profitable any time soon; for that matter, distributed computing isn't either. So I wrote back explaining that I had no intention of helping them waste their investor's money on ventures doomed to failure.
Ever since then I've refered to that day as "the day I refused five million dollars".
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
Too bad a lot of people stick to themselves forming so called nation states instead of integrating into a proper world collective.
They MUST assimulate
Why is it that people like you keep on insisting that immigrants must become just like the native population? That's herd mentality. You're right in that the immigrants should learn how to cope in the society. That means: learn the language and how the society works (civics).
After that they should be left alone to follow their own cultural habits. It's wrong to force Muslim children to choose between eating pork at school ("everybody's eating it and we cannot afford a special menu for you"), paying for his/her meal or not eating at all. It's wrong to hinder their attempts to create mosques and so on.
I've never had to deal with VCs so I can't comment on most of it, but there is one part I have trouble with:
Look, for example, at hard disks and floppy disks. In the hard-disk business, there have been as many as 41 rivals fighting for market share. Only three major manufacturers competed in floppy disks. The hard disk has improved much faster technically; the floppy disk is stagnant by comparison. I'm not talking about market size or market opportunity (the hard-disk business versus the floppy-disk business); I'm talking about rates of innovation.
Although his thoughts are noble, in the real world, who is going to willingly do something to help kill their own company? Will the engineers do that? If say I started a video game company, why would I HELP someone else start a competing video game company? Same with investors. Why would an investor put money in one video game company, and then fund a competing one? The conflict of interest alone could get him in serious legal trouble.
Really, we all want our society to compete and innovate. But that should be done on a legal level (anti-trust laws, for instance). To expect it from people on a personal level or a corporate level is totally ridiculous and will never work simply because humans are selfish creatures. We will always serve ourselves before serving others. To think that human nature can change without force is a bit naive.
Just think, if you had tomorrow's lottery number, would you tell the whole world about it or would you buy the ticket all for yourself? Now be totally honest.
eTrade SUCKS
Nope, there are, in fact, different kinds of geeks. There are the clueless geeks who think that they can make a quick buck by developing big sounding technology with expensive tools and on impossible deadlines. Sometimes they get lucky, but more often, they get f*cked.
Clueful geeks never participated in this game. They work steady jobs, save money, run small consulting business, and generally are having a much better time. If a VC contacts them, they just politely refuse.
You don't need millions of dollars in order to be happy. Engineering and software development is a decent way to make a living, and you can be quite well off without ruining your health on startup dreams.
Oh, as for the open source startups, the VCs that invested in them were fools. But if VCs are going to waste their money, they might as well waste it on something that contributes to the common good. I suspect many engineers working for such companies weren't dreaming on getting rich but just liked the idea of creating open source software fulltime. (Support of open source by companies like Sun and IBM, on the other hand, makes business sense for them.)
My opinion is that you people are nice, relaxed and friendly. It's really sad that your government is hell-bent on making this incident a total PR disaster for your country.
At my last startup, we were mostly funded by angels. Unfortunately, unscrupulous people in upper management took them to the cleaners. The upper management took worthless business trips to exotic locales, and bought extremely expensive office furniture. By the time we got the crooks out it was too late, the money needed to fund development and pay salaries was gone. Then the economy turned sour, and relations between the new management (who had been the old middle management) and the angels broke down. Personally, I felt bad for the angels, they had paid my salary for two years and given me a chance to be essential personnel at a company that had a viable business plan. If the con men hadn't eaten up all the money and left a husk, I might be making a reasonable (I never expected vast wealth) living now instead of collecting unemployment and the angels wouldn't have had to see their money tossed down a drain.
A true fanatic doesn't want to discuss matters with someone who disagrees with him.
I am SO floored!
As a total GPL'er and Linux advocate, no article I've seen in recent memory truly distills the geek/aristocracy dynamic as well as this one does.
This shit goes back MILLENIUMS, folks! There's nothing new here.
It's, however, ohso nice to see it updated so well. Congrats to all involved.
Brak: What's THAT?
Thundercleese: A light switch.. of TOTAL DEVASTATION!
The old saw about "The world beating a path to your door if you have a better mouse trap" is pure hokum. The one thing that Microsoft proved with Windows 95 is that if you have enough marketing money you can sell anything - no matter how bad it is. Conversely - take the best commercial program you can find - write up a sign that says "Software $5.00" stand on a street corner with the sign and see how many copies you sell. I have tried that: all you'll get is sun-burned; marketing is far more important than product when it comes to making money in a business.
This is a good article - but I honestly do not find it anymore "devastatingly cynical" than my introductionary economics book.
Personally I believe the best way of "fixing the problem" would be to have more people skilled in both engineering and economics. Simply because investments that are also technical sound are more profitable.
