Next Week: Heading up to Stinson
Each year our team heads up to Stinson Beach for a 4 day offsite. It’s a highlight of the year for our team for a lot of reasons. We genuinely have fun together, and four days gives us the chance to have countless conversations and ample time to think through ideas that are broader than just deals and portfolio. This annual ritual is essential for our team and our culture.
Stinson also gives us time to reflect and ruminate on the past year. Each year we ask ourselves whether or not we are living up to “the promise” we made when starting True. The promise was something we talked about at our original Stinson offsite. The time was 2006 and we had just closed Fund I at $165 million. We had the opportunity to create a new kind of venture firm that really did stand first for Founders and the entrepreneur. We really did have an opportunity to re-align (true) the venture industry to shift more power and value to the people creating value (the entrepreneur). We really did have the chance to change the relationship between investor and entrepreneur through better practices and communication, and appropriate structuring to create true alignment. And we really did have a chance to create a new kind of partnership in our firm.
We promised each other that we’d make this happen, and it wasn’t just b/c we are nice people. We are, nice people, (☺), but all we hold a core belief that tremendous value and innovation existed in the talents of the early stage entrepreneur, and we saw it as our job to unlock it. We saw the chance to create a much bigger pie.
So each year we check our progress.
We also do a deep dive product review. No, not of our portfolio companies, but literally a review of our own products. True is a startup just like any other. We have a customer (the Founding entrepreneur) and we build a product (a deal, or in our case three types of deals: Super Seed, Seed, Real). We think long and hard about product, and we’re all dedicated to making ours the best ones in the marketplace. We frequently talk to our customers about how our deals are working for them, and when we see problems in how a product is working, we’re quick to improve it.
We’ve done a lot of product development at and after Stinson. Two quick examples: our “$10K both sides legal docs” that make it easy and inexpensive to get a seed round done with the appropriate structure. There’s been a lot of great attention on this area in the past 6 months, but we’ve been doing this for 4 years at True.
Example 2 is last year’s launch of our $250K “Super-Seed” deal. We noticed tremendously talented Founders who just wanted a tiny bit of money to either engage in early customer development or testing. Raising even $500K or $1mm made little sense to these customers, so we launched the Super Seed. Our process is lightning fast, but our criteria no different. This product “flew off the shelves,” because it hit a sweet spot for many entrepreneurs, and a year ago there weren’t many options in this category. A year later there are many, many options in the $250K category thanks to the proliferation of the super-angels. This is an incredibly good thing, because it offers Founders more choice.
I’m not sure what we’ll conclude next week at Stinson relative to our product set. We have a few ideas for some adjustments to make our deals more competitive. We haven’t noticed a ton of “bugs” in the existing set, but we’re interested in staying ahead of the market, so we’ll be engaged in a deep dive.
If you know of ways we can build better deals for Founders, please comment here, tweet or email us. We’d love your help improving.
More to come from Stinson, and please do let us know any thoughts or suggestions on stuff you’d like us to tackle as a group.
“If you know of ways we can build better deals for Founders”
You guys do a pretty damn good job of it already, but I have been thinking of a number of things:
*should investors in seed deals (rounds of 500k or less) buy common stock instead of preferred
*how do you balance the interests of Founders and seed investors who need to protect their investments in later multiple financing rounds
by Weissman
on July 10, 2010
Hi Andy,
We’ve thought a lot about the Common Stock a lot over the years, and I suspect we’ll discuss it at Stinson. One of the issues is that we need to add a couple things to it to make it work for our business model (ie pro-rata rights, which are super important to us b/c if we take the risk side by side with Founders early on, we should be able to invest more and benefit later). So we end up adding so much to common that the choice is a “souped up common” or a “vanilla preferred”. Souping up the common means you usually have 2 classes, or other unintended consequences, so in the end we always opt for super vanilla preferred. As you know, we are incredibly practical on terms, so it usually ends up that Preferred is better and easier all around.
But, we’ll re-look this week.
Jc
by Jon
on July 11, 2010