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Investors Weigh In With Convertible Note Caveats for Start-Ups – Venture Capital Dispatch

Posted in Entrepreneurship, Investments, Venture Capital, Venture Capital Dispatch on September 15, 2012| Leave a Comment »

  • September 13, 2012, 6:45 PM

Investors Weigh In With Convertible Note Caveats for Start-Ups

By Lizette Chapman

Tech entrepreneurs take note: Convertible notes are not free money and, if not structured properly, can prevent you from raising additional financing.

Investors speaking at the TechCrunch Disrupt SF 12 conference in San Francisco this week had this gem and a few other choice observations about early-stage financing for start-ups.

“We’ve had companies come in for their Series A and not realize  that  they’d already given up 25% of their company” in the seed round,” said Sequoia Capital Partner Alfred Lin, referring to the fact that convertible notes are unpriced, but convert to equity stakes when founders go on to raise a priced Series A round. He added: “That you raise money at a higher valuation than your friend? That’s a false milestone for you.”

Another false milestone, according Google Ventures Partner Joe Kraus, is thinking that raising a bigger round is better for the company when a smaller one will do. While Kraus said he “had no bones to pick” with the convertible note structure, he cautioned it can lead to companies over-raising their seed round and then  ending up with a “weird” cap table that makes  backing a  company at the Series A level difficult  for new investors because there’s  not enough equity left to go around.

While none of the investors speaking (Cowboy Ventures Partner Aileen Lee, SV Angel Managing Director David Lee and Greylock Partners Partner James Slavet were also on the panel) mentioned Y Combinator companies specifically, they might as well have.

Many of the 75 companies who graduated from the three-month accelerator program last month have been talking to investors to raise capital on top of the $150,000 offered to all YC graduates by the Start Fund. Along with the note structure, valuation (which sets expectations for the Series A round) has become an unusually public discussion, with YC co-founder Paul Graham last week accusing Google Ventures of lowballing YC companies on valuation and following up on a prediction last spring that valuations may be dropping.

Although the Start Fund (which is backed by Yuri Milner, SV Angel, General Catalyst Partners and Andreessen Horowitz) offers the cash at no cap and no discount, other early seed investors have been unwilling to offer a similar blank check lest their equity gets washed out in a later round.

And, judging from investor comments–Lee said he’s now seeing down valuations in more sectors than previously–the amount and valuations of convertible notes are becoming more disciplined.

“It’s feast or famine,” said Slavet, of start-up  funding. “Seed valuations fluctuate on the ability of seed companies in the previous months to set Series A funding. Seeds, in many ways, are a lagging indicator of Series A valuations.”

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

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Consumer, Internet Startups Increasingly Targeted for VC Backing

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, boic, Business models, Economy, Entrepreneurship, Intellectual capital, Investments, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on September 7, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Article from PE Hub.

Venture dollars have shifted to early rounds from late-stage deals over the past several years. It is a shift that proved fastest in quick changing industry segments, such as the consumer Internet, and slowest in segments like semiconductor, which are less dynamic.

Until now, I have not seen a study with an industry-by-industry breakdown of the trend. The work came from Preqin and offers some useful detail. For instance, just 13% of “consumer discretionary” deals over the last four years were late stage transactions and just 15% of Internet fundings, the study found.

Meanwhile, 45% of semiconductor and electronics deals in the four years from 2009 to 2012 were late stage. And a third of transactions in cleantech and health care were, according to the study.

Since the Great Recession of 2008 and 2009, venture capitalists have shifted substantial dollars to the early stage. In 2007, 40% of invested capital went to late stage deals. Nineteen percent found its way to the early stage, according data from the MoneyTree Report. By 2011, early stage spending was 30% of the total and late stage had fallen to just under 34%. The breakdown for the first half of 2012 is almost identical to last year.

According to Preqin, another segment with strong early stage interest is business services, where just 17% of deals were late stage. Preqin draws the dividing line between early and late at the Series C funding, lumping expansion financing into its later stage tally.