I have to admitt, 100%, with the author of the article. The feeling I have nowdays is that when the VC are in over 50% of the company, the company is lost. They will drive the company to its knees and force the orignal enginners out. All that without really wanting it, just by pure incompetence or ignorance. The VC (pet) CEO will be changed within 12 month when, accoring to plans, the company has outgrown his set of competences (allthough not much may have changed in the company). They have no eye for talent since they really don't care for technology or development. The product is the company, not the technology put into to product of the company. Once a structure reminding of a company has been created it is due for introduction to more traditional investors that may buy the company on the basis of "track record" and build up of market presence.
/Jarek
The New New Thing, by Michael Lewis, is an account of Jim Clark's adventures in Silicon Valley. Clark created Silicon Graphics, which was stolen from him by VCs. He used what he learned to extract much more favorable terms from the VCs when he started Netscape -- the company that caused the Internet boom, and rewrote its financial rules, by a) creating fabulously wealthy *engineers* (although the VCs made out like bandits too) and b) going public when profits were only the foggiest of concepts.
This book's a great look at Silicon Valley venture capital and definitely supports Tredennick and Shimamoto's observations. Looks like the VCs are back to business as usual and only experienced, buzzworthy engineers like Clark can get decent terms.
The author of the article seems to assume that VCs will always get their way.
You don't need to let them. If you know what you're doing, are the right type of person to talk to VCs and have a business opportuinty that they truly value, you may be able to retain control of the company as well as the board.
VCs are talking to numerous potential targets for funding and they have no intention of funding all of them. If you aren't talking to multiple VCs, you're letting them control you.
Insist on appointing your own CEO. Insist on controlling the board. Only let them have a reasonable percentage of shares. They can't screw you. They'll still reap the financial benefits if the company succeeds.
So, lets see, Vulture Capitalists BAD, and engineers GOOD. Hmmm.
Personally, I'm a very very good engineer.
However the way our society works is that the best engineers are the ones that haven't had time to open their mouths and remove all doubt.
The way the engineering career path works is you very quickly sell out and replace the values of being a good engineer, with the values of deferring to authority and accepting "things" the way they are, so that when you are older you can take advantage of these values to maxime your own PERSONAL gain.
In fact, this extremely typical career progression and value development merely leads to being a Vulture Capitalist at the end. The only real complaint people seem to have about this whole situation is that others are at the top of the food chain and not themselves.
I'd love to be in their position and screw anyone I want (clueless engineer drones or management wannabes).
Want to come out on top? Then stop complaining about the existing hierarchy. There are easier ways to succeed then by "changing the system".
Want engineers to have more power? Screw the people who have the money - that will cause a quick transfer of money and power. Maybe not to you though.
Take this personaility test.
Trying to building a firewall without a uP was an exceptionally DUMB IDEA!
First you would have to build a real fancy state machine. TCP/IP protocols are based on streams of bytes/bits. Doing a couple of states in a parallel hardware design is easy, but thousands, or ten's of thousands of states is nearly impossible. Plus, a firewall needs to be flexible, (catch the latest un-expected hacker exploit, log it, etc), which is something most hardware designs are not.
Hence the idea of using Microprocessors is a very useful thing. B.T.W. What where they going to use to drive the I/O interfaces? All the designs I know of need at least one micro to run them! (I.E. Program dma lists, handle errors, etc). Unless you're going to re-invent those wheels as well, and build your own custom interfaces.
In summary, that idea deserved to die, it failed to reduce risks too an acceptable level!
The VC's were right not fund a real dumb idea, next time, pick a better example.
An inside look at venture capitalists, and nobody's posted a link to goatse.cx yet?
There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.
I've been ".COM'd" twice in 5 months. Both times I had a real good view of the financing process; the first time, because the CEO was very open with the company and took time to explain what was going on; the second time, because the company was very small and the CEO and I talked fairly regularly about it.
While the article in question has some obvious flaws, in general, it's on target. VCs are looking to screw you any way they can, in the hopes that it'll make them some money. It doesn't matter whether they're dealing with engineers or financially astute CEOs.
The general pattern looks like this:
1. Meet with the VC, present the business plan
2. The VC offers unrealistic terms -- like, grow the company by 1000% and we'll invest the money, and make financial assumptions on 1000% better productivity.
3. Lather, rinse, repeat, until you realize those are the only type of terms you're going to get.
4. Nod along, get the cash.
5. Hire like crazy, according to the "plan".
6. Money runs out in some short period of time (usually around a year). Nothing has happened, because growing a company by 1000% doesn't give you 1000% better productivity, even if you were hiring pre-trained employees.
7. VCs say, "gee, shucks, guess we need more money". BEND OVER.
6 and 7 get repeated a few times and all the original players get diluted to nothing (except the original VCs, of course). You go IPO with a horrible product and no cash inflow; the VCs make their cash, but your company is bound for failure, and your restricted options/shares guarantee that you won't make any money. Or you go under and the VCs swoop in and take the technology in an attempt to sell it to get some of their money back.
