One of the more interesting conversations I have from time to time with early stage entrepreneurs relates to the real goals of a VC when they make an investment. Oftentimes, the entrepreneur can show how a meaningful, albeit small (call it less than $20 mm) exit can produce a great return for a VC willing to invest in the business. The logic goes like this:
1) Invest a small amount of capital (call it $500 k) in my business
2) Even though I have a limited addressable market, I will own that market and
3) we will get a quick exit which could produce a high multiple for you, Mr. VC. $500 k to buy a 25% stake in a start-up that presumably doesn’t raise any more cash means a 10X return to the VC if the company sold for $20 mm in cash.
If the exit is achieved within a year or so, the VC would achieve a 200+ IRR. Who, the entrepreneur argues, would turn that opportunity down?
Makes a lot of sense until you look at what some VCs consider to be the more important metric – so called Cash on Cash Return. The $500 k invested in that start up produced $5 mm in cash. Again, not a bad return, but let’s look at another example:
1) VC invests $5 mm in a business and gets 15% of the company
2) Company sells for $150 mm in 3 years
3) Assuming that the VC’s equity converts to common (so the VC’s take is a straight 15% of the proceeds), the VC would get $22.5 mm in cash, yielding a 4.5X return that translates to roughly a 65 IRR
So our first investment yielded $4.5 mm in proceeds while our second investment yielded $17.5 mm in cash. So what would be the considerations a VC would make in looking at these two deals:
1) Is the tradeoff of cash-on-cash return vs. time spent on the investment a good one?
2) Which is better – doing a bunch of small investments with limited upside but short time to exit or doing fewer deals with bigger upside and longer horizons to exit?
3) What does all this mean for VCs? Does it become a game of small ball (lots of small exits) or is the key to dig in hard with a few companies and place big bets to more efficiently achieve high cash-on-cash returns for every deal?
Thoughts?
Stay tuned…
{ 1 trackback }
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Blake Perdue 07.24.09 at 11:58 am
My guess is that the number of small balls vs large balls on the court will determine how VCs play the game.
Evan Kramer 07.31.09 at 4:39 pm
I think if you are a VC then you need to clearly define your investment criteria and stick to them. If dealflow matches your investment criteria, it should be evaluated accordingly. Too many firms define criteria too broadly and have portfolio investments outliers. In the end, ‘evaluating goals’ should fall out from the optimization of your selection, management and development process.
Colin Blake 08.12.09 at 3:01 pm
An interesting example of this trade-off is what Paul Graham has done at Y Combinator (and is being tried elsewhere). He focuses on the first scenario, but in an even more extreme sense with investments less than $20k and very early exits.
Russell Jurney 08.14.09 at 12:33 am
Colin, its worth pointing out here that what you say is actually not the YC model - very early exits. PG’s model is entirely dependent on guys like Greg Foster to fund the companies in later rounds. Many YC companies raise series A’s immediately after the program, those that don’t will raise angel money, and those that don’t raise angel money… almost all fail. ‘Ramen profitability’ gets a lot of hype, but there is no intention to have the companies self sustain after just $20K of investment. The goal is simply to make them survive long enough - on the order of months - to be able to raise money, or to be able to raise on better terms.
This is a common misunderstanding, because there was a single $15 million super-fast exit, but it is not the YC model for that to happen - it was a single blip. The YC model requires angel rounds and VC rounds like the ones in this post. Its cheaper to get started, its not cheaper to grow.
Greg Foster 08.14.09 at 7:17 am
And the reality is that a quick exit with a good multiple is not a bad thing for the investors. If I was making a personal direct investment into a start-up, I would love to have a 3X or 5X in a year or two. It’s just not the VC approach because it doesn’t scale. Having said that - the fact that start-ups today can do a lot with so much less capital will continue to put pressure on VCs to look at smaller investment opportunities.