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> I would assume that an average Series D startup has way less risk of evaporating to zero than a seed stage startup. My estimate, admittedly not looking at da

> I would assume that an average Series D startup has way less risk of evaporating to zero than a seed stage startup. My estimate, admittedly not looking at data right now, would be that a Series D company is roughly 100x more likely to succeed than a seed stage company. But then again your returns could easily be less than 100%, whereas with seed you can literally get a 100x ROI (this actually happened for Uber).

tp3 6y ago
I am certainly not saying that it's 100% a "natural" example of this either. In particular, the money invested there is a lot less than a Series D startup. But, I suspect (which I cannot yet confirm) that if you did it in an attempt to maximise your gains, you'd wind up with vastly better returns than if you've chosen to run all your money on a single bet. The most important thing here though is, that it's very likely that some of those investments will eventually yield big returns that you would like to share with your team. As that becomes a reality, your investment becomes your team's. You could then use those returns on another team as a way to further leverage their collective capital (e.g. to fund their employee hiring efforts by paying them) and they could then use their own capital as their own way to increase their employee morale (e.g. by creating a startup, selling it to a VC), without being obligated to be on the team's side. This sort of model will likely be extremely attractive to founders to use, but it's still likely a very conservative way of approaching building a team in these types of models. This is something you can see in a lot of other sectors of the industry and it's something I have not witnessed here with the exception of maybe the big VC's. Also, as a company grows and its employees get larger, you may simply become an important part of the team and have less room to invest in your own capital as they grow. This is a fairly common phenomenon in tech circles right now in general but it's not something you might see in the tech industry with a lot of companies in general.
staysaasy 6y ago
Another factor to note is that many larger institutional funds reserve a portion of their funds for follow-on to fill up their pro rata in their winners' later rounds. Those winners tend to be where all of the returns come from anyway, so it isn't a strict distribution of one-and-done bets across companies of a similar stage.
nl 6y ago
Worth noting that in very late mega rounds (like the Uber late rounds) there are a lot of odd things going on. Not only are their preferential shares (which people should know about), but in some cases the investment seems to have been ways of moving and/or washing money. Things like Chinese investment via investment funds and Saudi money via the vision fund and others can be seen as ways to move from illiquid assets to liquid holdings and these investors are prepared to lose money in that transaction.

tp3 6y ago

I am certainly not saying that it's 100% a "natural" example of this either. In particular, the money invested there is a lot less than a Series D startup. But, I suspect (which I cannot yet confirm) that if you did it in an attempt to maximise your gains, you'd wind up with vastly better returns than if you've chosen to run all your money on a single bet. The most important thing here though is, that it's very likely that some of those investments will eventually yield big returns that you would like to share with your team. As that becomes a reality, your investment becomes your team's. You could then use those returns on another team as a way to further leverage their collective capital (e.g. to fund their employee hiring efforts by paying them) and they could then use their own capital as their own way to increase their employee morale (e.g. by creating a startup, selling it to a VC), without being obligated to be on the team's side. This sort of model will likely be extremely attractive to founders to use, but it's still likely a very conservative way of approaching building a team in these types of models. This is something you can see in a lot of other sectors of the industry and it's something I have not witnessed here with the exception of maybe the big VC's. Also, as a company grows and its employees get larger, you may simply become an important part of the team and have less room to invest in your own capital as they grow. This is a fairly common phenomenon in tech circles right now in general but it's not something you might see in the tech industry with a lot of companies in general.

staysaasy 6y ago

Another factor to note is that many larger institutional funds reserve a portion of their funds for follow-on to fill up their pro rata in their winners' later rounds. Those winners tend to be where all of the returns come from anyway, so it isn't a strict distribution of one-and-done bets across companies of a similar stage.

nl 6y ago

Worth noting that in very late mega rounds (like the Uber late rounds) there are a lot of odd things going on. Not only are their preferential shares (which people should know about), but in some cases the investment seems to have been ways of moving and/or washing money. Things like Chinese investment via investment funds and Saudi money via the vision fund and others can be seen as ways to move from illiquid assets to liquid holdings and these investors are prepared to lose money in that transaction.