The venture capital industry was built on the premise that both capital and high quality companies are scarce. For most of the history of the industry, this has been true. I remember sitting at demo day in 2011 and marveling at the fact that the combined capital of all the VCs in the room was less than that controlled by the hedge fund at which I had worked. But the model is wrong. Venture capital is abundant, and that fact should fundamentally change how founders fundraise.
This scarcity model has shaped the structure of startups and VCs - most of what an early stage startup does is designed to convince a VC to invest. Companies treat VCs as a limited resource that is both hard to access and hard to convince. Investors do their best to perpetuate this idea because it allows them to retain control of the pitch and fund dynamic.[1]
Something interesting happens, though, whenever a company has a signifier of quality - a YC demo day slot, a high quality angel, pedigreed founders, or, even better, strong growth. In these cases, there are investor feeding frenzies, leading to oversubscribed rounds, ever climbing prices, and investors willing to accept ownership targets they - until recently - would have termed unacceptable.
To be sure, there have always been bidding wars in private equity (of which venture is a subset), but these bidding wars are so frequent now as to be approaching the norm. If capital was actually scarce, this wouldn’t happen, there wouldn’t be enough money to create so many bidding wars.[2]
Bidding wars aren’t the only evidence of capital abundance. The VCs are changing their businesses because of this abundance, whether or not they admit the reason. The evidence is in the new funds that seem to launch on a daily basis, the multi-billion dollar growth funds that have become increasingly common, and the ownership targets at various rounds that continue to drop.
At the same time that capital has become more abundant, founders have become smarter about fundraising. There are now a huge number of blogs, classes, essays, guides, and advisers ready to help founders navigate the previously opaque world of fundraising. As a result, founders can approach each funding event with a clear plan of how to run a process. Running an orderly process further increases the chances that a company will see competitive bids.
As a thought experiment, assume that the abundance model is here to stay. It is also safe to assume that founders will not suddenly forget their newfound knowledge about process. I think this should encourage founders to think about changing fundraising in a few major ways:
Founders should approach every fundraising as an auction. This is what each process already is, but the auction is inefficient. There’s lots of language and pseudo-moral arguments about why this is bad, but most of those fall apart if capital is abundant.
Founders should expand their funnels beyond the traditional VCs. These VCs hold a marketing and branding advantage, much of which is built around the signal to later rounds. If, however, each round is an auction, this benefit evaporates. YC’s demo day proved this funnel expansion works at seed, and there’s no logical reason it should fail at later rounds.
Once a founder has the information produced by this process, she can decide whether to minimize dilution, maximize price, or optimize around the partner. The answer will change based on the situation, but having access to the choice is important.
Founders are hesitant to run this model because they fear that running an auction will create a negative quality signal. Investors encourage this belief because it allows them to keep deal flow proprietary. This is flawed logic. The quality of a company can’t be determined by the investors to whom that company talks when raising money. The quality of a company is determined by whether or not the company is good, and good companies should take advantage of abundant capital markets.[3]
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[1] Perhaps more importantly to the investors’ business model is that this dynamic creates a reason for the existence of VCs. If founders and LPs both internalized how non-scarce capital actually is, they could find one another directly, bypassing VCs.
[2] It’s important to remember that, even though capital is abundant, it remains unevenly distributed. There are companies that struggle to raise money - some of these may be bad investments, but many are good. This is a problem of access rather than capacity, which is a whole different issue.
[3] When a company IPOs, it opens ownership up to anyone who can afford a share. Imagine, for a second, an investor arguing that this is a sign of low quality.