Welcome to high tech.
What an interesting phrase. Is it 90% probable that it's 100% accurate, or just 51% probable, and in any case what the hell does that mean? Are you certain of its accuracy, or uncertain? Or are you not sure which you mean? ;-)
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
where do you think silicon comes from?
how do you think chips get packed in little black plastic?
where do you think all the water and energy comes from
to work those fabtabulous billion-dollar factories?
i tire of listening to whiny engineers talk about
how they dont care about money and they are so humble
and they do all the work and business people just do money.
that is all bullshit. engineering is a WHITE COLLAR JOB.
engineering is an UPPER MIDDLE CLASS JOB. this hatred
of VC is just self hatred projected outwards.
The best thing to protect a company against investors that are just being too pushy is to make it very clear to them that you only need them in order for them to make money, but that you could clearly do this slower, but without the added benefit that they would get.
This way you make sure your planning stands on two grounds : with or without VC money, and you make it much harder for VCs to pressure you into doing things which are totally stupid.
But this suggestion is definitely not easy to realize, but if you can have it you will probably stand your ground with a stable company for a long time ! It will also help your valuation a lot.
To be fair, some VCs do recognize this and do something about it. I have a friend who's been involved in a few startups. Not too long ago he described what had happened in one funding round. BTW, you're practically always involved in some sort of funding-related activity or another, all day every day. If you're a true techie you'll go insane wishing you could sit down and write code again. Anyway, this is basically what the lead VC said:
What ended up happening is that some of the previous-round investors saw their share reduced so the founders' share could be increased. I'm sure they didn't like that much, but I'm also sure that if it was presented as a choice between that and losing the lead investor (with nobody else ready to step in) they would have gone along. Losing the lead investor like that at that point in time would basically have meant that the company had zero prospects of survival (in fact it did not survive).
The upshot is that a "vulture capitalist" really - for once - did try to do the right thing by the founders, and even leaned on other investors to make the right things happen. They're not evil people. They're ambitious, they're greedy, they're often ruthless, they almost always have goals that are at odds with techies' goals, but they do have honor.
I wish I could name the east-coast VC company involved, because I like to see good behavior rewarded. Unfortunately, I don't feel safe doing so. One character trait they hold very dear is "discretion"; it's not very discreet to tell stories like this one in a place like slashdot, and I might want to do business with them myself someday. ;-)
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
I would really love to hear from Philip Greenspun and his experience with ArsDigita.
I think Venture Capitalists, with this behavior, will f*ck themselves out of a job. Check out the SBA They give very favorable terms. --BlueRain
I say this from first hand experience, well from a parent that is an engineer and an extremely experienced and successful entrepreneur (e.g., not naive), but this article really does hit the mark with a great number of them, really. I've seen them at their best and at their worst.
Speaking in general terms:
As a community they are extremely incestuous.
As a community they are very risk averse, in a personal sense. They're willing to risk their investors money, but not if they themselves will hang out to dry. What this means is that they'll invest in the latest fads, so long as the herd is with them. By and large, they will not invest in superior investments from a risk/return perspective, if the herd is not there behind them.
Many are extremely amoral. There is a difference between being greedy and neglecting obligations and duties, to both the investors in their own funds and investors in that companies that they hold board seats on. I've personally seen this border into the illegal territory.
Many are simply ignorant--in both the financial, operations, and technical sense. Ok, they don't need to be experts, but what makes them dangerous is that the dont know what they dont know. On technical issues, they consult "experts" that are not experts in the least and consider it "expert" advise.
Most are in there for the short term. They're willing to invest in companies that are doomed to fail, just as long as they can flip it over in an IPO or to another company before it craters.
And it goes on... I really hate to make such sweeping statements, but this a terribly universal experience with VCs. Not just one or two firms, but many of them, in different regions and industries and from different perspectives (CEOs, founders, engineers, etc).
In short, many VCs really serve all involved poorly [In other words, I believe there are better real-world solutions for the necessary parties]. There are some really good VCs out there, but they are hard to find and they have finite resources. A beginning entrenprenuer would be well advised to get some solid and independent advise, both legally and otherwise, from people that are experienced with startups and dealing with these kinds of investors. Especially when it comes to issues like drawing up a solid board of directors...
Also, the comparison is not quite valid. He's comparing a standardized removable medium with a fixed medium. One is a docking bay for standardized cars, and the other is a magic box that you put things in. Who would you rather be? The company that sells approx 1/3 of all floppy disks, or quantum... oh wait... they don't sell hard drives anymore.
I'm not going to report to a boss after taking this long to become my own boss.
