Category Archives: Angel investment

True Stories: One Good and One Bad Answer to Investor Q&A

Angel investment, Business Pitch, ,

We talk about the slides, and what they cover, but some of the more important moments in business pitches I’ve seen are not about slides, or plans, but rather about the people themselves, and how they respond. pitching

For example, I posted last week on gust.com about two radically different ways to handle questions about financials. In both cases investors had interrupted a business pitch with complaints about financial slides. One response worked perfectly, and the other was disastrous.

A really good answer

A smart woman had a financial summary slide showing when one of the investors complained:

Those numbers are different from what you show in your plan.

She answered immediately, no pauses, no reflection, as quick as a heart beat:

Of course not. That version of the plan was submitted to your deadline, three weeks ago. We’re not static ever. Things change. This chart is from our latest projections.

That was a total win. Everybody in the room understood.

A really bad answer

It was another financial summary slide. Otherwise the pitch was pretty good, and the founders impressive, but the numbers were annoyingly unrealistic, particularly the huge profitability, something like 50 percent or more profits to sales.  Several of us objected. The answer was:

We don’t like those numbers either. They were done for us by an outside financial consultant. We’re looking for somebody to come in and revise them.

Ouch. Throwing some anonymous third person under a bus doesn’t impress your investors. You can’t disown your own slides.

On the other hand, just for a note of paradox, bad financial projections are easier to fix than a bad product/market mix. That disastrously bad answer was not absolutely fatal.

(Image: istockphoto.com)

Gust Streamlines the Angel Investment Process

Angel investment, , , ,

Are you hoping to find angel investment for your startup? Are you looking to invest in startups? Go look at gust.com. It’s a better-than-ever first step.

Gust, is the new platform launched last week to replace angelsoft.net. The angelsoft.net platform is used by 600 angel investor groups, 35,000 angel investors, and 125,000 startups. Gust.com is its replacement. Angelsoft.net redirects to gust.com.

TechCrunch covered the new gust.com last week:

On Gust, entrepreneurs will be able to create their own profile, update their company information, build an investment relations site for their startup, collaborate on funding, and most importantly, get connected with angels interested in funding their efforts. Investors will be able to filter and search through the startups listed on Gust. And only those who have been specifically granted access will be able to see the details of a startup’s financials and progress.

That same post included this quote from David Rose, founder of both angelsoft.net and gust.com:

We’ve integrated powerful investor relations tools with direct access to the largest community of established, organized investors, thus supporting the entire ‘pitch-to-exit’ business life cycle. What’s most important is that our platform has gained the trust of the world’s most demanding investor and entrepreneur organizations.

In answer on quora, David added:

The enormous change with Gust is that now the *company* creates a single profile, which is always live and under the entrepreneur’s control. That profile stands alone as a protected web site (with both public and private areas) to which the entrepreneur can provide access to any individual investor he or she wants, whether or not the investor is part of an angel group or venture fund.

I have personal experience with angelsoft.net, so I’m looking forward to switching up to gust.com. We used angelsoft.net to organize the submission and filtering process for investment in the Willamette Angel Conference, in Western Oregon, of which I’m an investor member. Companies submitted their information to us as summaries, videos, and business plans, and we reviewed them. It also managed our communication within the group. And it was free, easy to use, and powerful. I’ve also used angelsoft.net as a judge in several major business plan competitions that use it as a convenient platform for managing submissions and information.

This looks to me like a good structured and organized answer to something people have been asking for since the early 1980s. And that’s from both sides of that table, the investors and the entrepreneurs. People wanting funding for new ventures faced a bewildering maze of possibilities, trying to find interested angel investors, looking for groups, forums, and so on. People wanting to invest had to connect one way or another to deal flow.

And for a good 18-minute view of David Rose, watch his 15-minute TED talk on pitching to investors.

Disclosure: I’m going to be posting on the gust.com blog; and Palo Alto Software products, for business planning, are compatible with the platform.
(Image: screenshot from gust.com)

Long-Term Successes Don’t Leave Out Investors

Angel investment, Starting a Business, Venture Capital, , , ,

For an investor in a startup, return on investment is as simple as writing a check now and depositing some related money later.  And since startups are risky, you’d expect to hit big when you win because you’re so much more likely to lose. Does that make sense?

So when the angel investor writes a $50,000 check today to invest in a startup, getting $100,000 back out of it five years later is not bad – it’s slightly less than 14% per year return – but it’s not spectacularly good either.

