Series B

“Is I'm seeing Series A is priced at three to 500 on two to five million in revenue, but I'm finding the B at a hundred million in revenue priced at one to 1.5. It's a three X price increase for a 50 X revenue increase.”

“I think the real pressure is, it means anything below that growth stage, you better be a damn good picker. Because it used to be when Rory and I met, Series B, even into Series A, you actually didn't have to be a good picker. You just had to be good at math an…”

“So for the series B, that was all inbound, but the series A, we actually did run a process because we were like, we should raise money here.”

“When we raised our series B for this company, revenue wise, we were almost the same, almost identically the same number as when we raised our series B for my last company. Yeah. At my last company, at that stage, we were 75, 80 employees. Let's call it 85, may…”

“Having the founding team be in that 20 to 25% range, or thereabouts, at a B is, like, a really strong position.”

“I'm on the board of Rillet. I did the Series B, and it was 60 days after the Series A, and that's unfortunate.”

“Right now on Carta, the median time between A and B is close to a thousand days. It's a long time. 2.7 years or so.”

“What matters most here is that the compensation has pretty predictable upside. Their stock is likely not going to go to zero and they can estimate how much they'll be making in future years as the company continues to grow.”

“The first is they can literally decide they're not pricing this round, they're buying an option on the next round. If Harry's trying to make his money on seed, and they're simply trying to set themselves to make the money on the B, they can, by definition, pay…”

“Did you know, by the way, on Carta, like, the median time to raise for a Series B to a Series C is 18 to 24 months?”

“Now in the pipeline, I have about 20 top tier VCs that are very interested in leading our series B. Ok, and eventually I will have to choose one of them.”

“I think that that threshold of, call it series B, it's probably not a great return on The time for a CEO or like a founder to be in every recruiting loop. They are still the pace setter, the like bar setter for the company in terms of talent density and talent…”

“It is taking from series A to series B, for instance, it's the median amount of time is over two and a half years and the highest higher end, you know, the 75th percentile is well over three years.”

“I'd say in a startup world, at least before, say, series B, you probably want to do weekly all hands, because things change a lot in a month.”

“Yes, and the idea was since we knew that we wanted it to be a subscription-based business, that building the core of the subscriptions would scale the business faster. So you have to, you need a splash to get above the sort of noise for these women and figure …”

“Yeah, so we are To some extent stage agnostic but I would say sweet spot is somewhere between serious seed and maybe an early B.”

“My intent would, it would be to go as low as possible.”

“From our series A, that critical milestone was build that very, very powerful magnet, which people said you cannot do. There's not enough material in the world to build it. No one's ever done it. It's not going to work. We said, we'll do it in three years. Sha…”

“So we're actually launching a new product today. Part of series B. First, first heard on sorcery. Breaking news. You know, and it's called director, director.ai.”

“At the A and B stage, what we've observed is this. The going in probability of a five X plus winner, our mental model, remember I said it's 30, yeah, 20% chance of that outcome. If after two years the company has done what we said it would do roughly in terms …”

“I'd say that probably today the minimum threshold is around five million of ARR. But really, like, 10 to 15 is starting to become standard. The sort of goalposts have moved quite a bit, and so I'd say that's rather difficult.”

“Yeah, so we've raised about, I want to say about eighty million dollars in total series B up to so far.”

“Hiring right at the precedency level. Most of the expertise that you need is not in the company yet. Once you read series A, series B, you probably have a fair amount of experience inside the company, and you have more networks inside the company to find, you …”

“When people talk about revenue, they're missing at least 50% of the story, which is there's revenue, and then there's revenue quality. If you have a bunch of revenue that's churning, any investor with their salt is going to look under the hood at your metrics …”

“Seed to scale, you know, somebody told me, ah, ah, your goal versus whatever realistic thing, ah, you can have a hundred percent margin at seed. You know, you can have like, 75 at A, you know, 50 probably at B. By the time you get to C, it can't be like, you k…”

“There's no more like magic numbers you hit and like a valuation framework that's consistent. It's actually much more about belief. You know, I say in the deck, it's a lot about this kind of new math of people want downside protection and then an option on infi…”

“It's really hard to be a meaningful, important person in the journey of a founder if I appear in front of them at series A, series B, and the only way to even have a meaningful role at that point is to write a very big check.”

“The best companies and the worst companies at the Series B or Series A kind of trade at approximately the same multiples. There's exceptions here and there, but by and large, very few people could actually tell the difference between the two.”

“We still weren't at positive margin, and so that means that effectively we're still kind of paying for each project. We are not making any money on any project, which means that we have all this great pipeline of projects, we have this portfolio we can use for…”

“Every round we raised, we probably had 50 no's, like, literally 50 to a hundred no's every single round. Seed stage, A stage, B stage, C stage, every single round, 50 to a hundred no's”

“But I think actually the B and then the C, like, once they get to a certain point and do some of those things, and it becomes clear to others that, like, if anybody wins this category, it's going to be this company, then capital, I think, actually becomes, lik…”

“Once you hit Series B, the companies that don't make it are the ones that don't actually understand The quality of their revenue. And the people that have high quality revenue, they'll, they'll make it.”

