The Ledger
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Overvalued late-stage startups face severe down-round risks in 2016
“I think there's a lot of companies now, especially at the later stages, that are going to have a lot of issues in the next year because they raised rounds at too high of a valuation. The market has corrected, and now they need to raise rounds at down rounds or…”
Seed funds eliminate signaling risk by only following outside-led rounds
“If you always follow when they raise a new round from a new investor, you also get around any signaling issues.”
Eniac Ventures dislikes founders who actively search for problems to fix
“Probably the type of team we like least, kind of in this area is teams that kind of stumble upon a problem, or they're just trying to find a problem to fix. The best teams are ones that kind of in their everyday life as an employee or as a consumer notice some…”
Harris disagrees with seed funds that refrain from follow-on investing
“I don't agree with the idea of not following on in your good companies.”
Eniac Ventures avoids participating as a new investor in second Seed rounds
“We generally don't participate kind of as a new investor in those when we have companies that need to do that, you know, we try and be as supportive as possible.”
Prominent VCs warned Eniac founders in 2010 that mobile was too niche
“A lot of the VCs that we had worked with as entrepreneurs who are Very well-respected VCs and continue to be very well-respected and nothing against them, but a lot of them told us that, you know, it was too niche, that we needed to be broader.”
Stebbings: ENIAC Ventures was world's first mobile-focused VC fund
“ENIAC Ventures, who are the world's first venture fund exclusively focused on mobile”
Eniac Ventures takes pro-rata but never leads Series A or B rounds
“Our model is to take our pro rata in the follow on rounds, but we would never lead a series A or B or something like that given our size and our focus.”
Eniac requires strong retention and organic growth before investing in social startups
“We tend to try and find companies that even if it's a small number of users have really great data retention engagement on those users. And then some sort of semblance of organic growth before we get involved.”
Eniac Ventures allocated half of its 2015 investments to San Francisco
“If you look at kind of our investments last year, about half were in San Francisco, about a quarter were in New York and about a quarter were We're elsewhere.”
Eniac Ventures agrees on valuation in 19 out of 20 startup deals
“I would say, you know, 19 out of 20, we were able to agree on a valuation and, It's more about wanting to work together and coming to something that we're, that we we're comfortable with rather than kind of a pure negotiation.”