4 ms·

As this was a forward looking piece I was surprised to see no mention of crowd-investing. Are YC companies looking forward to it? Are they indifferent?

shin_lao 13y ago
Crowd-investing doesn't solve the question of business development, one of the other things VC do in addition to "lending" money.
buro9 13y ago
As one VC said to me on Friday: "The best way to take money from your users is revenue". We've crowd-funded our seed in the UK, using an equity based crowd-funding site called Seedrs. We're currently the fastest equity crowd-funded company in the world, we got our seed in 15 hours thanks to the belief and need that the users have. Our impression was that this was massive social proof, but what we're hearing from angels and VCs is that there is a great amount of uncertainty about crowd-funding. Questions like: * What happens with drag-along? * Did you crowd-fund because no-one else would invest? * Are we now dealing with 100 naive investors? So much FUD. We did it in place of the friends and family round, and chose Seedrs for their nominee structure that gives us a single shareholder with terms that are not a disincentive to any future investor. We had a third party (Orrick) check the papers to make sure nothing was in there that would cause complications, that things like drag-along and preemption rights were all standard, that the seed investors couldn't complicate things later. We also had numerous options on money and went with the one that helped mitigate a risk we had. By securing a financial as well as emotional investment, our biggest risk of substantially changing the product and losing a core of our key early users as we imported sites with UIs that they knew intimately, is mitigated somewhat as their investment helps to overcome some of that. Our experience has been positive, but the amount of inexperience within angel circles and VCs of crowd-funded companies that have later raised and exited is so great that there is a great deal of uncertainty, and from that the fear and doubts emerge. We http://microco.sm/ http://microco.sm/ have only good things to say about the process and engagement of users, and some of our "user as investors" have contributed phenomenal feedback and helped win us key customers at an early stage. What happens next, for us, and for other companies in our position in the next few years, will help influence how crowd-funding is perceived by angels and VCs. We are at an interesting stage now where we need to raise a further round as demand for the product is out-shipping our revenue and we need to go faster. Users still want to invest, but users can't always be the source of investment and we now need to start transitioning towards angels and VCs. An issue for us is that the crowd-funding allowed us to get the MVP done and gain initial traction, and it has raised our valuation such that small angels may now be deterred as they won't receive as much ownership for their investment. And VCs like to have social proof of key angels to help filter and vet companies. So we find ourselves considering down-valuing to get the angels to help us go beyond this round, or tightening belts further and shooting for more traction and growth so that we can jump to Series A and skip the follow-on seed rounds. If any angels are interested in hearing more, get in touch, contact details on my profile. Ultimately what you learn is that more important than the money, is who backs you. We'd love to have one or two key angels who can be mentors and guides, whose experience we can learn from, and crowd-funding did not give us that.
- iandanforth 13y ago
  Fantastic, detailed, interesting answer. My thanks. For those missing the numbers, they sold 10% of the company for ~80K (US). https://www.seedrs.com/startups/microcosm https://www.seedrs.com/startups/microcosm

shin_lao 13y ago

Crowd-investing doesn't solve the question of business development, one of the other things VC do in addition to "lending" money.

buro9 13y ago

As one VC said to me on Friday: "The best way to take money from your users is revenue". We've crowd-funded our seed in the UK, using an equity based crowd-funding site called Seedrs. We're currently the fastest equity crowd-funded company in the world, we got our seed in 15 hours thanks to the belief and need that the users have. Our impression was that this was massive social proof, but what we're hearing from angels and VCs is that there is a great amount of uncertainty about crowd-funding. Questions like: * What happens with drag-along? * Did you crowd-fund because no-one else would invest? * Are we now dealing with 100 naive investors? So much FUD. We did it in place of the friends and family round, and chose Seedrs for their nominee structure that gives us a single shareholder with terms that are not a disincentive to any future investor. We had a third party (Orrick) check the papers to make sure nothing was in there that would cause complications, that things like drag-along and preemption rights were all standard, that the seed investors couldn't complicate things later. We also had numerous options on money and went with the one that helped mitigate a risk we had. By securing a financial as well as emotional investment, our biggest risk of substantially changing the product and losing a core of our key early users as we imported sites with UIs that they knew intimately, is mitigated somewhat as their investment helps to overcome some of that. Our experience has been positive, but the amount of inexperience within angel circles and VCs of crowd-funded companies that have later raised and exited is so great that there is a great deal of uncertainty, and from that the fear and doubts emerge. We http://microco.sm/ http://microco.sm/ have only good things to say about the process and engagement of users, and some of our "user as investors" have contributed phenomenal feedback and helped win us key customers at an early stage. What happens next, for us, and for other companies in our position in the next few years, will help influence how crowd-funding is perceived by angels and VCs. We are at an interesting stage now where we need to raise a further round as demand for the product is out-shipping our revenue and we need to go faster. Users still want to invest, but users can't always be the source of investment and we now need to start transitioning towards angels and VCs. An issue for us is that the crowd-funding allowed us to get the MVP done and gain initial traction, and it has raised our valuation such that small angels may now be deterred as they won't receive as much ownership for their investment. And VCs like to have social proof of key angels to help filter and vet companies. So we find ourselves considering down-valuing to get the angels to help us go beyond this round, or tightening belts further and shooting for more traction and growth so that we can jump to Series A and skip the follow-on seed rounds. If any angels are interested in hearing more, get in touch, contact details on my profile. Ultimately what you learn is that more important than the money, is who backs you. We'd love to have one or two key angels who can be mentors and guides, whose experience we can learn from, and crowd-funding did not give us that.

iandanforth 13y ago
Fantastic, detailed, interesting answer. My thanks. For those missing the numbers, they sold 10% of the company for ~80K (US). https://www.seedrs.com/startups/microcosm https://www.seedrs.com/startups/microcosm