“I'd been speaking to maybe 25, 30 investors at the time. Likely got term sheets from about five to 10. It really came down to the firm and the person who was gonna sit on the board.”

“And I think many times like companies will make it far down, like they'll raise an A or even a B. And actually like never really had product market fit, but so much money was put in, so much effort was put in that they were able to grow top line. But then at s…”

“People don't realize that like this, like, kind of zombie stage where you've done series A, series B, but never really hit escape velocity. Those two options still exist. It's probably just something more like an acquihire and more like a special situations de…”

“And we didn't have a deck at the series A, we didn't have the deck in the series B. You know, the reason that they understood it was like, they were users of the product.”

“So by the time of Sirius B, we only had spent like 30,000 dollars in advertising and 30,000, I think went to, I think to your podcast at some point, and then it went to another podcast. So we basically did two podcast sponsorships with that money and nothing e…”

“When we did the series B, it was like Q two, Q three. We had just built a real sales team. We had like two sales reps. We brought in a sales leader. We had a good quarter. And that's when we did the series B right after.”

“If your data is self-explanatory, in good shape, easy to understand, and aligned with what investors really care about, you will avoid a lot of follow-up questions and a lot of back and forth with the investors that you are going to talk to and that are going …”

“In 21 and 22, the number of seed and series A companies that got funded. I think there's been that it sort of crowded the market, so there are a lot more companies who are still looking for those seed and series A or series B fundings. So that has led to an ov…”

“Forty million for a pre money for a series A up to like, call it, I don't know, between a hundred and a hundred and ten million for a series B.”

“The market for A and B between 2010 and 2022 went up by nine X. So nine times more capital in those markets than in any other sector of the market. And as a result, valuations went up like 300%.”

“Also, like, it's basically starting at Series A, B, that you need to go to a US fund, basically, if you want to raise really large sums, because there's just not a lot of options in Europe”

“And so the way to sort of think about it is at the early stage seed, it's about 80 to 90% attrition. At the series A, it might be 60 to 70, series B sort of comes down.”

“And you did in 2019, you announced that you'd raised over thirty million dollars in a series B.”

“And at some point, you got to decide, and you have to decide pretty early because nobody has ever raised an A or I would think a B doing both. You just would spread yourself far too thin attempting to do both.”

“The way I would underwrite deep tech is basically like series B is the biggest risk point because you're starting to tip real money at the company. C and D is like what's already working. It's a fucking near monopoly. C to A is like, well, it's insane. And you…”

“The reality is you raise a series B or a series C or whatever, you're doing it methodically. Like you have certain numbers, you're going to go after certain investors, you're going to run a process and people are going to look at real things. But when you're r…”

“A lot of people say, you don't know until year 15 whether you're good at VC. That's completely idiotic because you obviously have people marking you up. Once you get to a series B, you could sell via secondary. So whether or not you choose to sell does not mea…”

“Post series B, these things become not only like, they become painfully obvious and it's picking is not the thing. It's just access, right?”

“And that was when I learned, like, oh, like, growing 60, 80% a year, you know, series B is not, like, that was not good enough.”

“At series B, you can pick a good company and invest in it, but you pay the wrong price. The risk reward is totally out of the, totally out of whack. You may not even make real money.”

“Then you don't have to think about this, I would say, till maybe year three. I find, ideally, like, between your series A and B, it might be worth thinking about how to multiply QSBS if you were to get there. Any before, and it's too soon, because honestly, li…”

“If we look at series B's and series C's, it's kind of similar valuations, no, sorry, the number of rounds, we'll come back to valuations in a second, the number of rounds and the amount of capital is down 50 to 75% from the peak, depending on what you're looki…”

“Most companies were around six to twelve million in ARR. And interestingly, more than half of them were growing at less than two X. In, in previous years, that proportion was lower. So it's a bit similar to what we saw previously for the series A's. The rounds…”

“So I, I'm no longer convinced that seed is particularly like a bargain in terms of that part of the market. In fact, I think probably Series A or Series B is a better place to invest.”

“You will have 20 to 30% failure between seed and A. You will have 20 to 30% failure between A and B.”

“B rounds start at five million ARR with a tendency towards more.”

“Ah, this is series B, and here we assume six million ARR for a series B. And there the picture is slightly more concentrated, where most of the people think that 15 to 20 X is a healthy multiple, you know, for that stage.”

“So right now it's series A. It starts between like two and a half to three X as the minimum growth expectation. And then at series B, it starts at two to two and a half X as the minimum growth expectation.”