Among the latest of the late fundings during the period were the G and H rounds. Several took place. In 2010, Onconova Therapeutics raised a $15 million Series H and the same year saw Zipcar put another $21 million in its war chest with a Series G financing from Meritech Capital Partners and Pinnacle Ventures.

SolarCity this year roped in $81 million in a Series G round with investors including Silver Lake and Valor Equity Partners.
Read more here.

 

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Multinationals Stake a Claim in Venture Capital

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, Business models, Economy, Entrepreneurship, Investments, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 4, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Article from NYTimes.

MENLO PARK, Calif. — New York, London and Hong Kong are common addresses for blue-chip multinationals. Now Silicon Valley is, too.

From downtown San Francisco to Palo Alto, companies like American Express and Ford are opening offices and investing millions of dollars in local start-ups. This year, American Express opened a venture capital office in Facebook’s old headquarters in downtown Palo Alto. Less than three miles away, General Motors’ research lab houses full-time investment professionals, recent transplants from Detroit.

“American Express is a 162-year-old company, and this is a moment of transformation,” said Harshul Sanghi, a managing partner at American Express Ventures, the venture capital arm of the financial company. “We’re here to be a part of the fabric of innovation.”

The companies are raising their profiles in Silicon Valley at a shaky time for the broader venture capital industry. While top players like Andreessen Horowitz and Accel Partners have grown bigger, most venture capital firms are struggling with anemic returns.

The market for start-ups has also dimmed, in the wake of the sharp stock declines of Facebook, Zynga and Groupon, the once high-flying threesome that was supposed to lead the next Internet boom.

But unlike traditional venture capitalists, multinationals are less interested in profits. They are here to buy innovation — or at least get a peek at the next wave of emerging technologies.

In August, Starbucks invested $25 million in Square, the mobile payments company based in San Francisco, which will be used in the coffee chain’s stores. This year, Citi Ventures, a unit of Citigroup, invested in Plastic Jungle, an online exchange for gift cards, and Jumio, an online credit card scanner.

Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria, the large Spanish banking group, opened an office in San Francisco last year. The team, which has about $100 million to fund local start-ups, is looking for consumer applications that will help the bank create new businesses and better understand its customers.

“We are in one of the most regulated and risk-averse industries in the world, so innovation doesn’t come naturally to us,” said Jay Reinemann, the head of the BBVA office. “We want to avoid the video-rental model. We want to evolve alongside our consumers.”

The companies are hoping to tap into the entrepreneurial mind-set. Multinationals, with their huge payrolls and sprawling operations, are not as nimble as the younger upstarts. While they are rich in resources, big companies tend to be more gun-shy and usually require more time to bring a product to market.

“Companies cannot innovate as fast as start-ups; increasingly they realize they have to look outside,” said Gerald Brady, a managing director at Silicon Valley Bank, who previously led the early-stage venture arm of Siemens. “We think it’s happening a lot more than people recognize or acknowledge.”

Of the 750 corporate venture units, roughly 200 were established in the last two years, according to Global Corporate Venturing, a publication that tracks the market. In the last year, corporations participated in more than $20 billion of start-up investments.

Big business has played the role of venture capitalist before, with limited success. During the waning days of the dot-com boom, financial, media and telecommunications companies sank billions of dollars into start-ups.

The collapse was devastating. Although some managed to make money, far more burned through their cash. In 2002, Accenture, the consulting firm, scrapped its venture capital unit after taking more than $200 million in write-downs. The previous year, Wells Fargo reported $1.6 billion in losses on its venture capital investments. Dell, the computer maker, closed its venture arm in 2004 and sold its portfolio to an investment firm. (It resurrected the unit last year).

Companies say they are taking a different approach this time. Rather than making big bets across the Internet sector, investments are smaller and more selective.

“We invest with the idea that we’re a potential customer for a company,” Jon Lauckner, G.M.’s chief technology officer said. “We’re not looking to make several $5 million investments and make $10 million on each. That would be nice, but it’s not important.”

