The part about the investors getting nothing while the founder gets millions is really interesting. How does something like that even happen?
I’m unsure which exact BVP and GC funds Baremetrics raised from, but that $800K likely doesn’t matter to either of their returns with funds of that size. Even at $100M, it probably doesn’t matter to a fund. VCs expect over half of their investments to outright fail.
What’s much more important to the VCs is the good will they just built with that founder. Most founders will give back door reference checks to other founders about investors. Josh is likely to say good things about BVP and GC now. Also, they got that mention in his blog post too. It’s likely they knew Josh would write a post like this and chose to just write it off for the “we’re founder friendly” story vs. looking founder unfriendly.
As a founder, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with what happened here for the investors given their fund sizes. They’re professionals investing other people’s money and expect this type of thing to happen. In fact, most VCs likely expect you to fail. If these were angel investors putting in their own money, I’d have a different opinion.
Did they get anything? It doesn’t sound like it.
What are we missing here?
1. At the end of the day, investors are people too. They may care that the team ends up whole.
2. 800k is non-trivial money, but it’s a small percentage of, say, a $100MM VC seed fund. The economics of VC are that some investments will net zero return. While they could have tried to claim back something here, letting go with grace gives them a lot of goodwill to be first to invest in the founder’s next project (assuming there is one).
Also a halo effect with other people who are reading this.
But I'm guessing there were some animated discussions about this.
Plus, per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25045874
> We've had carryover losses for years, so from a tax perspective, there was no hit on either side.
Some investors are gonna be ruthless sharks. Others are not.
Advertising money well spent?
Other startups looking into them will see this. And breaking even might be about the same as taking the thing as a loss in the grand scheme of the VC model to them. I do wonder if other lower profile companies would have gotten the same deal.