3 ms·
> If you only own 1% of your company after raising funds, you've made some serious mistakes along the way. This was a simple example to illustrate a point. A m
by speedplane 7y ago
> If you only own 1% of your company after raising funds, you've made some serious mistakes along the way.
This was a simple example to illustrate a point. A more realistic example would be: owning 100% of a company making $1M/year is better than owning 40% of a company making $100M/year where investors put in $500M with a 4X liquidation preference. This case is even clearer here, but not quite as easy to parse.
Modern VCs allow founders to retain a large "percentage" of their company in stock or other ownership terms, but they use liquidation preferences and other mechanisms to effectively increase their financial leverage.
- keiferski 7y agoBetter in terms of financial gains, sure. But in the ability of the business to have an impact on an industry, group of people or the world at large, the smaller business has infinitely less leverage. Fundamentally these kind of comparisons are not really relevant. The $1 million/year business is not even in the same universe as the $1 billion/year one, nor are the motivations of the typical founders.