Open the tech press and you read a litany of “success” stories:
- DocuSign Doubles Valuation to $3 Billion with $233 Million
- RaiseInstacart Valued at $2 Billion in New $220 Million
- FundraisingTwilio Has Joined the Unicorn Ranks with Stealthy $100 Million Raise
The numbers are big, the companies sound sexy.
This is success, right? Wrong. The idea that raising investment is a mark of success—and a badge of honor—destroys startups.
Investment is a burden as much as an opportunity.
It increases the pressure, corrupts your incentives, and creates a communications minefield. Court it at your peril.
What you need to understand about venture capital
Venture capital is a core feature of the startup world, yet how it actually works is not well known.
I didn’t fully learn this myself until I became a VC. I worked as a venture partner for a $1 billion venture capital fund. As an angel investor, I have invested in over forty companies.
Angel investors are a little different: they invest their own money. But, apart from the angels, the money a VC invests normally isn’t his own—it comes from his investors.
Investors typically come from among the world’s elite: family offices, endowments, sovereign wealth funds. These have billions of dollars sitting around, and they are risk averse: their goal, simply, is to not lose it.
So they spread their money all over the globe, in every type of opportunity, in order to hedge against the risk of losses. No single market can hurt you if you’re invested in all of them.
How this works in the tech sector is a little different. VCs that invest in tech don’t want slow and steady growth from all of their investments—they want massive gains from a few.
VCs don’t care about low-level success. They understand that if they invest in 10 companies, 6 or 7 will fail, 2 will break even or have small returns, and 1 will make a 10x return.
VCs only care about that 1, and that can be a problem for founders.
How raising money can crash your company
Recently, a friend called me for advice. He is a CEO and founder, and a large competitor had approached him with an offer to acquire his company for $15 million. He has a one-third share, so he would pocket $5 million from the deal.
He is recently married and still carrying debts from years of struggle to bring this company to life. Five million dollars would be life changing.
But he is under pressure from his investors not to take it. His largest investor bought a third of the business the previous year at a $12 million valuation. He stands to make $1 million on a $4 million investment—a 25 percent return.
That may seem like a reasonable return, but VCs typically aren’t interested in reasonable returns. They are looking for the one in ten that will make a tenfold return. My friend’s VC investor would rather he hold on in pursuit of that outcome than take the money on offer and exit now.
The emotional and financial pressure that VC can bring to bear is likely to mean that my friend will turn down the offer, which could be the biggest mistake of his life.
That’s the kind of decision that VCs make on behalf of their super-wealthy investors. And it’s a decision that can be entirely at odds with the interests of the founder.
The minute you raise money, any future exit has to pay back that investment in order to be considered a success. The more money you take, the more you have to pay back: investment is basically debt. Henceforth, your investors will review all of your major strategic decisions in an exclusively profit-oriented environment—investors aren’t in it for the creative kick.
Just getting to that exit is hard enough on its own without the burden of increased expectations.
How to avoid taking unnecessary funding
Ignore the cheerleaders, hangers-on, your team, the tech press: when you get a decent investment offer, they will all tell you to accept it.
But the longer you can hold out without investment, the greater your control, the greater the ultimate rewards, and the greater your chance of success.
If you must take investment, remember: the job now gets harder, not easier. Don’t party: get back to work.
Jonathan Siegel is a serial entrepreneur, angel investor, and the bestselling author of The San Francisco Fallacy. He is the founder of several companies, including Xenon Ventures and RightSignature. He has worked as a partner for Accel Partners and served on Amazon Web Services’ customer advisory board.
