Zaveri: Most startup financings do not involve multiple competitive term sheets
MZ Zaveri · 20VC: Kleiner Perkins' MZ Zaveri on Why Success In Venture Is About The 3 F's, How VCs Can Manage Deal Heat & Is There Too Much Venture Dollars At Seed · May 29, 2017 · at 12:08
MZ Zaveri, Partner at Kleiner Perkins, discusses startup fundraising dynamics on The 20 Minute VC with host Harry Stebbings.
0:00 / 0:14exact quote · 14.6s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“You know, not in reality is not most financings, the most financings are probably not, you know, sort of like 10, 50, 10 plus, like, you know, eight to 10 term sheets in, in motion. Most financings take time, you know, you want to get to know each other. There's some courtship period there.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from MZ Zaveri
Zaveri: Deal heat is often manufactured by early investors over-socializing rounds
“In many ways, actually, I've seen that if you kind of peel back the onion, you can kind of find The root node or sort of the creator, there's sort of individuals that, you know, may have feel sort of have put some early dollars into a financing and have a stro…”
Zaveri: Value in AI comes from vertical applications, not infrastructure
“I look at it from a vertical application standpoint, not from just Hey, we want to have the best models, the best sort of, you know, technology, and we're just going to sell enabling technology, you know. No one buys programming languages. And in the same way,…”
Zaveri: Outbound sourcing is how venture works, not inbound deal flow
“I fundamentally learned that outbound is the way venture works and inbound is rarely the way it should work.”
Zaveri: Out-raising competitors starves rivals and yields a distribution advantage
“Particularly sort of in sort of markets where there might be four or five competitors, if one can raise more than the others, you can suck out, suck the oxygen out of the room and have an advantage on customer acquisition and distribution in general.”
Zaveri: Seed capital excess mainly threatens undifferentiated new venture funds
“So I don't over worry about the excess of capital. I think it can be problem. It can be problematic if you are trying to start a new fund where what's your differentiation, right?”
Zaveri: Dismissing founders or ideas as just a feature is dangerous
“I'd say, like, huge market, and then the other pet, you know, pet peeve is, oh, this is a feature or something like that, right? It's like, you know, companies evolve and change, and I'd say there might be sort of folks that may sort of poorly phrase things, a…”