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Archive for the ‘Business Strategy’ Category

5 Habits of Great Startup CEOs by Scott Johnson – Partner New Atlantic Ventures

Posted in Business Strategy, Entrepreneurship, Management, New Atlantic Ventures, Scott Johnson, Uncategorized, Venture Capital, tagged , , , , on May 2, 2013| Leave a Comment »

April 5 2013
by Scott Johnson

5 Habits of Great Startup CEOs

Being CEO of a startup is quite similar to being the parent of a newborn.  The neighbors see a clean cooing newborn with smiling proud parents.  But we all know what goes on inside the house.  Sleepless nights, stress, no time to attend to other relationships.  You are a slave to the new creature.  It is ultimately incredibly rewarding, but parenting is very hard work and not at all glamourous.  And just the way not everyone handles parenting well, not everyone is a good candidate to run a startup.  As a matter of fact, a great startup CEO is as rare as a 70 degree day in March in Boston.

I have compiled the qualities that great startup CEOs share – you know – the CEOs that actually get multiple B-round term sheets in down markets and get that marquis exit at an unusually high multiple.  These are the ones that consistently surprise their board on the upside, investors love to back, and that acquirers pay up to bring in-house.  If you are a founder looking for a CEO to really grow your company, here are the five personal attributes you should look for:

1) Attracts Great Talent.  This is the best indicator of success, as it really encompasses all of the other attributes.  If A+ talent flocks to work for someone, that person has got something special.  Be careful though.  An orangutan could be CEO of super fast growing startup and attract great talent.  So, make sure it is the CEO who can attract talent, not someone riding the wave at a hot company.

2) Networking God.  A good CEO shortens sales cycles with contacts, shortens hiring time with contacts, and shortens fundraising time with contacts.  A CEO who networks well can hence shorten time to exit and massively reduce dilution to founders.  Give 8% to a great CEO, prevent 20-30% or more in downstream dilution.

3) High Intelligence.  The CEO is usually not the highest IQ in the room.  But he needs to be in the conversation.  At high tech startups, a certain acumen is needed to keep the respect of the troops, and gain the respect of customers and investors.

4) Strategic Thinker.  The trick with startups is to channel all of the companies limited resources in the optimal direction.  And to quickly alter course as markets dictate so not a single moment is wasted by indecision.  This requires strategic thinking, not tactical execution.  Many line executives from larger companies struggle as CEOs of startups because they  have not had the opportunity to deviate from a strategy that was handed down to them from above.

5) Stamina, Energy and Productivity.  This gets back to my point at the top about parenting a newborn.  The CEO needs to be all-in, and one of those productive people that doesn’t waste a second of his or her day.  The CEO sets the culture at a company, and that should be one of reward for achievement, productivity, hard work, and accountability.

So, there you go.  Every founder CEO should be very honest in his or her self assessment, and then when they see someone with the above profile, move quickly to hire them.  But do your diligence.  Hiring the wrong CEO can be every bit as costly as hiring the right one can be helpful.

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Flocking Angels Focus on Exits – by Lizette Chapmnan Venture Capital Dispatch

Posted in Angel Investing, Business Strategy, Capitalism, Investments, Venture Capital Dispatch, tagged , , on April 21, 2013| Leave a Comment »

By Lizette Chapman

With money in their pockets and change on their minds, some 700 angel investors flocked to the Angel Capital Association Summit in San Francisco this week.

Alexander Klein/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

Along with macro issues like best practices for syndicating rounds and navigating the Series A crunch, attendees buzzed about the JOBS Act, new funding platforms and other recent changes to the $20 billion a year marketplace of private investing. One of the most popular panels however, focused on a topic that’s always been near and dear to investors: exits.

“We don’t know if we’re investors until the exit occurs–until then we’re merely donors,” said Ohio TechAngel Funds Founder John Huston, eliciting laughter and some wistful sighs in the packed conference room. The panel–“8 Steps to Lucrative Exits”–was one of five devoted to the topic, with Huston suggesting all angel investors set up a process for achieving an exit before they ever enter a deal.

Huston focused entirely on exits through acquisition–a topic worthy of tutelage given the sluggishness of late. According to a recent report by Dow Jones VentureSource, M&A activity declined 44% during the first quarter of 2013 compared with the previous quarter, with the most recent quarter being the lowest since the first quarter of 2009. Huston advised investors to set exit expectations with founders from the onset and build the company for acquisition–not shareholder value.

