Insight
Stancil: Investors consistently override investment formulas when sold
“There will be some formula to how they decide to invest, but they will consistently override it if they want to. Like they can be sold just the same as everybody else.”
Disclosure
Stancil: Mode will sacrifice business growth to hire diverse teams
“And so hiring a more diverse team is more effort. It takes time. It is more expensive. But if you value that, then great. And like we do, and that is a thing that I'm willing to say Moog will sacrifice some growth as a business to be able to do that.”
Insight
Stancil: Series A is hardest round due to idea-to-business shift
“In all of this, I think that the A was probably the hardest for a couple reasons. I think it is the transition from An idea to a business. That is the point at which you have to start showing, like you have customers that are happy, you are growing, your reven…”
Insight
Stancil: Upfront standardized metrics preserve narrative control in fundraising
“If we didn't give them stuff up front, what we would be concerned about was, well, they're going to come back and say, we care about
ARR computed in this way, compute it in a specific way for us, which one is bad because that's just a lot of extra work. If you…”
Insight
Stancil: Early-stage VC pitches require a path to $100M revenue
“In order to raise that money, you have to pitch a story of like, how are you going to get this thing to a hundred million dollars in revenues? Like kind of the generic, you go raise a C round, an A round. One of the things that people might ask is like, what's…”
Insight
Stancil: VC-backed growth creates a cycle forcing continuous fundraising
“Once those motions start to move in that direction, like it's a difficult train to stop because you start to hire people with that plan to hire those people. You have to hit revenue targets, you better hire more people from like sales and marketing. As you hav…”
Insight
Stancil: Founders should maintain board control as long as possible
“It's generally good to control the board as long as you can. So, you know, if you have, control it with either founders or friendlies.”
Insight
Stancil: Everything in investor term sheets is negotiable
“Anytime investors give you term sheets, sort of everything is negotiable. There are standard kind of boilerplate term sheets that are, you know, this is the types of shares they get. These are the voting rights they get. These are their pro rata rights, all th…”
Insight
Stancil: Founders should not treat their board as bosses needing permission
“It is worth in those times, like kind of remembering, this is still your company. You are still in charge. That just because someone came in and gave you some money and is your boss in the sense that the CEO reports to the board, they're not your boss in the s…”
Insight
Stancil: Shared fundraising adversity brings founding teams closer together
“There is something to that that I do not look back at fondly, but I look back and saying that it, like, probably brought a lot of the Team and particularly, I think the founding group more close together because you're going through these kinds of experiences …”
Disclosure
Mode Analytics raised $500k initial seed round from Yammer network
“So, so we basically raised a seed round of roughly like half a million dollars or so from folks that were coming out of that acquisition or people we had built connections to through that. And that was essentially on top of a pitch deck of saying, hey, these a…”
Insight
Stancil: Founders should reference-check VCs on how they handle crises
“It's also very helpful to do references on investors. And that, that mostly goes from talking to other, other companies that have had those investors on their board and getting a sense of what happened. How did those investors treat those companies in certain …”
Assertion Supported
Stancil: Yammer's $1.2B exit matches current Series A valuations
“Yammer was bought for 1.2 billion dollars, I think which at the time seemed like a lot now is, you know, the valuations of companies in their A rounds.”