You always have a "boss". Be it your business partners (who boss you and whom you boss) or your customers... there is someone that you are ultimately responsible to...
One question I have is... is it truly ethical to use a non-profit organization as a front for your for-profit business venture?
You probably won't have much chance for 501c3 status unless you completely separate the two businesses... better to stick with a for-profit. Starting a non-profit is hard work, and not something that should be taken lightly... or with expect for anything but a trival return on your time investment.
You're 28! That's not even old enough, in most cases, to have reached full technical competency, let alone to have also reached the level of maturity and business skill where you could be entrusted with employees' livelihoods. There are only so many hours in each day to learn all these very different skills.
"Taking this long" my ass. Along with all the other things you need to learn, try learning some patience.
In a word, no. In two words, HELL NO. Anybody who would even stop to think about it has a lot to learn about ethics.
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
A few thoughts on VCs, Engineers, and Managements:
1) VCs, in general, are not very trustworthy. They are in business, they are looking to make money, and they are not afraid to step on some toes to get it. I don't think there is anything particularly shocking about this, but it is something to keep in mind when dealing with them.
2) "Your ideas, Your work, Their company" - let's not forget their money. As the author of this article himself points out, it is very difficult to raise money. The fact that VCs give people astronomical amounts of money and ask for something in return (i.e. a share of the company and a voice in how it is run to protect their investment) is not unreasonable.
3) VCs, like most people, and especially those controlling large amounts of money, tend to have a herd mentality. Do they take more risk than the average investor? Absolutely. Looking at the number of ideas that have been funded in the last few years and then turning and blaming vcs for not funding "enough" risky ideas to me seems pretty silly.
4) Good management is critical to the success of a company. This may be anathema to many of the people who frequent this site(or at least this topic), but one of the mantra's of VCs is "management, management, management." Now, I am an engineer, I started a company, but I am more than willing to admit that:
A) I am not well suited to managing it
B) If I don't find someone who is, the company will have real difficulty succeeding.
Now, obviously there are many examples of companies that have been run into the ground by bad management. Does this mean that management is evil or (perhaps even more absurd) unnecessary? No. Good management is critical to a company's success, just as bad management is critical to its failure. This may not be pleasing to our egos as engineers, and there may be exceptions to this, but having worked with some good managers and some bad ones, it seems to me to be generally true.
5) Engineers are often not good managers. Let's be honest here. Sometimes the guy from Wharton is a really lousy manager. But just as often (I would argure more often) the brilliant programmer is also a really lousy manager. Being a good manager is an hard-to-acquire skill, in some ways as nuanced and difficult to achieve as technical proficiency. Just as a cs degree does not assure programming competence, neither does an MBA assure management competence.
6) In general, I found this article to be whiny and annoying. Yes, I don't like VCs either. Many of them are "sharks"(as I was told before I got involved with them, and have generally found to be true). They are not necessarily (and I would argure are rarely) the best businessmen, the best partners, or the best engineers. They are though the guys with the money. And if your talking to them, you are most likely the guy who needs. Now, the historical balance of power in relationships between those having money and those asking for it does not need to be summarized here, except to say that one of them (I'll give the author of the article a hint, not the one without it) holds a significantly stronger position.
What would be nice is a more practical-minded article about engineers dealing with VCs(because there are many useful things to keep in mind, and are things to watch out for, even if you don't have an axe to grind), rather than the sort of flailing complaints that we have received here.
John
However, there's a big missing piece here. The reality is that the money goes to those that risk the most, not those that work the hardest (or have the best ideas or IP, etc.). That's just the way it works.
Yes, the engineering is a critical element to success, and it would be nice if the engineers got a bigger share. But start-ups are extremely risky (look at the failure rates), and the initial investors are putting up a huge amount of money and rolling the dice. Most engineers will lose a whole lot less than the investors if the company goes under.
Brent J. Nordquist N0BJN
That's not even old enough, in most cases, to have reached full technical competency, let alone to have also reached the level of maturity and business skill where you could be entrusted with employees' livelihoods
Given the differences between people, surely it's possible that he's so skilled he kicks our asses? Why assume that he couldn't possibly be very much better than you or I at running a business?
thenerd
The camels are coming. I'm in love.
Of course, calculating Pi isn't likely to be commercially profitable any time soon; for that matter, distributed computing isn't either. So I wrote back explaining that I had no intention of helping them waste their investor's money on ventures doomed to failure.
;-)
Nice attitude! There was no commercial future for things like "home computing" and garage-built Apple I's, either! Take the money and let the funds decide if they're overstepping their investors' risk aversion levels. (The highest upside generally comes at high risk, and that's exactly what some people are looking for.) Does this mean you're looking to take equity or a salary in a nice, safe, obviously commercial idea instead?
