Venture Capital

I’m pleased to announce that I’ve joined the board of directors of LAVA, the Los Angeles Venture Association.  Given my past opinions (err…rants) on Los Angeles Venture Capital, I decided that instead of sitting on the sidelines playing Monday morning quarterback, I ought to get more involved and so something to help the startup community around LA.  If you’re a startup in the LA area, I encourage you to get more involved in LAVA.  Here’s just a few reasons:

1.  We first met and connected with VC firm DFJ Frontier, the first investors in AudioMicro, Inc. at a LAVA event (the  LAVA 2008 Investment Capital Conference 2008 to be exact).  You can actually get funded through your involvement with LAVA  – I’m living proof!

2.  There are a myriad of opportunities to connect with VC’s and mentors at LAVA events.  Yes – there are a lot of service providers in attendance but if you stay focussed and hunt for the right connections – you’ll come away with great additions to your personal network.

3.  Many of the events are breakfasts from 7am to 9am which don’t eat into your work day or evenings (if you like to work late or have a spouse / family events in the evenings)

4.  Did I mention I’m on the board of directors?  Along with myself, LAVA has a brand new president, Randy Churchill, along with another “young gun” on the BOD – Sam Jones of Formation Media.  And despite my lack of event planning experience, I do have experience starting, funding, operating, and investing in startups so I’m hopeful I can help make the LAVA events more focussed on early stage startups.  If you’ve got any suggestions for future events and topics, please shoot me an note or leave them in the comments below.

If you’ve never been to a LAVA event, tomorrow’s VC breakfast would be a great one to start out with.  You’ll get exposure to the following local VC’s:

Dana Settle of Greycroft Partners

Leo Spiegel of Mission Ventures

Jim Andelman of Rincon Venture Partners (one of my personal faves!)

Neal Hansch of Rustic Canyon Partners, and

Monica Dodi of the Women’s Venture Capital Fund

If you’re not yet registered to attend tomorrow’s breakfast, you can do so by clicking here.  Or simply show up at 7am to 9am at the Skirball center tomorrow, Tues Aug 9th.

*Please note there is a small fee to attend the breakfast which helps to pay for the venue and the food.

Ever since my post on Los Angeles venture capital, I’ve been getting a lot of email and phone inquiries from local entrepreneurs seeking advice.  It’s not surprising because the post presently shows up #3 on Google when you search “los angeles venture capital” and the 100+ re-tweets and 20+ FB likes certainly helped solidify this position.

Typically the entrepreneurs that reach out want to meet in person and ask for advice.  I try to disclaim everything in that I OFFER OPINIONS, NOT ADVICE.  I’ve been compiling these opinions and figured I’d jot down the cliff note version here.  Without further adieu, here are some strong opinions on various topics that have come up in my recent correspondences with local entrepreneurs.

7 DO’s:

1. Choose a freaking huge market.  Don’t play around in a small market.  If you can’t quantify the size of your market, that means it’s too small, especially for VC.  Go big.

2. Quit your day job – sooner rather than later.  If you want to build a business, it takes 110% commitment.   You’re never going to get anywhere if you relegate your dream to a side project for nights and weekends.  Quit now, not later or you’re only proving that you’re not as committed as you should be.

3. Learn to use an RSS reader.  If you’re in tech but don’t use RSS, I fear for you.

4. Have founder vesting.  There’s nothing worse than founders not having 4 year founder vesting in place, with or without outside investors.

5. Tell anyone and everyone about your idea.  Ideas are a dime a dozen, execution is everything and you’ll learn far more than you could ever possibly lose by sharing your ideas with all.

6. Fire people as fast as possible. The second you think things are not working out.  Fire away.  You’ll never regret firing, you’ll only regret having not done it sooner.  Everyone is replaceable.

7. Read Mark Suster’s blog.  Pretty much every single question I get asked has an answer on BSOTT – “Both Sides of The Table”.  The answer is already out there.  Do your friggin homework.

5 DONT’s

1. Don’t raise money from non-millionaries.  Raise from deep pocketed institutions and corporations.

2. Regardless of what the lawyers tell you, do not form an LLC.  Lawyers love LLC’s.  You know why?  Because lawyers are not entrepreneurs.

3. Don’t have a 50 / 50 co-founder (or 33 / 33 / 33 for that matter).  One of you needs to be in charge and be in control and if you’re the leader…the real entrepreneurial one bringing this thing to life, then it should be you.  Founder shares must have vesting (i.e. be restricted) and be subject to a buy-sell agreement (aka pre-nup).

4. Don’t get caught up in all the press and attention your competition gets.  It’s truly meaningless and in no way indicative of financial success.

5. Don’t raise a round of convertible debt (exception:  if the terms are so Y-combinator style crazy in your favor that you’d be a dumb-ass not to take the cash).  If someone wants to invest, they should set a price and take an equity stake.  If you want a loan, you’d be asking for one or you’d go to a bank / credit card company.

Now each of these points could be a blog post of their own backed up with experiences and circumstances to help you understand why I’ve formed these opinions.  Maybe I’ll get around to doing a deep dive on each item but for now, the cliff notes will have to do.

Now it’s time to get back to what matters most – executing.

• Why Startups Should Raise Money at the Top End of Normal (techcrunch.com)
• The Entrepreneur/VC Dynamic (informationarbitrage.com)

p.s. I use stock photos from Photoxpress.

Louis Gray recently posted a great piece about Digg and it’s founder Kevin Rose.  I’ve been a fan of Kevin since I first saw him on The Screen Savers on TechTV a little before Digg was even live.  I think that there’s really one over arching takeaway from all the talk about Kevin and Digg this week.

HOP OFF THE TRAIN AT THE RIGHT TIME!

What I mean by this is that a financially successful exit is a lot about timing. Just think of how many companies that are on the downswing or no longer even exist today, yet they made such great returns for their initial founders and shareholders because they sold out while they were on the top of their game.  On the flip side, there are many circumstances when companies have sold out to early, only to have their acquirers go on to grow the business 10x after the acquisition (still a better position to be in than having not exited at all).

Businesses and industry move in cycles and technological progress happens extremely quick these days. Companies, particularly those on the web, can so quickly fall in and out of favor. It’s crucial to exit at the right time.