When and Why to Bring on VCs (The {Closed} Session Episode 3.7)
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Episode Summary
When should an entrepreneur raise money? What does the money do? How is a Series A round different from a seed round? How is a Series A today different from 1999? What makes a good VC? Tom and Vivek describe the lessons learned from fundraising at Rapt in 1999 — the height of the first internet bubble — through their experience at Krux — amid the most recent tech bubble. After sharing war stories, they describe how super{set} melds funding with hands-on entrepreneurship to set the soil conditions for long-term success.
Episode Notes
We have a venture fund at super{set} but aren’t Venture Capitalists. What’s the difference? We’re operators, while the VCs are helpers. The best VCs come in asking the catalytic questions that encapsulate risks and delineate opportunities, but they aren’t hands-on with the company. They know when they are needed and when they are not.
In the over-caffeinated recent years, seed investments have started to look like Series A. And it reminds us a lot of Tom and Vivek’s first foray into entrepreneurship — Rapt, which began in 1999. Rapt’s Series B was much larger than Krux’s Series B over a decade later, yet Krux had the more robust exit.
It’s not that we are proponents of bootstrapping — taking on outside investors for your company is necessary to move at the speed of business today — it’s that the right sized check at the right time is what matters.
That’s why part of our model at super{set} is giving seed-stage co-founders the space to be disciplined about product, product, product in the earliest stages. We create the soil conditions and the capital so that great entrepreneurs can focus on company-building, not pitching outside investors.
Learn more about how we at super{set} found and build data-driven companies at superset.com.
Listen to the latest episode on superset.com!
