VC Funding Spelled Backwards

mattmaroon.com

42 points·breily··11 comments

gnidnuF CV

Sorry, but i've been holding myself back from doing that for about half an hour now. I caved.

Whoops, clicked the down arrow but meant to click up. For what it's worth, consider yourself +2 karma.

"Had Xobni taken $1 million instead of 4, they’d all be buying beach houses right now. On the other hand, Microsoft might come back and offer the $40 or $50 million it would take to make the VCs agree (I think it would be a good idea for them to do so) and they’ll be buying beach house and Bentleys."

Let's say an angel would invest at the same valuation as the VC, then for $1M they would get 12.5% of the company. That would mean that when acquired for $20M, founders are left with $17.5M. For VCs with 50% stake and $40M acquisition founders are left with $20M. Not sure where Bentley's come from.

you overestimate the price of bentleys

Angels would have invested 1m at a lower valuation than VCs. That's both the perk and the drawback of VC money. You can get more while giving up about the same amount of equity.

the MS offer was not that high when you factor in how many people work at xobni. i've heard some tech acquirers say they initially value a startup at $1M per engineer before factoring in the value of the actual product. xobni is up to what, 14 or 15 people now?

15 people, all engineers?

I'd actually be really curious what their engineer to executive to support staff ratio is.

Theoretically executive support staff has some value too. I mean, outside of the hacker crowd anyway, those people are viewed as useful.

Oh, sure, I could use some support staff, but I could use hackers more.

Why MS just not go ahead and copy Xobni? it is not like they would need to get users, they are already there.

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