If they screw you bad, then you need to have a little payback all set up. These business types are quite able to justify away some of their near criminal activity away in terms of "doing business". Most of these "sharks" or "vultures" are actually pussies (if you pardon the term) just like any other money obsessed folks. Plus they are cowards and value their life simply becuse they need their lives to enjoy all the fruits that their explotive endeavours provide for them.
A few of the methods that were used when I was back in the old neighborhood would be useful here. The "expert" CEO and all his cronies on the board giving you greif? Oh dang that car accident was soooo unfortunate, guess we need a new CEO and maybe the other board members will get the message. VC steal you idea/IP? Well gee the informal fee for my IP is two eyes, two eardrums, a tongue and two hands. Or lets negotiate, ill take a small slice of you spinal cord instead.
Its all very simple, soon one of these days, them folks will see that their are real paybacks that can come their way. Cash in hand ain't any good if one cannot enjoy it.
Ambitious, greedy and ruthless go a long way toward filling my definition of evil. Dishonorable would certainly be even worse, but I'm not convinced that the epithet doesn't fit a lot of them.
--Just the place for a snark!
I'm convinced that most startups don't need venture captial. What they do need is a core crew of engineers and (later on) a skeleton crew of support staff (ie, people who will find paying customers) who are willing and able to take equity instead of cash until paying customers are found. When and if those paying customers are found, profits not reinvested in the company are paid out as dividends to the shareholders. Add angel investment into the mix as appropriate. Don't even consider going public (not worth the overhead and distraction, especially now that the IPO bubble has gone kaboom), but if the stockholders (mostly engineers, if you've managed to do this right) want to sell out to a Big Company that offers the appropriate pile of lucre, that works too. (A local crew did this, selling out to Cisco for $millions. Neat trick.)
Benefits:
1) Paying out cash to employees is inefficient, since the marginal tax rate in America is roughly 50% (28% Federal income + 12.4% SocSec + 2.9% Mediscare + the state income tax that pays for the roads/schools/fire/police that people actually use). This is known as "soaking the rich", aka slavery, aka how the Democratic Party has adapted from the pre-Civil-War era to the Information Age. Equity doesn't get taxed until it's sold, and the long term capital gains tax is 20%. Which is why the 1993 Federal income tax hike didn't kill the economy, people just switched to financing with stock instead of cash, which had the unfortunate side effect of making it easy to fund things like pets.com.
2) Very little corporate overhead, very simple. Minimizes contacts with lawyers, accountants, and other such creatures that add friction to the economy.
Problems:
1) The U.S. Federal Tax Code is rigged to royally screw companies that pay out dividends. Corporate profits are taxed once as income, and the stockholders are taxed again on what's left of that income when they receive their dividends at the stockholders Federal income tax rate. So $1,000 in gross profits becomes $650 in net profits becomes ~$450. Possible workaround: profit-sharing checks for the employees, but that doesn't help angel investors if you have them. Killing the double taxation of dividends would make more sense but it would never get through the Senate.
2) Surviving on little to no income while the company gets off the ground. Even without dependents, just paying for housing is a bitch, and geeks tend to congregate in territories with the looniest real estate valuations. (In the Midwest, that means my home city of Ann Arbor, Michigan, home of the University of Michigan, with housing valuations second only to Chicago.) The reason valuations are so high is that the Federal Mortgage Interest Deduction encourages real estate inflation, and the average voter is too stupid to realize that giving up their precious deductions (aka social engineering) and switching to the Flat Income Tax plan would leave them at least as well off. Local zoning regs that make high-density development impossible do the rest (thus why we have yuppie lofts in renovated decrepit downtown buildings renting for $big bucks rather than highrises).
3) Stock is much riskier than cash for workers. Nice upside when it works, though.
4) This doesn't work for companies with heavy capital expenses. Fortunately, many/most geek companies don't fall into this category.
Fair warning: IANA(lawyer | accountant), just a geek who follows finance and politics enough to be dangerous.
Look, if the founders of the company themselves do not fundamentally believe in the technology OR how they're approaching their targeted market(s), then they have NO business wasting other people's money. First, not every idea is worthy of investment. Second, and perhaps even most importantly, even if the idea itself is worth something, if management does not know where or how to execute, it is wasteful of everyones time and money. If you don't at least have a fairly clear plan, you have no business being in business, at least when you're playing with other peoples' money.
Furthermore, while it is true that high return investments almost always bear higher risk, that does not mean that every high risk investment will or can return a decent amount. For instance, I could loan a fugitive 1 million dollars, while this is certainly high risk, it's almost certainly a formula for ruin. This point being that some investments are simply bad investments, deserving NO investment because they do not offer a return commensurate with the risk, relative to what can be had else where. Fundamental to the field of finance is that at any given level of risk you want the maximum amount of return. This is why: some companies cannot get additional capital, why some shares are priced so low, why some land is worth so little, and so on.
