The Ledger
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Startups Passing 150 Employees No Longer Need Hustler Founders
“When a company gets past a 150 people and, you know, start getting up towards, you know, 200, they don't really need the kind of hustler Founder there anymore. They need people who are going to adhere to processes and, you know, get stuff done and not trotting…”
Party Rounds Will Show Major Downside in Coming Months
“And I think, you know, the, one of the big issues that we're going to see in in the market over the next few months is this, the downside of the party round.”
Silicon Valley remains the best place to incubate global startups
“And I think if you believe that great entrepreneurs and great businesses can be born absolutely anywhere, but this is probably still the best place in the world to incubate them, then finding those teams and finding those people who maybe don't look, you know,…”
Series A startups compete against all fundraising companies, not just sector peers
“And, you know, given that there is such a glut of seed money out there and so many companies being seed funded, yet this, you know, the number of Series A deals is effectively the same, if not lower year on year. What that means is, and I, this is the exact wo…”
Over 2,500 US seed funds have inflated Bay Area business costs
“There, you know, there are now two and a half thousand plus seed funds operating in the U.S. With a large focus on being on the Bay Area. What that means is, you know, there are probably too many dollars chasing too few deals Which has driven the cost of both …”
McLoughlin predicts Pipedrive will be worth hundreds of millions or billions
“I think that's going to be a business which is worth many hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars in the future”
SoftTech VC Avoids Outside Seed Plus Rounds as Red Flags
“What we don't generally do, though, is look at C C primes, or C pluses, or second Cs, or C twos, or C Bs, from companies that aren't already in the portfolio. Cause generally that smacks of a company that went out to raise a series A and failed.”
VCs Will Use Leverage Over Startups Whenever Possible
“Well, exactly, because, you know, the thing that you have to remember is that VCs are, at the end of the day, in the business of trying to make money, and if they have leverage over a company, they will probably use it.”
Enterprise Software Requires Top-Down Sales for Real Revenue
“Grassroots is great because it can just spread like wildfire inside an organization. It can move from org to org very virally, but I think, you know, to make real revenue, you kind of need to you need to be kind of selling top down.”
SoftTech VC missed hardware deals because founders assumed a software-only mandate
“Given that fairly large chunk of the investments we make these days are in hardware and frontier technologies, I think we actually were missing deals because people thought we would only invest in software.”
Investors should not expect founders to be experts on the VC landscape
“I think that the art of fundraising and the art of pitching and the art of selling are all kind of bound up together. I just don't expect my founders to be experts in understanding the VC landscape.”
Startups should target 24 months of runway instead of 18
“Yeah, I mean, I think 24 is probably the right number. The issue with 18 months worth of runway is that by the time you close the funding ground, you get started, you might have 1011, 12 months before you need to think about fundraising again.”
Uncork Capital avoids health startups requiring upfront FDA approval
“Yeah, I mean, I think we stay clear of anything which is too highly regulated. I mean, we do a lot of look at digital health. We look at hardware and health, and in any of these areas, we try and find products that don't necessarily need FDA approval, in order…”
Seed Rounds Reached $1.5M to $3.5M by 2016
“Seed rounds have really, really gotten a lot bigger in the in the last three or four years, to the point now where you have a pre-seed Round. So you might have a friends and family round of, you know, 25 to 50,000 dollars to get you off the ground. You then do…”
Seed VCs Skipping Series A Follow-On Signals Severe Trouble
“Yeah, I mean, if we were, if there was a startup going out from one of our, going out for their Series A, and we didn't participate, that would look really bad.”
McLoughlin's first angel check was $10,000 into Postmates in 2011
“And so I invested 10,000 dollars into this entity that became a company that turned into Postmates. And so that was my first ever investment.”
Jeff Clavier bought SoftTech VC's original logo on 99designs for $100
“Jeff had bought on 99 designs for like a hundred dollars or something back in probably 2005 or something.”
SoftTech VC was regularly confused with SoftBank after Vision Fund launch
“With the announcement of the Vision Fund and, you know, the huge investments into Uber and everything else that they've been doing, we were just getting confused on a pretty regular basis, which is kind of crazy considering that their fund is, I think, three o…”
McLoughlin predicts Tray.io will raise its Series B in 2018
“I think they're probably going to be raising their Series B this year, and I hear a lot of great things from great VCs who want to meet them.”