After all, that same investor could buy a cool car or put a down payment on a vacation condo instead. Or she could just leave that money in a bank with decent interest and have $70,000 in five years without risking losing it all.

But here’s the counter-intuitive catch: What happens if the $50,000 creates a healthy and happy company that grows and becomes independent and never creates any liquidity for its investors? The founders don’t want to get bought, and the stock market doesn’t accept it for a public offering, so the early investors are stuck with a share in a long-term business. Growing businesses don’t generally produce dividends, so that $50,000 investment is stuck.

The return on investment of a $50,000 check that never produces a deposit is way less than zero. Getting $50,000 back would be a zero return. Getting nothing back is – well, let’s just say it’s bad. Real bad.

All of which I post here to explain this statement:

Investors are more interested in companies that will be bought. Not in long term companies.

That’s not exactly what I said last Thursday in my credibilitylive.com session for Dun and Bradstreet Credibility Corp; but it’s close enough.  If you’re curious you can click this Youtube link to go directly to seven minutes into the interview where I was was saying that.

Investors appreciate long-term success as much as anybody. But a long-term successful company finds a way to reward its early investors. Maybe that’s through subsequent rounds, a partial liquidity event, a buyout, or some other instrument. But you don’t leave investors stuck in your company with no way to exit.

When my business confronted a situation like that, we practiced then what I’m preaching now: we bought our investors back out of the company.

Mark Suster: Be a Line, Not a Dot

Angel investment, Starting a Business, Venture Capital,

This morning I added Mark Suster’s Both Sides of the Table to my blogroll here because his post Invest in Lines, not Dots reminded me that I’ve been meaning to include his blog for a long time. His idea here is something everybody should understand.

His single line chart here,combined with his title, makes the point extremely well.  As a startup looking for investment, you need time to become a line. You start as a dot:

The first time I meet you, you are a single data point.  A dot.  I have no reference point from which to judge whether you were higher on the y-axis 3 months ago or lower.  Because I have no observation points from the past, I have no sense for where you will be in the future.  Thus, it is very hard to make a commitment to fund you.

So instead of that, Mark suggests, you need time to communicate progress:

For this reason I tell entrepreneurs the following: Meet your potential investors early.  Tell them you’re not raising money yet but that you will be in the next 6 months or so …  Hopefully by then you’ve made good progress.  You’ll be able to give them an update on key hires, pilot customers, key tech innovations – whatever.  Keep these interactions low-key and short.

Do you see the dots vs. lines concept in that? I think it’s one of those great concepts that seems obvious, but only after you’ve heard it. I also really like Mark’s emphasis on entrepreneurs and investment as a long-term relationship. Here’s his conclusion for entrepreneurs:

you might be pumped up with that super quick round done at a high price.  But just remember that raising money is a bit like Ireland in the 90′s – no divorces allowed.  I know VCs and sophisticated angels can be difficult, slow and price sensitive, but I also know that in tough times unsophisticated investors can be a right pain in the arse.  For some companies – they become deal breakers on further funding rounds.  By definition if somebody is investing in you as a dot (limited thought, limited due diligence, maximum price) they are a dot to you, too.  You can’t really know them in 2 minutes yet you’re letting them own part of your business.

That’s an excellent post. Go read the original. He has several additional line charts, and great advice.

How Much Money Do I Need for My Startup?

Angel investment, Business Planning, Starting a Business, Venture Capital, , , ,

It’s an obvious question. And if you’re looking for startup investors you’d better be able to answer it well, and quickly too. No wandering eyes. No doubt. If you’re doing a pitch, have a slide for it. And be specific.

I liked this from Ben Yoskovitz’s Instigator Blog on Use of Funds:

…most descriptions of “use of funds” are incredibly generic and standard, typically involving the following: hire key personnel, product development, sales & marketing. Hhhm…the phrase, “No shit Sherlock…” comes to mind.

And on the other hand, there’s this about that, from Perfecting Your Pitch, by Guy Kawasaki’s Garage.com Ventures:

It should be clear from your financials what your capital requirements will be. On this slide you should outline how you plan to take in funding—how big each round will be, and the timing of each—and map the funding against your key near-term and medium-term milestones. You should also include your key achievements to date. These milestones should tie to the key metrics in your financial projections, and they should provide a clear, crisp picture of your product introduction and market expansion roadmap. In essence, this is your operating plan for the funds you are raising. Do not spend time presenting a “use of funds” table. Investors want to see measures of accomplishment, not measures of activity.

So go figure. There are two opposite points of view from two good sources.

