Ask HN: How did Treehouse get 5M in funding without wanting an "Exit"?

Two ways to answer this question. The practical answer is: $5MM isn't a lot of money to a VC firm. They have hundreds of millions or billions of dollars to invest. Ryan Carson has a strong reputation in the tech community and he's an accomplished guy. $5MM is nothing compared to the potential rewards from a working relationship with him. Treehouse is a good product and it definitely has value, but the potential that he could somehow lead them to the next facebook is also very appealing. Part of being a VC is knowing how to use money to open doors.

To answer your queston about the mechanics of fundraising: They aren't just throwing their money away. They've bought themselves a share of the intellectual property and technical team that Treehouse builds. Carson could change his mind and decide to sell to an acquirer, or grow the business over decades into a public company. Even though he's blogging about not wanting an exit now, a lot can happen.

Unfortunately, VCs won't extend this kind of a deal to just anyone. The rules are different for founders who are already well known. Everyone else had better have a sharp business plan.

Github is a prominent example of a company that changed course on the funding / no-funding and exit / no-exit strategy. I'm sure history is littered with examples of such a change of course.

Further, there's the possibility of Treehouse raising more money in the future (let's say we have another crash in the market, or because they start facing really tough competition), and Ryan Carson is left with less than 50% of the voting rights. In that case, the founding CEO can just be pushed out so that the investors can pursue a strategy that maximizes their returns.

You guys are missing the point.

Github did not raise money BEFORE they figured out how investors would generate a return. They are likely to have an IPO. That's a decision you make before you decide to raise money.

It is also a decision you discuss with the investors.

If you take the money from them, without aiming to some sort of exit - or rather, under the pretense that there will be some exit and then "change your mind", that could easily be classified as fraud.

Now...please don't be mistaken. I am not saying that Ryan Carson has committed fraud....but this is a big big deal - assuming that his investors were under the impression that they would have some sort of exit.

> Treehouse is a good product

From what I can deduce (after paying for an account for the better part of a year) is that they've spent more in marketing than they have in developing something on par with the interactive experience you get from CodeSchool, Codecademy, etc. and hiring people that can create legitimate lesson plans and are good at teaching those lessons.

None of these educational sites have hit the nail on the head, but Treehouse's lessons were less-than-engaging on top of making it entirely too easy for me to skip through their them to fake my [badge] credentials if I wanted to.

I'm not knocking Treehouse - apparently they have a good reputation, and I haven't personally tried their product - but I was astounded at the number of employees on their About Us page: http://teamtreehouse.com/about

compared to the amount of content they have: http://teamtreehouse.com/library

I guess we know where the 5M went.

From my experience, the courses look extensive, but they only go so in-depth. In taking the Intro to JS, the entire thing was like sitting through a student presentation. There didn't seem to be a transcript or a purpose and myself and the person I was going through it with became frustrated with the lack of QA and quit with the hope that they'd fix it later. The CSS courses seemed more about highlighting CSS3 features rather than teaching how to do it right and what to avoid. Color Theory can't be taught with radio button quizzes. There's a lot to bite off, and they seem to try to fit every lesson into a similar structure, but I don't think that's the best way of going about it.

Will be interesting to see if getting the team all in one location makes the service better, but I'm surprised with the current offerings given, like you said, the amount of people on staff and on the big names on the advisory board. Ryan Carson might have a famous name that can attract these people to begin with, but I can't say that in the paths I went down that it made a difference.

Firstly, I must say I am completely flattered that you noticed my little comment and blew it up into this Ask HN.

Secondly, you are absolutely right that it should be addressed.

Some people are saying here that these investors gave Carson the $5MM because they have so much money that 'wasting' $5MM is no big deal. It doesn't quite work like that.

For starters, being an investor with a ton of money, you don't need to buy access to Carson. I can pretty much guarantee that people like Ron Conway, Peter Thiel, PG, Marc Andreesen, even if they didn't invest in Treehouse if they wanted something from Ryan Carson he would jump (as most rational people in the tech space would rightly do) at the chance to help them out.