“If you are on the board then it’s incumbent upon you to drive the exit. All the other angels are counting on you,” he said, adding that if VCs are on the cap table “then you’re neutered unless you drove the VC selection process.”

He said simply growing revenue, although nice, was too slow a process to incite high bids.

To maximize buyer value he suggested compiling a hit list of the top five strategic acquirers based on their willingness and ability to do a deal. Determining which customers they’d like to secure [and then beating them to it] and mapping their organization chart to sell the deal should also be part of the process, he said.

“Your goal is to move the strategic acquirers from greed to fear mode which is ‘Wow, I sure hope my biggest competitors doesn’t acquire them first.’ We only hire bankers [to run the sale process] if we are convinced they can do this and run the process with multiple bids,” Huston said.

Greg Sitters, managing director of New Zealand-based Sparkbox Venture Group, said he began using a similar process about four years ago and has had four of his 40 companies exit so far. Striking a balance between growing each company with additional capital and securing a solid exit has been key.

He said: “If we can get companies to exit without VCs than that’s what we’re trying to do.”

Teresa Esser, managing director of Winsconsin-based angel group Silicon Pastures, said her group is constantly trying to bring more of a science to the exit process.

“This entire conference is really helpful with information and inspiration,” she said. “It’s motivational in reminding us that we are a $20 billion marketplace.”

Write to Lizette Chapman at lizette.chapman@dowjones.com. Follow her on Twitter at @zettewil

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IVP’s Steve Harrick is looking for a few good B2B startups

Posted in Angel Investing, Apple, Blog of Intellectual Capital, Board Of Intellectual Capital, boic, Business models, Business Strategy, Capitalism, Date Certain M&A, Distressed IP, Entrepreneurship, FaceBook, Gerbsman Partners, Intellectual capital, Investments, IPO news, Market research, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on February 15, 2013| Leave a Comment »

Article from Silicon Valley Business Journal.

Institutional Venture Partners’ Steve Harrick sees a lot of opportunity in the enterprise and B2B startup space and has a $1 billion fund that was raised last year to work with.

His Menlo Park firm focuses on later-stage venture and growth equity investments, so it’s not the small fry they have their eyes on.

IVP is looking for startups that already have $20 million to $30 million in revenue and the potential to grow that by tenfold or more.

The firm had several big exits last year, including the $223 million IPO of CafePress and the $745 million sale of Buddy Media to Salesforce.

Harrick took some time to speak to me this week about the startups that are exciting him today and why IVP often remains an investor long after a startup has gone public.

Here are excerpts from that conversation:

There has been a lot said about a shift away from social and consumer-focused startups since Facebook’s IPO last year. What does that mean at Instiutional Venture Partners?

IVP has always invested in enterprise companies and we’ve been investing since 1980. We’re on our 14th fund, IVP-14. It’s a billion-dollar fund and we’re just beginning to invest that.

But enterprise has always been a mainstay of our investment effort. It ebbs and flows with budgets and where we see growth. But right now we’re seeing a lot of good activity in the enterprise space, a lot of innovation being brought to bear and the opportunity for new high-growth companies. So we’re actively investing there.

Can you tell me a little bit about the companies that are exciting to you right now from your portfolio?

There are a number of them. The most recent investment was AppDynamics. AppDynamics does application performance management. It’s really a very exciting area. The company allows anybody that’s creating an application to bug test it, to test it for security, to see if it can support high volume loads, all while they are designing the application.

The reason that this is such an interesting space is that every enterprise has applications that reach out to customers that they use internally and that they connect to partners with. It’s a real competitive edge for companies that do it correctly.

All the old stuff doesn’t support mobile. It doesn’t support the latest programming techniques. It’s long in the tooth. The market has been desperate for a more modern solution and AppDynamics really delivers that. We were really impressed with the growth the company has shown and just the massive demand for the product offering.

A lot of our portfolio companies were already using AppDynamics. That’s how we found out about the company and it’s a space that right now is at about $ 2 billion market size. It’s growing and it’s a very good management team. So we’re excited to be part of it.

Another one I understand you invested in last year is Aerohive.

Oh, yeah. David Flynn is the CEO over there. It’s a great company to watch in Sunnyvale. It’s a next generation Wi-Fi company. What Aerohive did very early on is it realized that a controller can be costly and also is a choke point for an enterprise deployment. If your controller goes down, you can’t change configurations. A lot of the old vendors had built a lot of cost around the controllers, which increased the cost of deployment for a customer.