Now, I'm sure that in the Real World it's more often that the IP would be worth $150 million, and the engineers brought in maybe $5 million, and the VCs only pitched in $50 million, and the engineers end up with a 15% share of something they conributed 75% of.
It takes money to make money. You might have a great idea, but generally great ideas need financing. I might make the world's greatest cheesecake, but without the hundreds of thousands of dollars needed to buy a restaraunt, outfit it properly, fill the pantries and larders, hire and train employees, purchase advertising, invite the media &c. my idea is worth very little indeed. Someone needs to finance me--and he's taking a huge risk. That costs me.
The best solution is to finance your activities yourself. If you cannot, sell the rights to your IP to others. You lose the opportunity to become the leader and known name in that market (which one needs to survive after the patents expire), but you turn your idea into cash. You might then use this cash to fund another idea, and this manner become the market leader. When the patent expires, it doesn't matter, because everyone knows and trusts the Smith family of widgets. And then you'll have a profitable corporation.
Remember, though, that it's more lucrative to have a 1% share of a $100 million concern than it is a 10% of a $5 million concern.
I worked for a 25 year old once (I was a fair bit older) because he had worked his butt off and built up a business that I wanted to be part of. I always got paid. He always let me know how things were going. He made all his employees part of the team. In short, he was a better manager/boss than a few 40 plus aged people I have worked for.
Anarchists never rule
News flash: Venture Capitalists bail out Australia, in exchange for a 75% share of the country, majority control of the legislature, and control of all top government posts. Elections have been canceled as a cost cutting measure.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
He might have the skills. It's highly unlikely, but it's possible. More importantly, 28 is not old enough to feel all entitled about the whole thing, or to whine about "oh, I've had to wait so long". Even if he is All That, there are plenty of other people who are also All That plus they have some ethics plus they've already had to wait longer due to reasons beyond their control. I'm sorry, but I'll save my sympathy for them, not some 28-year-old punk who thinks that six years past college is too long to wait to become a multi-millionaire.
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
- Technology -- the engineers' domain
- Product -- the domain of a nebulous group of visionaries that I'll call "product people", which can include engineers but also includes non-engineering folks, such as marketing or program management types. (There's the nasty "M" word.) In fact, engineers think they know products, and they totally don't, and VC's know this.
- Timing -- this is mostly luck, although it takes skill to recognize good or bad timing.
- Team -- hiring is the toughest job there is, mostly because it's so easy to screw up. This essentially requires good management. (The "M" word.)
- Money.
If you have everything you need, great. If you need something, go get it. If you don't like the bargain you have to strike the get what you need, don't start a company -- sell the idea and work for somebody else.But please, stop whining. Nobody likes whining.
The first 90% of the article is dead on. VC's don't get technology very well and they are definitely vulnerable to herd mentality. (There are fashions in the VC world just like having the latest cell phone or the hottest computer.)
Where he goes wrong though is when he says that it shouldn't work that way and that somehow the investors are jerks and want all these things to fail. Let's examine the loss state (out of business) for both parties in the transaction.
VCs
A VC takes in money from private investors, distributes it out to these startups, hopes that they work and that he can get his money back out. His job is to make rich people 20-40% a year and that doesn't happen till the money comes back out.
When a company is going in the shitter, the LAST thing he wants to do is shut it down, because then he has to recognize the loss on his books (and explain it to his investors). Instead he puts more money in (sometimes) to keep it alive. However now he's really puckered up because the stakes have gotten higher and the risks are also known to be higher. He is like a First World bank lending more and more money to the Third World to enable them to pay the interest on their original loans. Also, he feels that the company is in the shitter for a reason, so when he puts more money in he often dictates management and strategy changes in a desperate attempt to "fix" whatever got them where they are now. Taking control and changing strategies is an alternative to DEATH for the company--many times death is what happens instead. Which is better? Depends.
So in the worst case (which happens a lot), the company finally does die at some point after a few millions. The VC takes the phone calls from his investors and explains how the next one is going to make it all up and how they are all high-risk and only one or two have to hit to get the returns they are looking for. If those one or two don't hit, the investors' billions are GONE. And from a personal perspective, if his fund returns suck, his career is DONE. He can go work at Starbucks because his days of managing rich people's money are over.
Engineers/Technologists
- Have an idea.
- Get Millions of dollars in exchange for a piece of paper called a stock certificate.
- Sit on Aeron chairs and work on the technology. Maybe it gets done and maybe it doesn't.
- Earn a salary the whole time.
If it goes in the toilet, give them another piece of paper (and perhaps voting control of the company) and you get to rinse/repeat.
If they don't give you more money, shut the company down and get another job somewhere in a couple weeks or a month. Big deal.
