There has been a lot of talk about how early-stage valuations have risen dramatically over the past few years. Financially, this is probably good for founders and bad for investors. But a side effect of this frothy market is that financings are occurring much faster. It is very common for investors to get introduced to founders with the proviso that a term sheet will be signed in the next few days. As a result, founders and investors are spending very little time getting to know each other before entering into long-term business contracts.
This is bad news for everyone. Most significantly, founders often give up significant control to people they won’t get along with or even might end up hating. Having bad investors might not matter if the company executes flawlessly and the financing market stays frothy. But most companies have difficult episodes, and the financing market will eventually return to normal. Sadly, founders with bad investors will likely face punishing down rounds, key employees being indiscriminately fired, and elaborate financial shenanigans engineered to dilute founders and seed investors.
“It’s only when the tide goes out that you know who’s been swimming naked.” Warren Buffet likes to say this about investors, but it applies to founders as well. Taking on a new major investor should be treated with the same gravitas as taking on a new cofounder. You can’t do it in less time than it takes to really get to know someone, which is usually weeks or months. Quick financings might seem attractive but are actually fraught with risks.
Seems very relevant to today’s music industry, and potentially relevant to the internet/software industry in the near future as patent lawsuits become increasingly common:
The commons leads to overuse and destruction; the anticommons leads to underuse and waste. In the cultural sphere, ever tighter restrictions on copyright and fair use limit artists’ abilities to sample and build on older works of art. In biotechnology, the explosion of patenting over the past twenty-five years—particularly efforts to patent things like gene fragments—may be retarding drug development, by making it hard to create a new drug without licensing myriad previous patents. Even divided land ownership can have unforeseen consequences. Wind power, for instance, could reliably supply up to twenty per cent of America’s energy needs—but only if new transmission lines were built, allowing the efficient movement of power from the places where it’s generated to the places where it’s consumed. Don’t count on that happening anytime soon. Most of the land that the grid would pass through is owned by individuals, and nobody wants power lines running through his back yard.
From The Permission Problem, James Surowiecki, The New Yorker Magazine. A very worthwhile read.
If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.
Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody. Accordingly, it is a fact, as far as I am informed, that England was, until we copied her, the only country on earth which ever, by a general law, gave a legal right to the exclusive use of an idea. In some other countries it is sometimes done, in a great case, and by a special and personal act, but, generally speaking, other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society; and it may be observed that the nations which refuse monopolies of invention, are as fruitful as England in new and useful devices.
- Letter from Thomas Jefferson to Isaac McPherson
When I started grad school in 2001, every student was given an online “classcard”. Classcards were kind of a hybrid of modern-day LinkedIn and Facebook profiles. They were mostly static: no feed or status updates or any other advanced features that we are all accustomed to now. But they were wildly popular. Students spent countless hours browsing them. At one point there was a rumor that people could see who was viewing their classcard and everyone freaked out that their snooping would be revealed. When you met other students you no longer needed to ask for their contact info or background since it was easy to search for their classcard. It completely changed student interactions.
During that time, I was spending most of my personal time trying to develop new startup ideas. I ended up co-founding an online marketing company during school and then after school co-founding other companies (SiteAdvisor, Hunch, Founder Collective). Meanwhile, Facebook – the best internet business of the decade – was being hatched. Its first version looked a lot like classcards, and perhaps it wasn’t a coincidence that it was founded just down the street at the same university. The “toy” I was staring at every day was actually a much better business than all the “serious” ideas I spent so much time working on.
