Venture Hacks

I recently got on the phone for a cross-continent conference call with Chris Dixon from Founder Collective, Mark Suster from GRP Partners, and our own Naval Ravikant. The topic was VC signaling in seed rounds — and how these signals help or hurt your ability to raise money in the next round.
The interview was inspired [...]

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Summary: Raise as much money as possible. With these caveats: (1) maintain control at any cost, (2) monitor your liquidation preference, and (3) act like you don’t have a lot of money. Also understand that if you do raise a lot of money, you will have to (1) “go big or go home” and (2) [...]

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“AOL almost sold to Compuserve in 1991 for $60M. The VCs wanted to sell. [Steve] Case won by 1 vote. 10 years later, [AOL was] worth $100 billion.”
– Mark Pincus
Summary: Protective provisions let preferred shareholders veto certain actions, such as selling the company or raising capital. They protect the preferred, who are minority shareholders, from [...]

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“[Our existing investors] had put in a right of first refusal. Since I was a young entrepreneur at the time, I didn’t understand that this basically meant that you couldn’t go to any other VC… We could not get a higher valuation because [our existing investors] wanted to put more money in the company themselves. [...]

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