The VCs are the ones at risk in these deals. I suppose there could be a couple of examples where VCs took control on a late round, booted the original inventors and made it huge, but I would challenge someone to actually come up with a NAME of one. I think it's a myth.
I would hate to be a VC these days...
Crash
"The difference between theory and practice is small in theory and large in practice..."
I agree with the comments above, but there doesn't seem to be an understanding of WHY VCs are so vulture-like.
It is really very simple. There is no such thing as a "win-win". Or rather there is no reason why a win-win has to be 50-50.
When dollars are on the line, it is a zero sum game. What the VC gets, you don't get. What you get, he doesn't get. What he doesn't get, his investors don't get.
If you were an investor in a VC fund, you would want that guy chiseling every percent he could from the companies he funded. As the entrepreneur, you want to chisel every percent for yourself. Both sides are justifiable and equivalent.
It's nothing personal.
"The difference between theory and practice is small in theory and large in practice..."
This article entirely misses the point of VC. VC isn't out for you or your company, they are out for themselves, and if that means they leave a body count behind, it's just part of the business.
the VC's goal in investing is increase his money immensely. Just like a lot of folks had as a goal when they dumped untold millions on Power Ball or the Big Game. Start Ups are VC's version of the lottery, and just like when I lost powerball, both toss the ticket when it's clear it's a looser. (and since these are folks who if they loose a few dollars aren't going to miss a meal, it's little emotional investment for them to toss you and your company)
Just like a loan shark, expect unreasonable demands, exhorbitant interest rates, and an indifference to anything but getting their money back and the expected rate of return... since VC is a little more than legal loan sharking.
As a founder it's in your best interest to be very very clear on this before you sell your soul to the devil. My suggestion for an education is go look up the reference to Mark Twain's Republic of Gonder... walking in assuming these people are interested in anything more than their money is just poor thinking.
I don't really agree with your point of view on this issue. Why does it have to be sustainable to be worth doing?
:-) Then he gets another job a year older and many years wiser.
:-)
If he takes the $5 million and goes to build a business, even if it fails (which it might not), he is going to have a huge learning experience. There is really no substitute for running your own company to understand what it takes. (People who have done it all say it's required and people who haven't all say it isn't.
I also think it is silly to think that grants are "less damaging" to an economy than a failed investment because it is known ahead of time that the money is going to be gone. In fact, I disagree with the whole premise that failed investments hurt the economy. The money invested in those companies doesn't "disappear". It goes to pay engineers salaries and buy Aeron chairs, whose purchase price goes to pay salespeople and assembly line workers and castor manufacturers. The engineers take the money and buy computers and pay for daycare for their kids and go to McDonald's with that money.
All it really is is redistribution of wealth from the very rich to the technically advanced. And I'm in favor of that.
Crash
"The difference between theory and practice is small in theory and large in practice..."
The sheep mentality of trend following is good
in that more often than not these trends will be what people are in the market for. How many times have we seen truly groundbreaking concepts fall flat becasue they were ahead of their time?
Another point in the article was that VC's conspired to limit the amount of available capital.
The article bemoans the fact that engineers end
up taking the risks because they have
all their eggs in the one company they are working for. So it would seem, rather than a bad thing, if VC's limited the number of companies vying for the same niche, that would improve the
engineers' chances of a good payout. Let the VC's
do the first shakeout if you will. That will
make for less pain and wasted time for the engineer in the long run.
Customer financing is another way to go. If your company is real, something with an economic future, then it's offering a solution to a real problem. Find a company with that problem and see if they'll finance you, either with equity or pre-orders. If you can't get money from a customer, maybe you don't have something worth buying.
Charles Ferguson of Vermeer has even more stories about venture capitalists in his book High Stakes. Bottom line is, find out whether you're dealing with someone who's ethical, or who at least practices enlightened self-interest.
And a good VC (yes, they exist, yes, of course Sturgeon's Law applies) can bring a lot of value to the table. I've heard of entrepreneurs turning down higher valuations in favor of getting Kleiner Perkins on board.
But I'm still surprised the previous poster would lay a blanket statement like "distributed computing isn't going to be commercially profitable any time soon".
This is rather off topic, but it elucidates somewhat the problem with flocking VCs. Distributed Computing -- as exmplified by d.net, SETI@Home, GIMPS, and my own project (PiHex) -- has so far been dedicated entirely to attacking embarassingly parallel problems: All the problems so far have been trivially decomposable into cpu-sized chunks. This makes it really easy to create s distributed computing project... working on a meaningless problem.
It is almost a theorem that "interesting problems aren't embarassingly parallel"; in fact, certain results can be proved along those lines. "Interesting" problems are always problems which don't decompose trivially: In fact, the standard supercomputing benchmark (linpack) in its normal form requires networks with latencies of a few microseconds. In general, the problems which are commercially interesting all require large amounts of bandwidth and reasonably low latencies.