As they try to find the right start-ups, some are forging tight bonds with local firms. BBVA, for example, is an investor in 500 Startups, a venture firm that specializes in early-stage start-ups and is run by Dave McClure, a former PayPal executive.

Unilever and PepsiCo are limited partners in Physic Ventures, a venture capital firm designed to help corporate investors build commercial partnerships with portfolio companies. Both Unilever and PepsiCo have installed full-time employees in Physic’s downtown San Francisco offices.

American Express has stacked its investment team with technology veterans. Mr. Sanghi, the head of the office, has spent roughly three decades in Silicon Valley and formerly led Motorola Mobility’s venture arm. Through its network of relationships, the office has met with roughly 300 start-ups in the last six months.

The connections have started to pay off. Vinod Khosla, the head of Khosla Ventures and a co-founder of Sun Microsystems, introduced the American Express team to the executives at Ness Computing, a mobile start-up. In August, American Express partnered with Singtel, the Singapore wireless company, to invest $15 million in Ness.

Mr. Sanghi says Ness is a logical investment and a potential partner. The start-up’s application connects users to local businesses through customized search results.

“It’s trying to bring consumers and merchants together in meaningful ways,” he said. “And we’re always trying to find new ways to build value for our merchant and consumer network.”

For start-ups, a big corporate benefactor can bring resources and an established platform to promote and distribute products. Envia Systems, an electric car battery maker, picked General Motors to lead its last financing round because it wanted to have a close relationship with a major automaker, its “absolute end customer,” said Atul Kapadia, Envia’s chief executive.

Although the company received higher offers from other potential corporate investors, Envia wanted G.M.’s advice on how to build the battery so that one day it could be a standard in the company’s electric cars. After the investment, G.M. offered the start-up access to its experts and facilities in Detroit, which Envia is using.

“You want to listen to your end customer because they will help you figure out what specifications you need to get into the final product,” said Mr. Kapadia.

A marriage with corporate investors can be complicated. Besides G.M., Asahi Kasei and Asahi Glass, the Japanese auto-part makers, are also investors in Envia. They both build rival battery products for Japanese car companies.

Mr. Kapadia, who prizes their insights into Japan’s market, says his company is careful about what intellectual property information it shares with its investors. At board meetings, confidential data about Envia’s customers is discussed only at the end, so that conflicted corporate investors can easily excuse themselves.

“In our marriage, there has not been a single ethics concern, because all the expectations were hashed out in the beginning,” Mr. Kapadia said. “But I can see how this could be a land mine.”

For the big corporations, start-up investing is fraught with the same risk as traditional venture investing. Their bets might be modest, but blowups can be embarrassing and can rankle shareholders, who may see venture investing as a distraction from the core business.

OnLive, an online gaming service, offers a recent reminder.

The company was once a darling of corporate investors, with financing from the likes of Time Warner, AutoDesk, HTC and AT&T. At one point, it was valued north of $1 billion.

Despite its early promise, the start-up crashed in August, taking many in Silicon Valley by surprise. The company laid off its employees, announced a reorganization and in the process slashed the value of the shares to zero.

“It can be painful when a deal goes sour,” James Mawson, the founder of Global Corporate Venturing, said.

Read more here.

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GSV Capital, Placing Bets on Start-Ups, Falters

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, boic, Business models, Distressed IP, Economy, FaceBook, Gerbsman Partners, Intellectual capital, International Finance, internet, Investments, IPO news, Market research, Social Networks, Startups, Strategy, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 2, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Article from NYTimes.

Few investors have ridden the recent Internet boomlet like the GSV Capital Corporation.

After GSV announced in June 2011 that it was buying a stake in the privately held Facebook, the closed-end mutual fund surged 42 percent that day. Capitalizing on the euphoria, GSV sold another $247 million of its shares, using the money to expand its portfolio of hot start-ups like Groupon and Zynga.