Aerohive took that controller and put it in the cloud. You can manage your Wi-Fi deployments remotely from any computer. It doesn’t go down and their Wi-Fi deployments are enormously successful at scale. They’ve got a lot of enterprise and education and government customers. It’s a business that more than doubled last year and really one to watch going forward.

Are you finding a lot more company these days looking at the enterprise and B2B space than there were a couple of years ago?

Enterprise budgets have come back. People are recognizing that they have to refresh their technologies. They’ve got a lot of new demands in terms of supporting new trends in the enterprise.

Take another one of our companies for example, MobileIron. It is a software company that solves the bring-your-own-device problem for businesses. People are bringing iPhones and Android phones into the enterprise and they’re viewing enterprise information. They’re putting things in a Dropbox account and they’re leaving with it.

IT can’t control that and that is a big problem, particularly when you want to maintain rights and provisioning and state-of-the-art security and be able to track confidential information.

So MobileIron’s products allow you to do all that. It allows you to push out patches, security, rules and provisioning. It allows you to take control of a mobile environment in the enterprise.

Five, six, seven years ago, this wasn’t a problem. It just wasn’t happening. Now, it is and it is being driven by consumer behavior that has flown over to the enterprise.

So people are saying, I have a budget for this. I have to spend. We have to be on top of these issues or it’s going to be a big problem for us.

You know those kinds of trends are really unstoppable.

Are there other trends you are watching?

Another is Wi-Fi, which is being kind of taken for granted, how to be able to connect if I’m visiting your company or I’m in your auditorium or I’m having lunch in your corporate cafeteria. These are all things you need to have infrastructure for. You need to do it cost effectively. So these fund-smart entrepreneurs are seeing an opportunity and people are spending for it.

As a venture capitalist, we look for those tailwinds in terms of budget because that allows you to grow. It accelerates the sale cycle. It becomes less of a missionary sale and that’s how you have rapid growth in businesses. It is different from five or six years ago. There are a lot of people paying attention to it.

There is a lot said about the consumerization of IT, the trend where shifts in consumer technology is requiring IT departments and enterprises to change how they do things.

It’s a massive change in behavior. Enterprises are organizations that are comprised of employees that have jobs to do. Their behaviors change and the enterprises have to change with them.

There is also a lot of talks about what is being described as Network 2.0, involving things like software-controlled networking and flash storage. Are you guys involved in that at all?

On the network side, a lot of that is cloud computing and services around the data center. We are involved in that.

We invest in a company called Eucalyptus Systems, which is the leader in hybrid cloud deployment. They allow you to manage and test software on your own premises and switch seamlessly back and forth between Eucalyptus and the Amazon Cloud.

Cloud computing is still an area where people are trying to figure out exactly what their needs and specs are. It’s still early in the market. But there have been some large successes that have kind of changed behavior.

Salesforce is one of those. Salesforce is widely deployed. It really took customer relationship management and managing your sales force to the cloud. They’ve offered additional cloud applications and people have gotten used to paying by subscription.

That’s also a change from seven or eight years ago, when everything was license dominated. The old world was you paid for licensing and maintenance, 80-20. That was what you paid.

Those are perpetual licenses and they were often expensive. Sometimes, they were underutilized or never deployed and the world gradually shifted to paying on subscription.

Customers like it because they say, hey, if I’m not using it, I can turn it off. I don’t have to renew.

The vendors like it because it’s a more predictable revenue stream. You’re no longer biting your nails at the end of each quarter to figure out if you’re going to get those two or three deals that are going to make or break your quarter.

You get a lot of smaller deals that recognize revenue monthly and that provide a more predictable business and that have been a reward in the public markets. Networking and application functionality is being delivered that way now. The economics have changed and I think that is a very exciting trend. I think it leads to more sane management for software businesses.

How about the security? Are you into that at all?

We are. We were investors in ArcSight, which Hewlett-Packard bought. That was an example of a dashboard for enterprise security.

We’ve been involved with a number of other security companies. I think two to watch are Palo Alto Networks and FireEye. We aren’t investors in either of those, but they’re both very good companies. We’re looking at a lot of security companies currently.