Now I'm not claiming that these problems can't be overcome; the issue of latencies can generally be solved by switching to different algorithms, and the bandwidth requirements will be met over time (bandwidth is growing must faster than computing power). Thus my comments "... any time soon".
However, none of the VCs even considered such issues. They saw "distributed computing", and knew that "distributed computing" was hot... without even checking that the distributed computing being done bore much resemblance to the distributed computing they wanted to do. It's as if someone decided that they wanted to start a company to transport people between New York and London, so they invested in a company which had been carrying people from New York to San Francisco... simply because the company was "transporting people thousands of miles".
I think the VCs have gotten so overwhelmed with using buzzwords to sell their companies upon IPO that they start to listen to the same buzzwords when people come to them looking for initial funding; unfortunately most (all?) VCs lack the technical expertise to actually evaluate companies' modus operandi, so all they can do is fall back on the buzzwords.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
Actually, her name's Barbra.
This is basically what my firm, Alacrity Ventures, does. We started after the sale of Consensus Development (who wrote the reference implementations of SSL 3.0 and TLS 1.0) to Certicom. We are not a $100M fund -- only the personal investments of the founders. In over two and a half years of investing, we have yet to have a single company go under, which in these troubled times I believe to be a spectacular record.
However, after investing in over a dozen companies, I have discovered that there are some real reasons why VC's behave the way they do. We too have fallen into some of the behaviors that are described in the article, as much as we resent and dislike them.
It turns out that there are some very interesting economic, sociological, and psychologal reasons why the VCs fill a particular economic niche and why it very difficult to find alternatives. These reasons range from how many startups a person can be really involved in at a time, the economic incentives of associates to become partners, the pressures of repeatedly raising money for the next fund from publically accountable entities, the 'sharks' at the mezzanine rounds, etc.
As an example of one of these factors: It is common wisdom VC associate can't be meaningfully involved as an advisor in in more then 5 to 7 companies. I found this to be true in my own small company. Yet it is also true that 1 in 5 companies "break even" and 1 in 20 companies "makes the fund", i.e. pays off enough to pay for the fund. Even choosing better companies to start with doesn't necessarily improve the odds much as there are still significant "random" factors, especially if you invest early. Thus there are significant pressures on the VC associate to attempt to try to be involved with more then 5 to 7 companies, as it based on how he does with these companies that he will earn, or not earn, a right to be a partner when the next round is raised. This contributes to why VC associates often are spread far too thin, and why they don't want to invest "only" a couple of hundred thousand. Also, VC firms only make management fees on money after it is spent, and with the limits of how many people are required to supervise the investments they want to invest millions in each or they'd have to manage too many companies to use up all the money their fund has allocated. Another factor making it difficult is that you can't just invest in early rounds -- you have to participate all the way through else you risk a subsequent series C-D investor or "mezzanine" investor devalueing your participation. As a for instance, we invested significantly in a Series A round of a company that is doing reasonably well. However, they do need to raise more money now in a Series D as it looks like it will be a while before they can IPO given current market conditions. We can't afford to participate at this level (we only invest at early levels), and because of the funding climate, the lead of the Series D investor is converting all of us Series A investors to common stock. If we rally the series A investors to reject this (which is a right we have) it doesn't do us any good as it might cause the company to go bankrupt. So we have to accept it. So it isn't just the founders and engineers that are getting screwed, but also the early investors. If we were a large VC fund, we could participate all the way through and prevent such an occurrence, but then we'd have the pressure that the large funds have to invest only in larger chunks and we'd probably not have invested in this firm in the first place. There are many other reasons why VC behave the way they do that I've discovered over the last few years that are consequences of much more complex things then what this article describes. There are probably more that I haven't discovered yet. Yet like any engineer, I do have some ideas on how things might be done differently, but it requires tweaking some of the VC parameters in radical ways -- it is not a case where tweaking one variable will transform the system, it requires a major redesign of a new system. And like any new system, it will be difficult to test so it will be quite risky.You are incorrect in one aspect - if I were investing in a VC fund I would want a fund that sought a global maximum of return from companies funded, not a local maximum as you describe.
As I've seen from companies I've been in, what really matters most is not IP or existing code assets, but in fact the employess working on them. No matter how good the IP you mioght have, it is worthless without a team working well with each other to bring an idea to fruitful realilty.
By attempting to pay the people that actually make things real less, you are more likley to loose some employess and thus reduce the effectiveness of the team. You then reduce output and in the end the returns from the company.
More than that though, if you seek to make the employees with the good ideas and a knack for execution much better off, then later (after the company has produced) these same people can feel free enough to go off and start thier own companies with other good ideas, producing even more companies to reap profit from.
I see it as the difference between slash 'n burn farming vs. real cultivation.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley