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Scaling to $100 Million by Bessemer Venture Partners👇 Here's what you'll find inside: 1) ARR as Your North Star: Discover why growing your Annual Recurring Revenue is crucial for scaling effectively, with benchmarks from companies that soared from $1M to $100M+ ARR. 3) Winning with Wide Margins: Unpack the significance of optimizing costs and expenses to achieve superior gross margins, crucial for delivering your software to customers efficiently. 3) Understanding Your Worth: Navigate the complexities of cloud company valuations, learn the average multiples at different stages, and find out what investors are willing to pay based on growth. 4) Mastering Fundraising Dynamics: Get insights into round sizes, dilution trends, and how much equity companies typically give up at each fundraising stage, from seed through Series E and beyond. PS. check out 🔔 for a winning pitch deck the template created by Silicon Valley legend, Peter Thiel https://lnkd.in/ejp-Bhnu

Why early planning for growth is non-negotiable: Understand the law of diminishing distribution arbitrage to stay ahead 👇 David Peterson, Partner at Angular Ventures, offers practical insights on the critical role of distribution in achieving breakout success and how to innovate beyond diminishing returns of common tactics in “The Law of Diminishing Distribution Arbitrage”. Check out the key insights in the attached presentation 👇 ───── 👉 Follow me, Alexander Small, for tactics and strategies for building startups from industry-leading Founders, Operators and Investors

If the Google deal to acquire Wiz goes through, Index Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Insight Partners, Greenoaks Capital Partners, and Cyberstarts will return at least $7 billion on their investments 🤯 All firms invested in 2020 or later. Andreessen Horowitz and Thrive Capital, which invested in the company last May, will double their money 🤯 Each of the four founders will get ~$2.2B (9.5%) for their stakes in the company. Google is even willing to pay more for Wiz if it hits $1B ARR (Wiz's target by mid-2025); the company is already making more than $500M, five times what it was making two years ago. The deal could still fall apart as antitrust regulators would eventually challenge it. #venturecapital #vc

Back in 1999, Ron Conway invested $25,000 in Google by chance, which turned out to be one of most successful investments of all time. Sadly we can't all be like Ron. You see, investing in Venture Capital is like riding a roller coaster blindfolded – thrilling but unpredictable. VC follows a "power law", where 80% of your returns come from just 20% of your investments. And the power law isn't limited to the companies you invest in either. Data showed that over a 22 year period, 80% of returns came from just 5-7 of those years. To solve for this, Jaap Vriesendorp firms, Welt Ventures and Marktlink Capital, use a 3 principle approach they call 'The time machine approach to investing in Venture Capital': ❶ Diversify Entry Valuations: Invest consistently over many years to optimise entry valuation and capture outlier years. ❷ Diversify Exit Windows: Invest across different stages (seed, early, growth) to spread exit timelines. ❸ Invest in Primaries and Secondaries: Purchase both newly issued shares and existing shares to spread risk and increase liquidity. Want to learn more? We go into the details in this weeks episode of "The Unsophisticated Investor". Link in comments. #venturecapital #investing #privatemarkets

📈 How come an unknown Tiny Speck that has been vainly trying to create a Flash online game became one of the fastest-growing companies in B2B SaaS? 💥 It took Slack one year to boost the number of daily users by 33 times! 💰 The project was financed by Google Ventures, Slow Ventures, Accel Partners, The Social+Capital Partnership, Andreessen Horowitz, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and valued at $1.1 billion. 🫖 Grab some tea: we dive into the Slack growth case…👀 

📣 Registration is open for our next webinar — "Venture Capital Investor and Founder Dynamics" — scheduled for Thursday, April 18, from 12-1:30pm ET. 🏦 VC investor and founder dynamics are crucial to a start–up's success—it’s more than just a financial arrangement! Understanding this dynamic can be confusing, but it is critical for first-time founders who are still mastering the art of this partnership. So, what can founders and investors do to ensure they are aligned and create the best possible outcome for the business? We will explore this in our upcoming webinar. Hosted by Mark Mason, an early-stage venture investor in firms like Airbnb, Pinterest, CAVA and more, this 90-minute webinar will cover: ➡ The formal and informal aspects that govern founder-VC interactions. ➡ Deep-dive into the relationship between Uber and Benchmark, an elite venture capital firm. ➡ The underlying incentives driving both founders and investors. ➡ Common sources of conflict and how they can derail a business. ➡ Effective strategies for aligning goals and visions to ensure mutual success. 💻 Register Now: https://lnkd.in/eM2RVpHa #venturecapital #founderdynamics #investor #vcinvestor

📣 There's still time to register for our next webinar — "Venture Capital Investor and Founder Dynamics" — scheduled for Thursday, April 18, from 12-1:30pm ET. 💻 Register Now: https://lnkd.in/eM2RVpHa Details are below 👇 #venturecapital #founderdynamics #investor #vcinvestor

Had a great chat with Erin Griffith as she was getting this story together. She was intensely curious about the rapidly growing volume in private markets for startup stock. The article is a quick primer on the evolution of this explosive and, until recently, very secretive and opaque market. Covers the evolution of the pre-IPO market from the Facebook days, all the way up to the latest rollercoaster frenzy around Destiny (D/XYZ), and the role that marketplaces like Hiive are playing as alternative access point for the broader investment community. Ultimately, this story leads to many more questions: Should average retail investors have some form of access to this currently exclusive asset class? Are listed, closed-ended funds like DXYZ the right way for retail investors to access this market, or does its extreme volatility and apparently irrational price action pose a risk to those investors? Can market forces work out these problems as more supply comes to market via DXYZ and other closed-ended funds? Do unlisted open-ended funds like ARK Investment Management LLC's Ark Venture Fund which enable retail investors to buy-in at NAV instead of a floating public market price, albeit with significantly less liquidity, hold the key? Or, should regulators look at enabling other alternative options for small two-legged investors? #preipo #privatemarket #liquidity #unicorns

Bootstrapping isn’t for everyone, but for tech founders with a somewhat niche market and / or less competition, it can be a smart strategy. When I founded my vertical SaaS company, we kind of split the difference by raising *some* money, but not a ton - we focused on more deliberate growth, prioritizing low burn over hyperscaling. (NB: In our market, it felt like growing 10,000% might not even be possible anyway because the pace of adoption was naturally slower -- throwing more money at the problem might not have changed that) By avoiding big VC money, you can reduce the risk of going to zero and maintain more of your ownership -- this can increase your chances of a nice exit, especially in the $20-100M range!

Anti-portfolio... 😅 We're familiar with the headline - "VC firm makes 50x return on its portfolio company!" We always hear about their impressive portfolio, full of unicorn companies they had the foresight to back early. But what about the companies that they overlooked? And why they did do so? Bessemer Venture Partners has this page called "Anti-Portfolio". It's a candid list of massively successful companies that Bessemer decided not to invest in, despite having the opportunity. We are talking about the likes of Apple, Google, Tesla, Coinbase, PayPal! While it's easy to focus on successes, Bessemer's candid catalogue of misses reveals important biases in investment decisions. The Innovator's Dilemma... Breakthrough ideas often seem underwhelming or even unappealing compared to the status quo way of operating. Bessemer missed the Coinbase opportunity. The round on offer was $500k on a standard SAFE at a $10m cap! Coinbase went public at ~$85.8bn – or just 8,580x the price Brian Armstrong had offered! Anchoring bias... It is the tendency to heavily rely on the first information received, failing to adequately adjust perspectives as new data emerges. This likely clouded their judgement on Airbnb after initially dismissing the "crazy" $40m valuation Brian Chesky quoted in January 2010. Revenues doubled every month till March and in April, Airbnb raised money at 1.5x the “crazy” price. 10 years later, Airbnb went public at $47bn. Status quo bias... Status quo bias is the tendency to resist change, even when it may bring benefits or improvements. Combined with Cushing's Law about ridiculing the unconventional, it appeared to have influenced them to pass on Zoom's Series B round in 2015. Video conferencing seemed too crowded with incumbents to see Zoom's transformative potential. In all, Bessemer has its share of BIG misses. Hindsight bias may make these misses seem obvious now, but at the time of investing, a lot of other metrics and biases creep in. Also luck! Bessemer deserves kudos for their transparency! What I love about this page is that Bessemer has cheekily made fun of how they missed these big names. At the end of the day, to err is human! Have you come across any anti-portfolio names? Share in the comments below #bias #venturecapital #investing #markets