The challenge with security is that it can often be a point solution and a small market. To be a standalone security company, you really have to have a differentiated broad horizontal functionality that could stand on its own.

You can’t have customers saying, I want that, but it’s a feature and should be delivered with a bunch of other things. A lot of small companies fall into that trap in security.

So we’re on the lookout for the broader security places that you know really can get the $50 million, $75 million or $100 million revenue.

Have there been any companies that you passed on that you wished maybe in retrospect you hadn’t? The ones that got away?

Yeah, you know, there always are. That would be the anti-portfolio. You run into those things and you try to see what you learn from it. Sometimes, they’re very hard to anticipate.

We passed on Fusion-io, the Salt Lake, Utah, flash drive memory company. They have done well, but I think they have fallen off recently in the public markets. That one would be in the anti-portfolio.

We also looked at Meraki. Cisco bought them for $1.2 billion, more than 10 times revenue. It’s hard to predict when somebody’s going to buy a company at that kind of multiple. We believe Aerohive is the superior company. That’s why we invested in Aerohive instead of Meraki. You can’t really invest in both. They’re competitors.

Then there was Yammer, which was acquired for $1.2 billion. That was also a company we were familiar with, good technology acquired for huge multiple of sales and it was hard to predict that happening, too. So I wish all those guys well. Sometimes you miss on big returns like thoses, but we like the investments that we have made.

What is it that you’re looking for at the top of your list when you’re considering a company that you might invest in?

Well, you know, the old adages in venture capital have some merit in them. But things change and you can’t rely too much on just pattern recognition. There’s always seismic shifts in technology where old assumptions have been disproven. You have to adapt to those.

But the adages that do hold are quality of management. We really look for companies and management teams that can take a company to $50 million to $500 million in revenue.

That’s a very mature skill set. They have to show the ability to hire, the ability to supplement the businesses, to attract great board members and to build a company that can be public.

There are a lot of demands on being public today. The industry is still dominated by mergers and acquisitions, as it always has been, for exits. Probably about 80 percent of the exits happen from M&A.

But we really look to exceptional management teams that we can be in business with for many, many years.

How does being a later stage investor change what you are looking for?

We have a long-time horizon for investment. We often hold after a company goes public and even invest in the company after it’s gone public. That’s in our charter.

So we really look for these management teams that are really exceptional and deep.

As a late stage investor, you can’t really invest in small market opportunities. The early stage can do that, and they can exit nicely. You know they can invest $10 million valuation, the company sells for $60 million and they do great.

When you’re investing at a later stage, you know looking for companies that have $20 million or $30 million of revenue so the valuation is higher and you have to get these companies to a higher exit value to get a great return.

So you have to able to identify large market opportunities and AppDynamics, Aerohive, MobileIron, Spiceworks, all have really large market opportunities. That’s why we’re excited about them.

Interviewer: Tell me a little bit more about the philosophy of holding on to companies after they’ve gone public.

Our perspective is that going public is a financing event. It’s also a branding event for a company. It raises awareness. It creates liquidity in the stock.

But valuations fluctuate with market conditions. We say this is just the beginning of growth. That valuation that it’s at now may not be the right place to exit .

If you look back historically, venture capitalism left a lot of money on the table by exiting companies prematurely. You know if you exited when Microsoft or Apple or Cisco went public, you probably left a 10X, 20X, or 50X return on the table by doing so.

Obviously, that requires a lot of judgment. Not every company is going to be an Apple or a Cisco.

So that’s a judgment call and when we make the judgment that there’s a lot of growth ahead and the current valuation doesn’t reflect that, we’re happy holders. We establish price targets for exit and when it reaches that price target, we make a new assessment.

We do have to exit eventually, but we raise 10-year funds and our holding period is typically 3 to 5 years and then oftentimes its 5, 7, 8 years.

Is there a specific example to illustrate this from your portfolio?

Sure. One would be HomeAway. HomeAway is a remarkable business. People list homes on the website. If you’re traveling with your two kids, you get a home for 800 bucks for the week and you would’ve paid 500 bucks a night for a hotel. It’s a great service. It’s public. We invested, my gosh, about five years ago and we’re still holding that stock.

Read more here.