I’m amazed, meanwhile, how often I see people pitch startups to investors without having a good answer to that question. I expect an instant answer, without hesitation, and if it’s a slide deck there should be a slide.

And that doesn’t mean that anybody necessarily believes what you say. It’s all educated guessing. But details add credibility. And if you can’t answer that question, what do you think your audience is thinking?

There is a standard way to calculate starting costs.

  1. Make a list of the stuff you need to purchase before you start. Include expenses like early salaries, cleaning up the location, developing the website, packaging if relevant, prototypes … it’s a collection of educated guesses, of course. It’s just guessing, but how can you not do it?
  2. Do your projected first year cash flow. Estimate sales, costs, expenses, and payment lags from business customers, your own lags paying your vendors, plus what you need in inventory. If this isn’t a cash deficit, recalculate. In real startups it almost always is.
  3. Add those startup costs with the deficit spending, and that’s what you need from investors.
  4. Reality check: if that calculated amount is way too much, investors will laugh at you, go back and change your plan. Spend less. Look for the startup sweet spot.
  5. Double reality check: if you can spend less, maybe you can do it without investors. There are other ways to get money. But even in that case, don’t you want to have a good idea of what it takes?
  6. Triple reality check: if you’ve got a high-end high-tech startup, looking for serious angel or VC investors, give them a break and show spending the money on things that make for growth, excitement, virality, sizzle. If you don’t know what that is, rethink your plan.

(Image: mgkaya/istockphoto.com)

10 Good Reasons Not to Seek Investors For Your Startup

Angel investment, Starting a Business,

Sure, maybe you need the money. Maybe that’s what your business plan says. But seriously: Do you really want to have investors involved in your dream startup?

I’ve said it before: bootstrapping is underrated. I get frequent emails from people asking how they can get investment for their new startup, and I’ve admitted to being a member of an angel investor group. But let’s not forget, while we’re thinking about it, these 10 good reasons not to seek investors for your startup.

  1. It’s almost impossible to get investment for your very first startup. If you don’t have startup experience, get somebody on your team who does. Chris Dixon said it best: either you’ve started a company or you haven’t. And if you haven’t, and nobody in your team has either, that makes it very hard.
  2. You are selling ownership. Investors write checks to own a serious portion of your business. I admit that’s patently obvious, but you should see the emails I get in which people think of investors as if they were some sort of public agency. Once you get investment, you don’t own your entire company.
  3. Investors are bosses. You are not your own person when you have investors; you’re part of a team. You can’t decide everything by yourself. Politics matter. Investor relations matter. If you screw up, you do it in front of other people, and it hurts those people.
  4. Valuation is critical to them and you. Simply put, valuation means the price. If you want to give only 10 percent of your company to investors who pay $100,000, you’re saying your company is worth $1 million. And so on. Simple math, but wow, not so simple negotiation.
  5. Investors don’t make money until there’s a liquidity event. That’s why we always talk about exit strategies. You can be the world’s happiest, healthiest, most cash-independent company, but your investors won’t be happy until you get them cash back. The win is getting money back out of the company. Some big company stock buyers like dividends. Startup investors don’t.
  6. If it’s not scalable, forget it. The real growth opportunities are scalable. It used to be products only, but now there are some scalable services, like web services, for example. But if doubling your sales means doubling your headcount (that’s called a body shop), then investors aren’t going to be interested.
  7. If it’s not defensible, it’s tough going at best. Not that I trust patents as a defense, but trade secrets, momentum, a combination of trade secrets and patents, plus a good intellectual property defense budget … if anybody can do it, then investors aren’t interested. (Of course, what would I know, I thought Starbucks was a bad idea because I thought that was too easy to copy … there are always exceptions.)
  8. Investors aren’t generic. Some become collaborative partners and even mentors, some are nagging insensitive critics. Some are trojan horses. Some help, some don’t. (Hint: choose carefully which investors you approach.)
  9. Just getting financed doesn’t mean diddly. For an example of what I mean read this piece from the New York Times. You haven’t won the race when you get that check.
  10. Investors sometimes take your company from you. Well-known strategy consultant Sramana Mitra has a couple of eloquent minutes on that them in this two-minute video. She seems to be talking about India, but she’s well known in the Silicon Valley, and what she says applies perfectly well here.

5 Non-Traditional Ways to Get Startup Money

Angel investment, Business Financing, Starting a Business, , , , ,

So you want to start that company but you don’t have enough of your own money to do it. Most people think you either borrow the money or find investors, but neither of these are always possible.  You won’t get investment if your company isn’t investible.  And banks can’t lend you money on faith, you need a credit rating and some collateral. But there are some other ways to get that startup money.