If Carson took their money, with them assuming that there will be an exit - when he knew full well that he wasn't interested in one....well.....that's dishonest.

If he was very straight forward with them, which from everything I have read about him I assume this is the likely route he took, then he probably did discuss with them exit routes he will take (i.e. an acquisition).

The issue is, as an executive (especially a chief executive) you have a fiduciary responsibility to maximize shareholder value.

If you know, that your ONLY exit option is to be sold to a larger company, then publicly getting rid of your other "legitimate, best alternatives" essentially squanders this fiduciary responsibility.

In other words, if I want to buy your company. You want to sell it to me for $50MM, so all of your investors can make a good return, why would I pay that if I know that I can offer $30MM and you would be hard pressed to take it.

The only way for you to realistically bid up the price that they pay is if someone else wants to buy (or you want to take it public). You can't assume that someone will "always be there". That seems irresponsible to me.

The one option that every fast growing tech company has, is to go public. So it seems like a mistake to piss away that option for no upside.

Edit: Cisco's acquisition of Meraki is proof positive of my theory of having a legitimate alternative of going public - http://www.meraki.com/company/cisco-acquisition-faq

From the CEO of Meraki:

So, when Cisco approached with an acquisition offer a few weeks ago, our initial reaction was to politely say "thanks, but we're planning to do our own thing and take Meraki public". It turned out that was exactly why they were interested in talking to us...

Chris Sacca talks about his investment in Kickstarter and how the founders don't want to sell the company: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VOQnK7O2To#t=67m

You have to get your investors on board even if it's not the "typical" setup.

Exit != IPO.

One of the most common forms of exit is to be acquired by another company.

The CEO of Evernote also gave another option when giving a Keynote on Stanford[1], a talk properly entitled "No Exit Strategy for Your Life's Work"

You can listen to him explaining this point specifically here[2], on "Decoupling Exits from Liquidity"

[1] http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=2799

[2] http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=2805

If i remember correctly, Ryan Carson has publicly said he doesnt want to sell either, he's said he'd happily run the company for the rest of his life.

[Source] http://vimeo.com/47271938

Yep. That's really my question anyway - is there a path to victory as a non-bootstrapped startup that doesn't include IPO or acquisition. How would you structure things to where investors and employees are confident they would share in the ongoing rewards of a non-public company.

If you look at the headaches Zuckerberg is running into now, even with, ostensibly, "total control" over a public company, it just seems like an extraordinary distraction from keeping your users and employees happy.

Speaking of Facebook, there is also the issue they ran into with having over 500 shareholders and staying private. I'm assuming that there is some way to guarantee revenue sharing to employees without making them actual shareholders, so that you wouldn't step over the 500 employee threshold and trigger the SEC's required IPO - assuming you were lucky enough to get that big.

At least as early as 2011 [1], the 500 shareholder rule [2], when applied in the case of Facebook, meant that Facebook had to start reporting financials to the SEC.

Although they were not necessarily obligated to go public, they were effectively forced to anyway.

It's a small but significant distinction. Essentially, once forced to report like a public company, you might as well become one; even if you had no prior incentive to.

[1] At least as early as January 2011, when Goldman Sachs made $450 million investment in Facebook on behalf of itself and other private investors. [2] This rule has since been revised under one portion of the JOBS act which raises the bar to 2000 shareholders (or 500 non-accredited investors.)

I've never quite gotten this idea. Why does reporting force a company to go public? Aside from the liquidity, what does a founder gain from going public, and in return for ceding control of the company? How does forced reporting change the equation?

but some sort of structure that would allow profit sharing, without requiring a path to IPO or acquisition, would be great

Wouldn't that structure be a corporation? Shareholders can take profits out of corporations as dividends thus allowing profit sharing without requiring an IPO or acquisition.

