SV Angel

“LendUp raised an incredible hundred and fifty million dollars in January, 2016, according to the trusty PE Hub, from the likes of SV Angel, Yuri Milner, our friends at Sousa Ventures with Chad Byers, who I've got to thank for making the intro today, and then G…”

“Between five, if we can target five to 10% ownership initially, that's still enough to bring in the SV Angels or the Fuel Capitals or other great investors that we especially like to work with.”

“We see on average eight to 15 companies per day referred to us all from within our network.”

“So we don't really think about it That much at all. Unless it's something totally out of whack or, you know, out of line with where the company is in the founder's background, that's probably the only time that it'll really play into our decision. Other than t…”

“You can always bring on angel investors and advisory board members earlier on in the life cycle of the company, but when it comes to really constructing a board, you know, doing that post series seed going into the series a, you know, that's probably when it's…”

“We also don't take board seats. We think that, you know, we always want to align ourselves with founders and be the advocate for them. We think that at some point in the business boardroom will get contentious and founder will, and the board won't agree on som…”

“And for us, that's our latest fund. We actually reduce the size of it so that we have the flexibility to invest whether it's pre-seed or seed, you know, so we can make that 100,000 dollar investment where it's really just the founders that we, that we're inves…”

“And, you know, one of the byproducts was it really forced companies to focus on their core metrics. What really happened in the, over the last couple of years is, you know, series a investors and B started really focusing on, you know, is this a good business?…”

“Like I said, our checks are smaller. They're a hundred to 200 K checks. So we rely on all the other investors to participate in the round. We never lead rounds ourselves.”

“You know, if the company's, if it's going to be a big, successful company, you know, if you're investing at a six million cap or an eight million dollar cap, it doesn't really matter.”

“We have about 40% of our portfolio goes out of business and that's fine.”

“You know, if we spend more than, you know, we've always had this kind of internal rule is if, You know, if we spend more than five minutes talking about valuation with a founder, then something's wrong. Something's awry there.”

“That's raised over forty-five million dollars in VC funding from some of the very best in the business, including Thrive Capital, Forerunner Ventures, IVP, Redpoint, and SV Angel, just to name a few.”

“That was the batch that Yuri Milner and SV Angel came along and said, we're going to give everyone 150,000 dollars to every single company in that batch. It was about 40 companies”

“But the reason I invested 25 or fifty-k, whatever it was, in SV Angel, and their approach, I mean, it ended up being pretty smart on a lot of levels, was because I got a report card on pretty much everything in the Valley regularly. And that allowed me to go h…”