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Perspectives on entrepreneurship, startups and venture capital from K9 Ventures.

Tag Archives: Series A

The Pre-Seed FAQ

One of the people I respect the most in the VC/PE media ecosystem is Dan Primack. I’ve been an avid reader of Dan’s Term Sheet while he was at Fortune, and now Pro Rata at Axios. His writings and knowledge of the inner workings of the VC/PE ecosystem is impressive, and I have learned a […]

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Everlaw Raises Series A led by a16z

Today K9 Ventures’ portfolio company Everlaw announced that it has raised $8.1M in a Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from K9 Ventures. I couldn’t be more excited about Everlaw’s Series A round as it reflects a recognition of the amazing work that the company, co-founded by CEO AJ Shankar and Jeff […]

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Seed Is The New A – #PreMoney 2015 Talk

Here is the video recording of the talk I gave at  500 Startups‘ PreMoney Conference in San Francisco on 12 June.  Seed Is The New A: What The Seed-Stage Explosion Means For Founders, GPs & LPs And the deck from my talk Thanks to 500 Startups  #PreMoney     As always I welcome your thoughts […]

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The Seeds Have Changed: An Epilogue

  Note: This is a long post and it’s based on reflecting on a couple of years of observations in the venture industry. It’s a work-in-progress and I expect to update (last update 10 June) and refine the content, especially in the next week as I prepare for a talk I’m giving at the PreMoney […]

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The New Venture Landscape

In May 2011, I wrote the post: Investor Nomenclature and the Venture Spiral. That post got a lot of attention because back then all the buzz was about “Super Angels.” The venture landscape was evolving and had reached a point where Super Angels were an important part of the ecosystem. Well, now in 2014, almost 3 […]

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The Curse of Over-Capitalization

For VCs money is a commodity. VCs also operate in a limited time window. Now, combine those two motivations that venture investors have: 1) ownership, 2) quick growth, and what do you get? You get a situation whether investors are incentivized to put in more money into a company, not only to buy more equity, but also to fund the quick growth. In fact, it becomes a vicious circle. First, a company may get encouraged to raise more money that it really needs, just so that the venture fund can get to it’s desired level of ownership. Then the same company gets encouraged to spend that money to accelerate and to grow quickly, which in turn means it runs out of that money more quickly, and then needs to raise even more money.

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Hope and Numbers

The seed round happens on hope. The Series A happens on a combination of hope and numbers. And the Series B and beyond, happen largely based on numbers.

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