If Treehouse makes $10m profit per year then that can be issued as a dividend and if a VC owns, say, 30% of the company, that's $3m for them. Do that each year and you have a great, steady return (it could also be arranged that equity can convert into a loan in case the business doesn't reach its targets, thus protecting the investor.)

Hi Peter, thanks for your response. If you'll see below, my question is more on the practicalities of this (copied at the bottom of this comment.)

Personally, I'm not aware of any VCs in the "dividend business", but I'm by no means an expert so I could be wrong.

Also, if you are lucky enough to be successful and have over 500 employees/shareholders, my understanding is that the reporting requirements required by the SEC are so onerous that you might as well go public.

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Yep. That's really my question anyway - is there a path to victory as a non-bootstrapped startup that doesn't include IPO or acquisition. How would you structure things to where investors and employees are confident they would share in the ongoing rewards of a non-public company.

If you look at the headaches Zuckerberg is running into now, even with, ostensibly, "total control" over a public company, it just seems like an extraordinary distraction from keeping your users and employees happy.

Speaking of Facebook, there is also the issue they ran into with having over 500 shareholders and staying private. I'm assuming that there is some way to guarantee revenue sharing to employees without making them actual shareholders, so that you wouldn't step over the 500 employee threshold and trigger the SEC's required IPO - assuming you were lucky enough to get that big.

I'm being a little tongue in cheek because we do have the structures, it's just that the modern sort of VC we call 'investors' in these parts have a limited range, as you imply.

is there a path to victory as a non-bootstrapped startup that doesn't include IPO or acquisition. How would you structure things to where investors and employees are confident they would share in the ongoing rewards of a non-public company.

This question probably does make sense in the context of HN and the modern tech VC scene but the reason I was being tongue in cheek, again, was because across other industries and in most of the world for the past X hundred years, taking shares in businesses and then taking a cut of the dividends has been a main (though not only) way of making investments in smaller companies.

It seems like the modern tech scene is almost an aberration in this sense.

If you can build a profitable company with good margins fast, the company could do what I would call a reverse private equity deal. The company would buy back the investment stake from investors and fund that via a loan or some type of debit.

The option feels like a "domino rally" type of plan since multiple parts would have to together perfectly in order to work. This type of plan is the only option I can imagine besides being acquired if an IPO is out of the question. I've seen this type of thing happen in the Oil and Gas world.

I've actually thought about this, but I think there would be conflict with the investors in that there might be a sense that their shares are being taken hostage, especially if this plan wasn't disclosed upfront. If the company has no interest in an exit or IPO, then really the only interested buyer of the shares is the company, which would depress the value of the shares compared to what they would fetch on the open market.

Also, something similar would have to be worked out with the employee stock options presumably, and then you would have to work out some other profit sharing mechanism anyway in order to retain and attract new employees.

Because investors know that no matter what people say, everyone has their price. That's just a human reality.

I don't see the problem really, if it's a major hit but still unlisted, can't the fund simply shift the shares to its investors when it is wound up? There's the small matter of valuing them. But a piece of a successful company will be valuable even if it's private with no IPO on the horizon.

Most limited partners who give their money to VCs are university endowments and pension funds. If you're the manager of a pension fund, you want cash back once the fund shuts down, you certainly don't want a piece of paper saying you own X number of shares in a company.

I don't know the details of this deal, but suffice to say, the VCs already know what their exit plan is.

I know in the biotech space there is a trend towards exits other than acquisitions or IPOs. You basically create LLCs and any returns are funnel back through to shareholders (through dividends??).

I'd be fascinated to read any sources you might have regarding the Biotech LLCs. Thanks in advance.

Here is a link:http://lifescivc.com/2011/05/structuring-a-biotech-liquidity...

Go down the page to "Standalone LLC model". Basically the LLC is used to "pass through" revenue from licensing deals and such to the LPs.

Thanks refurb, appreciate it.

If a young founder makes it known that he's in it for the long haul with no possibility of IPO/acquisition - we're talking decades - presumably the value of their shares would be depressed significantly. It's a bit like having the deed to some prime real estate on Mars.