  1. The absolute best startup financing is prepaid sales. Get a company that knows and trusts you to prepay services, or product development. Give one or more key customers an attractive discount for betting on you early. When I started on my own I sold a year’s worth of consulting, in advance, to the consulting company I was leaving; I accepted only half a year’s money, but it worked. It got me started. Later  I got large buyers to prepay software development in order to influence the product features they wanted. I know it’s hard, but it happens.
  2. Innovative non-traditional borrowing. Even though banks can’t lend you money if you don’t qualify, other people – angel investors, for example – can lend you money if they want to take a risk on you that way. Usually they’ll do it only for additional benefits to compensate for additional risks. That could be a high interest rate, or an “equity kicker” (a small percentage of ownership that they keep even after the debt is paid), or some portion of the debt that converts to equity (ownership). Look into convertible debt and warrants.  Fred Wilson had a very good post yesterday on Venture Debt, which isn’t usually applied to startups, but still, an interesting option.
  3. Percent of revenue, or royalties. This worked beautifully for me in the middle 1990s when I needed professional programming to help turn my business plan templates into Windows applications. I found a company that would work for a small fixed fee per month plus a small percentage of future revenue. Just last year I helped a friend find a fair way to pay a co-author without sharing ownership in her startup. She and her co-author were both happy with a long-term royalty arrangement.
  4. Do-now pay later. Offer somebody a contract for services paying a bare minimum now and then twice as much later on, as a balloon payment or a series of payments. Say you get a consultant to help you with your business plan and she’d normally want $5,000, but you offer her $10,000 if she can take it in 10 monthly payments starting on the third month. It can happen.
  5. Lease equipment. Leasing works best when a new business depends on relatively big equipment purchases: the trailer truck, the espresso machine, the dry cleaning equipment, for example. If you can qualify for the lease contract, you turn that big purchase into a long series of monthly purchases.

Bombarding Investors With Your Deal Is a Terrible Idea

Angel investment, Starting a Business, , ,

Subtitle: The deals chase the money. The money doesn’t chase the deals.

Two days ago in Angels vs. VCs on Business Pitches I said our angel investment group looks at all submissions.

That confused my friend Anthony Richardson, who followed up yesterday with this question:

Should an early stage company bombard every online submission under the sun ? It has always been my advice to clients to tell them that it was a complete waste of time, and if I may be honest here; I was fairly surprised to see that you thought differently.

Anthony, I completely agree with what you’ve been telling your clients. An early stage company should definitely not bombard every online submission under the sun. That is, exactly as you suggest, a complete waste of time.

(Aside: misunderstandings are always the writer’s fault, never the reader’s.)

My reference to submissions was very specific. We use angelsoft.net, which is free to entrepreneurs and angel investors, and is used by about 400 other angel investors.

We would never consider investing in a company without getting to know the people personally. Our review process first narrows them down to about a dozen or so, using mainly the executive summaries. From there we break into teams, visit their offices, talk to their customers, and study their business plans (the buzzword is due diligence) before we make our decision.

I like angelsoft.net because it’s practical, it works, it collects and manages the information, and it’s free for both sides of the table. And several hundred angel groups use it like we do. It’s free for entrepreneurs and angel investors.

But submitting to us through angelsoft.net is not just submitting online. While it may be possible to use it to submit to lots of groups, that won’t work. Almost every group that uses it has its specific criteria. For example, our group looks only at Oregon companies. We’ve made a couple of exceptions for companies in Southern Washington wanting to move, but neither of them won.

Angelsoft.net does allow what it calls “bulk” submissions, meaning subsmissions to multiple groups. We don’t look at them unless they’re in Oregon. I doubt that other groups look at submissions outside their criteria either.

I’ve been watching online business plan posting sites since I finished the first Business Plan Pro in 1995. My company owns one of them, secureplan.com, but only as a convenience to our software users. It lets them post a plan online instead of printing it. Investors don’t browse it; they need an owner’s specific login information for each plan they see. And we don’t charge for it.

Seriously: real investors don’t browse the web business plan posting sites.

Those sites that charge you money to get listed where investors will find you? Assume that’s a complete waste of time and money. No, I don’t know them all. Things do change. In 15 years I’ve heard of one single deal that started with an online listing. I’ve heard serious investors have concerns about deal flow, but that doesn’t mean they’re browsing business plan posting sites.