Now, GSV is feeling the Facebook blues.

When the public offering of the social network flopped, GSV fell hard, and it still has not recovered. Shares of GSV, which were sold for an average of $15.35, are trading at $8.54.

“We probably benefited from our stake in Facebook more than we deserved on the way up,” said GSV’s chief executive, Michael T. Moe, “and were certainly punished more than we deserved on the way down.”

GSV, short for Global Silicon Valley, is the largest of several closed-end mutual funds that offer ordinary investors a chance to own stakes in privately held companies, at least indirectly. Closed-end funds like GSV typically sell a set number of shares, and their managers invest the proceeds. In essence, such portfolios operate like small venture capital funds, taking stakes in start-ups and betting they will turn a profit if the companies are sold or go public.

“I think GSV was really innovative in creating a kind of publicly traded venture capital fund,” said Jason Jones, founder of HighStep Capital, which also invests in private companies.

But the shares of closed-end funds trade on investor demand – and can go significantly higher or lower than the value of the underlying portfolios. The entire category has been hit by Facebook’s troubles, with GSV trading at a 38 percent discount to its so-called net asset value.

Mr. Moe, 49, has previously experienced the wild ups and downs of popular stocks.

A backup quarterback at the University of Minnesota, he started out as a stockbroker at the Minneapolis-based Dain Bosworth, where he wrote a stock-market newsletter called “Mike Moe’s Market Minutes.” He met the chief executive of Starbucks, Howard Schultz, on a visit to Seattle in 1992, and he began covering the coffee chain after its initial public offering.

“I left believing I had just met the next Ray Kroc,” Mr. Moe wrote in his 2006 book, “Finding the Next Starbucks,” referring to the executive who built the McDonald’s empire.

After stints at two other brokerage firms, Mr. Moe became the director of global growth research in San Francisco at Merrill Lynch in 1998. There he ran a group of a dozen analysts at a time when mere business models “were going public at billion-dollar valuations,” he said.

Shortly after the dot-com bubble burst, he founded a banking boutique now called ThinkEquity. At the time, he expected the I.P.O. market to shrug off the weakness and recover in a couple of years. Instead, it went into a decade-long slump.

“Market timing is not my best skill,” Mr. Moe said. In 2007, he sold ThinkEquity.

The next year, he started a new firm to provide research on private companies, NeXt Up Research. He later expanded into asset management, eventually changing the name to GSV. Within two months of starting his own fund, he bought the shares in Facebook through SecondMarket, a marketplace for private shares.

GSV soon raised additional funds from investors and put the money into start-ups in education, cloud computing, Internet commerce, social media and clean technology. Along with Groupon and Zynga, he bought Twitter, Gilt Groupe and Spotify Technology. The goal is finding “the fastest-growing companies in the world,” he said.

But Mr. Moe has paid a high price, picking up several start-ups at high valuations on the private market. He bought Facebook at $29.92 a share. That stock is now trading at $19.10. He purchased Groupon in August 2011 for $26.61 a share, well above its eventual public offering price of $20. It currently sells at $4.31.

Max Wolff, who tracks pre-I.P.O. stocks at GreenCrest Capital Management, said GSV sometimes bought “popular names to please investors.”

“This is such a sentiment-sensitive space, the stocks don’t trade on fundamentals,” Mr. Wolff said, adding, “If there’s a loss of faith, they fall without a net.”

GSV’s peers have also struggled. Firsthand Technology Value Fund, which owns stakes in Facebook and solar power businesses like SolarCity and Intevac, is off 65 percent from its peak in April. “We paid too much” for Facebook, said Firsthand’s chief executive, Kevin Landis.

Two other funds with similar strategies have sidestepped the bulk of the pain. Harris & Harris Group owns 32 companies in microscale technology. Keating Capital, with $75 million in assets, owns pieces of 20 venture-backed companies. But neither Harris nor Keating owns Facebook, Groupon or Zynga, so shares in those companies have not fallen as steeply.

