Opinion
Kupor: Most startup bridge rounds are simply bridges to nowhere
“I would agree with Mike that unfortunately a lot of them are bridges to nowhere. You know, most of the time, in my experience, it's pretty clear, though, whether that's the case or whether you are bridging to something.”
Insight
Kupor: Founders Are Often Relieved When VCs Suggest Winding Down
“When I started this business, when we started, we thought these would be incredibly difficult conversations, and there's no doubt sometimes they are, but oftentimes we find actually exactly the opposite, which is sometimes the founders are relieved after those…”
Insight
Kupor: VCs cannot achieve success through conservative investing
“I think it's very hard to kind of conservative your way to success in this business.”
Opinion
Kupor: Dot-com bubble comparisons are not relevant to current tech market
“We don't think that comparisons, particularly to 99, 2000 are that relevant for today.”
Insight
Kupor: Startup evaluations shift 80% toward team after market qualification
“So I agree with Freddie, which is, you have to at least believe the market is big, but I would kind of flip his percentages, and I would say, once you get to market being attractive, then I think most of the evaluation shifts to team. So I don't know if it's 8…”
Insight
Kupor: $750M venture funds require multi-billion dollar outcomes to move the needle
“So I think you're right, which is you gotta have to do the backward math, which is, okay, if you've got, call it a, we have a seven hundred and fifty million dollar early stage fund that we just raised in the, for consumer enterprise, and so for something to k…”
Insight
Kupor: Distressed startups cannot sell themselves without pre-existing inbound interest
“At the end of the day, companies are bought, not sold, meaning that if you don't have that inherent interest already from other companies, it's very hard when you're facing a bridge situation to assume you're going to go out and market yourself to somebody els…”
Insight
Kupor: Venture capital firms are purely customer service businesses
“We don't build anything. We don't make any products. All we are, quite frankly, is a customer service business. And day-to-day, we've got to make sure that we deliver on that customer service.”
Opinion
Kupor: Tech must look beyond the Bay Area and NYC-Boston bubbles
“The biggest thing we've got to change is we have to kind of get out of our own bubble and realize that the entire U.S. Doesn't live in the fifty-mile radius of the Bay Area or in the New York-Boston area. And just understand that for all the great things that …”
Insight
Kupor: Reliance on paid acquisition degrades startup unit economics over time
“So if this is a heavy paid marketing business, it's probably the case that those economists are going to degrade over time because, you know, your cost of acquisition, you know, through Google and Facebook and other paid channels may be difficult.”
Assertion Supported
Kupor: US had 700 IPOs in 1999-2000 vs 450 from 2009-2018
“We did 700 IPOs in 1999 and 2000. And in the decade from kind of 2009 to 18, we did about 450.”
Assertion Partly supported
Kupor: Average IPO revenue grew 10x from $17M in 2000 to $170M
“The average revenue for those companies was about seventeen million dollars on an annual basis when they went public. Today, those numbers are roughly about a 170, so almost 10 X scale from a you know, size perspective.”
Insight
Kupor: Founders focus too much on pitching products that will inevitably change
“And I think what happens a lot of times in pitches is people immediately want to kind of talk about product, which is wonderful. And of course we love product, but you know, the product we know is going to change. That's just the nature of this business.”
Assertion Partly supported
Kupor: Uber and Lyft expanded SF taxi market from $100M to $1.5B
“At the time, Lyft and Uber were raising kind of their first couple rounds of financing. I think the taxi market in the, in San Francisco was about a hundred million dollars annually. And I think today, the combined, the two of them do north of a billion and a …”
Insight
Kupor: VCs must engage entrepreneurs 12 to 18 months before fundraising
“I think that what that means is the onus is really on us as venture capitalists to get to know entrepreneurs way earlier in the cycle. And so I think the biggest thing that we've got to do to kind of try and address that problem is we need to be talking to ent…”
Insight
Kupor: Compelling pitches inspire people to make irrational career moves
“The most compelling pitches that we see are those individuals who can really create a vision and distill that vision and tell it in a way that will cause people, as I said, to do maybe even irrational things, right?”
Insight
Kupor: Founders raising Series A should work backward from Series B pitch
“The best advice we always give is when you're raising your A round of financing, what's the pitch that you're going to give at the B round and work backwards and say, okay, based on that, if I'm raising A today and I'm targeting 18 to 24 months to raise my B, …”
Insight
Kupor: Target fundraising ranges are fine if objectives scale with capital
“I think it's okay with ranges as long as you can articulate, if I have eight, this is what I'm going to do with that money, but if we're lucky enough to be able to raise 12, this is the incremental, you know, set of financials or company objectives we're going…”
Insight
Kupor: Venture capital is fundamentally a network-effects business
“I think the biggest one has been that this is fundamentally a network effects business. If you do things right, if you respect the entrepreneurial process, if you know, handle yourself professionally, you get tremendous lift from that.”
Insight
Kupor: Startups must act on partial information and make new mistakes
“I love the phrase, make new mistakes, because to me, it implies exactly what you need to do in a startup, which is you can't be great, cannot be the enemy of good. Sometimes you have to just move forward with the information you have and be willing to make mis…”
Insight
Kupor: Building external networks is more valuable than extra working hours
“Working fewer hours and spending more time on external relationship development, I think it's one of the most undervalued skills that we all kind of fall into, that trap, because that's the way the educational system works, particularly in the U.S., But making…”
Assertion Partly supported
Kupor: Average startup board tenure in US exceeds average marriage duration
“And so in the US, at least it's interesting that the likely life of a board member on a company in the tenure, I should say, which is probably about 10 years in many cases, probably exceeds the average of marriages in the US, which actually is only eight years…”
Scott Kupor