If you’re serious about getting investment, do it right. Choose your targets very carefully. Look for close matches between what you have and what they want. Shotgun scattering will never work.

Angels vs. VCs on Business Pitches

Angel investment, Business Financing, Starting a Business, Venture Capital,

Over the weekend I caught Business Insider’s Five VCs Explain What They REALLY Think About Your Pitches. It’s a great post, gathering points together from discussions with several high-end VCs. If you’re looking at venture capital, read it. Business Insider

Part of what they said reminded me that angel investors and VCs have a lot in common. For example, these important points:

  • Keep it short.
  • Avoid buzzwords.
  • Answer questions quickly without getting defensive.
  • Be a good storyteller.
  • Know the people you’re pitching.
  • Don’t forget the financial info.

I’m pretty sure all of the 30+ investors in my local angel investor group would agree with every one of those. I particularly like the three about answering questions, telling stories, and not to forget the financial info. Those three are critical.

Some of the other points, however, remind me of the differences between VCs and angels. For example, the VCs say introductions matter:

The person introducing the entrepreneur is a big deal — if [the VC quoted] doesn’t trust the referral, he won’t even take the meeting.

Our group, in contrast to this, looks into every submission we get. Introductions aren’t required. Some of them don’t get past a quick read of the executive summary, but I think most angel groups are similar. We’re going to read the executive summaries, at the very least. And we invite submissions. Every plan submitted before March 31 is considered for our May investment. Some are not considered very long — like less than five minutes — but still. Introductions don’t matter. The plan does.

Two other points probably depend on the group, the particular angel investor, and the moment. The VCs said:

  • Think big or don’t bother.
  • Forget saving the world.

I don’t think those points are as true for angels as for VCs.VCs are investing other people’s money, mostly institutional money, and they’re paid to do that well. Professionally. Angels, on the other hand, are investing their own money. Maybe that makes a difference. It does to me. Angels invest smaller amounts, generally, and at an earlier stage, generally. Maybe that’s why sometimes we’ll consider a not-so-big deal, and sometimes saving the world, or not, makes a favorable difference.

That’s my opinion, anyway.

Are You Planning to Sell Boxes or Hours?

Angel investment, Bootstrapping, Starting a Business, Venture Capital, , ,

All of these are just “in general” points. There will always be exceptions. But still, it’s good to understand the huge difference between service businesses and product business. Selling hours has advantages, but selling boxes does too. And there are huge differences, things I think you need to understand.

My wife and I spent several years working on converting our business planning business to “sell boxes, not hours.” It took a long time, but eventually that worked. But we started with a service business, and it was only after several years of that business that we started to convert it to products. Here are some of the standard tradeoffs.

  1. Service businesses take less capital to start. Particularly professional service businesses, like consulting, graphic design, landscaping, bookkeeping … you don’t have to buy products to sell, or materials to build products. You need credentials, yes, and a computer, and in most cases a website. But you’re not worried about design, prototypes, packaging, inventory, channels of distribution, and all that.
  2. Service businesses are harder to grow. With a product business you sell more and you make more money. Succeed with online marketing, open up a new channel, and you can build more of those things. Product businesses usually – obviously not if a lot of hand labor is involved – scale up. On a classic service business, though, to double sales you have to double your payroll. That’s what investors call a “body shop.” Classic service businesses can be great businesses for the owners and workers, but they’re rarely good investment opportunities for outside investors.
  3. Investors like Product businesses. I’ve been spending a lot of time lately looking at pitches for our angel investment group, and evaluating businesses for some major business plan competitions. Investors like product businesses because you can lever up, and scale. And you can sell a product business – the whole business – to somebody else. And you can make sales while you sleep. And of course, to make this perfectly clear …
  4. Investors don’t like service businesses. It’s the body shop problem. The assets walk out of the door every night. The assumption is that they don’t scale. Sure, there are exceptions.
  5. Web service businesses act like product businesses, without the inventory drag on cash, or the problems of physical distribution. A web service can scale up, if it’s designed correctly, and go from 100 to 1,000 to 10,000 without needing a lot of hand labor or human intervention.

So what? I think it’s good to know. Service businesses start up all the time with only a few thousand dollars of initial investment. All you need is that first good client, and off you go. There is less risk. It’s easier to get from nowhere to covering costs.

But if you want to go big-time, or if you want to build a business you can sell, build products or web-based services.  Sell boxes, not hours (or a web app).

(Image: Quang Ho/Shutterstock)