Tag: funding

New line of business

I’m considering a new line of business. This is basically advising startups on option valuation and how to account for different conditions and optionalities that venture capitalists put in in term-sheets.

Aswath Damodaran has an extremely interesting piece on valuation of the so-called “unicorns” and how such valuations are inflated on account of optionality in favour of investors. He takes a stab at valuing such optionality, but I think there’s scope for going deeper and helping companies figure out the valuations in each individual case. Money quote from the piece:

As an outsider with an interest in valuation, I find venture capital deals to be jaw-droppingly complex and not always intuitive, and I am not sure whether this is by design, or by accident. When it comes to investor protection, the stories that I read for the most part are framed as warnings to owners about “vulture capital” investors who will use these protection clauses to strip founders of their ownership rights. I think the story is a far more complex one, where both investors and owners see benefits in these arrangements, and where both can expose themselves to dangers, if they over reach.

Do you think this is a good line of business to get into? Will startups be willing to pay for a service that allows founders to get value for money for the equity they are giving away? Or will they be so focussed on execution that trifles such as a change in valuation by a few percentage points don’t matter to them any more?

And what are the odds that if I get into this business and do a good job of it, a VC will want to hire me just so that I stop damaging their carefully designed ratchets?

Uninspiring startups

The other day I suddenly wanted to check out what the “startup scene” is like in India, and so went on to VC Circle, looking at companies that have raised (Series A or B) funding in the last few months. I looked at the last 20 such companies, and quickly got bored. Most of them were in businesses that seemed absolutely uninspiring and banal.

A week ago I was mentioning this to a friend, who chided me for wasting time on VCCircle doing such “research” when Tracxn has it all in one place. And so yesterday, when I was once again in the frame of mind where I wanted to see what’s going on in the startup world. I logged on to Tracxn.

So I couldn’t log on immediately. The site asked me for my “work email” before I could see anything, and when I supplied an email ID that can pass off as a work ID, I got a mail saying it will take some time before I can actually log on. That time turned out to be five minutes, after which I got a message asking me to log on, and I started browsing the section on Indian e-commerce companies.

The experience wasn’t very different from what I had on VCCircle the other day, though evidently this was much quicker and more organised, meaning I could browse more companies with fewer clicks. So I probably got past a hundred startups, not all of them funded (VCCircle reports funding events, so it is biased that way). The tracxn database contains name of company, sector, what their business is, who the founders are (including background), any funding and so forth.

I’m unaware if any biases have crept in to the Tracxn database in terms of listing, but after some cursory viewing, there was a dominant pattern that emerged. And I must admit this is not a pattern that I might have fully appreciated.

So what I found based on the Tracxn database is that most of the startup founders are very young, aged less than 25 (guessing based on their school graduation year). Not too many of them have much in terms of academic pedigree (a few recent IIT graduates here and there, but more the exception than the norm), and not much in terms of work experience (obvious, if you’re starting up before you are 25).

Again the Tracxn data might be biased, but I didn’t find too many technology companies. Most seemed to be of the on-the-ground-getting-things-done kind of businesses. And then there were copycats.

It is not hard to believe, but every time a particular sector gets established or becomes “hot”, it attracts all and sundry. And justifiably so, for the company that might ultimately make money from the sector need not be the pioneer. In fact, there might be a last mover advantage, since the later entrants can learn from the mistakes of the early entrants and set themselves up to succeed better. In that sense the copycats are justified.

But the thing to note is that a large number of such “copycat” companies are getting funded. Some of them might have raised from angels, or small investors, rather than from established Venture Capitalists, but they have obtained financial backing for sure.

Anyways, after my session of looking at startups and analysing them yesterday, the one big insight was that the market is currently rewarding risk taking ability at the cost of all other kinds of abilities. Hot money is chasing startups, so anyone willing to work with a remotely viable idea is able to raise money. How these companies will fan out going forward is anybody’s guess!