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‘Conscious Capitalism’: A business primer for doing well — and doing good, too By Lanny J. Davis – 01/28/13

Posted in Business Strategy, Capitalism, Lanny J. Davis, thehill.com, Uncategorized on January 29, 2013| Leave a Comment »

‘Conscious Capitalism’: A business primer for doing well — and doing good, too
By Lanny J. Davis –  Read more: http://thehill.com/opinion/columnists/lanny-davis/279707-conscious-capitalism-a-business-primer-for-doing-well-and-doing-good-too#ixzz2JPVnIcib

Once in a while, a book about business theory and philosophy transcends the usual audience that reads “how to” business books — with lessons to be learned by everyone, business people and consumers alike. Such a book is Conscious Capitalism, recently published by the Harvard Business Review Press.

The two co-authors are John Mackey, co-CEO and co-founder of Whole Foods Market, a Nasdaq-listed public company based in Austin, Texas, which has become one of the most successful and premier supermarket chains and brands in the world; and Dr. Rajendra (Raj) Sisodia, professor of marketing at Bentley University, who in 2006 wrote, along with two other management specialists, Firms of Endearment, identifying 35 such firms, including Whole Foods, that have been successful as businesses and followed progressive, socially responsible policies.

Conscious Capitalism describes four specific tenets to teach companies how to implement policies and practices of this approach to business leadership and success.

The visual graphic in an early chapter of the book depicts both the interrelatedness and interdependence of these four tenets, as well as their prioritization. The three white, smaller triangles around the outer three sides of the large triangle describe three of the tenets: “stakeholder integration” (on top) and “conscious leadership” and “conscious culture and management” as the bottom two.

In the center — obviously, the most important, because of its central location and because it is highlighted in shaded gray — is a triangle with the first tenet of the book: “higher purpose and core values.” As Mackey once stated in a 2005 debate with conservative economist Milton Friedman, who argued that a company’s purpose must be almost entirely to make a profit, not to do good deeds:

“Making profits is the means to the end of fulfilling Whole Foods’s core business mission. We want to improve the health and well-being of everyone on the planet through high-quality foods and better nutrition, and we can’t fulfill this mission unless we are highly profitable. Just as people cannot live without eating, so a business cannot live without profits. But most people don’t live to eat, and neither must businesses live just to make profits.”

Whole Foods’s remarkable record is a case in point. In late 2008 and early 2009, at the time when the Federal Trade Commission appeared to have successfully blocked Whole Foods’s already completed acquisition of Wild Oats Department Stores, the company’s share price on the Nasdaq exchange plunged from $40 per share to $10. Whole Foods fought back against the FTC’s legal action, and the result was a compromise settlement that allowed the company to move on. On Friday, Jan. 25, the stock closed at $95.65/share — an increase of more than 900 percent in just four years.

Aside from shareholders, Whole Foods and its management team are proud of the way they have treated all others whom they regard as stakeholders — suppliers, employees, citizens of communities where stores are located and philanthropic causes — consistent with the fourth tenet of conscious capitalism, “higher purpose and core values.” For example, Whole Foods gives a minimum of 5 percent and closer to 10 percent of its profits to nonprofit organizations each year; allows all employees — called “team members” — to participate and vote on important working condition and company policy issues; puts a ceiling on the maximum ratio between the highest-paid executive and lowest-paid team member; and provides all full-time team members with virtually all their premium costs for health insurance, and part-time workers some healthcare benefits as well.

As readers of this column know, while I am a liberal Democrat (clearly on the opposite end of the ideological spectrum from Mackey on some issues), I also search for “purple” areas where there are common values and subjects about which constructive, solutions-oriented conversation can occur between left and right. And I find many such places articulated in this book.

The fact is, Conscious Capitalism is an important book for exactly that reason. I believe it should be a must-read, with a message especially appropriate for these times of dysfunctional political polarization, with “red-state” Republicans over-simplistically depicted as conservative and pro-business and “blue-state” Democrats as liberal and anti-business.

This book teaches that there is nothing inconsistent between doing well and doing good. Indeed, both not only can co-exist, but each is dependent on the other. That is a crucial lesson with meaning both in the business community as well as the larger divisive political, cultural and social arena in which the country finds itself after the 2012 elections.

Davis, a Washington attorney and principal in the firm of Lanny J. Davis & Associates, specializing in legal crisis management and dispute resolution, served as President Clinton’s special counsel from 1996-98 and as a member of President Bush’s Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board. He represented Whole Foods during its legal challenges with the Federal Trade Commission in 2008-09 and on various matters since then, but does not do so at this time.

 

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