GSV is now dealing with the fallout.

In a conference call in August, Mr. Moe was confronted by one investor who said, “the recent public positions have been a disaster,” according to a transcript on Seeking Alpha, a stock market news Web site. While Mr. Moe expressed similar disappointment, he emphasized the companies’ fundamentals. Collectively, he said, their revenue was growing by more than 100 percent.

“We have been around this for quite some time, and we are going to be wrong from time to time,” Mr. Moe said in the call. “But we are focused on the batting average.”

In the same call, Mr. Moe remained enthusiastic – if not hyperbolic – about the group’s prospects. Many of GSV’s 40 holdings are in “game-changing companies” with the potential to drive outsize growth, he told the investors.

Twitter, the largest, “continues to just be a rocket ship in terms of growth, and we think value creation,” he said. The data analysis provider Palantir Technologies helps the Central Intelligence Agency “track terrorists and bad guys all over the world.” The flash memory maker Violin Memory “is experiencing hyper-growth,” he wrote in an e-mail.

But Mr. Moe was a bit more muted in recent interviews. While he says he still believes in giving public investors access to private company stocks, he recognizes the cloud over GSV. “We unfortunately have a social media segment that got tainted. I completely get why our stock is where it is. It’s going to be a show-me situation for a while.”

Acknowledging some regrets, Mr. Moe said he was angriest about overpaying for Groupon, saying, “Yeah, I blew Groupon.” He said that he also did not anticipate what he called a deceleration in Facebook’s growth rate, and that it was “kind of infuriating” that some of its early investors were allowed to exit before others. GSV often must hold its shares until six months after a public offering.

But the downturn in pre-I.P.O. shares has a silver lining, Mr. Moe said. Since the Facebook public offering, he has been able to put money to work “at better prices.” He recently bought shares of Spotify at a valuation of about $3 billion, roughly 25 percent below the target in its latest round of financing.

The I.P.O. market is also showing signs of life, he said, with the strong debuts of Palo Alto Networks and Kayak Software. And he still has faith in Facebook.

Whatever its current stock price, at least it is a “real company” with revenue and profit, Mr. Moe said, adding, “It’s not being valued off eyeballs and fairy dust.”

Read more here.

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Zscaler finally accepts VC dollars — and gets $38M

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, Internet Security, Investments, mobile 2.0, Startups, Strategy, Technology, Venture Capital, Venturebeat, Web 2.0, Wireless, Wireless 2.0, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 30, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Article from GigaOm.

Zscaler a four-year-old startup that has bootstrapped its business by providing a new form of security designed for a mobile and cloud-dependent workforce, has raised $38 million in first-time financing. The round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and an unnamed strategic investor.

Zscaler has been fairly successful in its four years building a significant base of clients including Crutchfield Corporation, La-Z-Boy and Telefonica. The company’s software as a service is hosted in more than 100 data centers around the world and essentially protects a company’s web traffic. It does this by routing requests through Zscaler’s software. But there’s no software for users to download on their clients and there’s also no appliance for corporate IT to worry about.

As the cloud and mobility do away with the perimeter model of security where a firewall may prevent harmful traffic from getting in and corporate secrets from getting out, Zscaler is one of several new companies trying to adapt security to a world where there is no perimeter. And even if the corporate IT thought it had a perimeter, the corporation may not own it or have a say in what runs on it. A perfect example of this might be the CEO’s iPad (a aapl).

Zscaler doesn’t solve all problems, but it’s certainly ahead of the pack in thinking about security in a forward-looking way. Other companies trying to address the changes in security required by BYOD and corporate access to the cloud applications are Bromium and CloudPassage. And by waiting to take on venture capital Zscaler’s CEO Jay Chaudhry has joined a select group of established companies who are finally succumbing to the lure of VC cash. For example Qualtrics, a ten-year-old company this year raised $70 million in its first round of outside investment. Another company, Code 42, avoided VC dollars for 11 years before this year raising $52.5 million.

Read more here.

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