I know it's been true for a while, but "pivot" is really gone from "alter part of the business while retaining certain aspects of it and the company's core strengths" to "pitch an idea in the trash and start over."
Properly pivoting an idea probably should not be too disruptive to investors' investment thesis, since the pivot is happening because a new, clearly better route has been uncovered in the process of the first idea that the team can leverage their past efforts in executing on some tangible way. If you're really going to just try a completely new idea from scratch, it would make sense to refinance the business and give investors a chance to take their money out, but that's hard to legally structure obviously and would take too much time.
So I get the sense that AZ is saying a lot of startups aren't pivoting really but just pitching and starting over too often if they fail to get initial traction quickly enough. This combined with the illiquid nature of startup investments forces them to not really know what they are investing in and be stuck with it once it materializes.
People have started to forget that startups generally take a long time and a lot of work to build momentum. It's easier to just pitch what you have and jump into the next shiny thing. Particularly when you have ridiculously long runways due to low costs and absurd valuations. I blame the ridiculous liquidity in deals right now combined with the "fail fast" culture.
If the value in most startups -- as evidenced by the practice of acquihiring -- is really just the team, then a pivot would be anything which changes the business while keeping said team.
It is interesting that a16z is making a public announcement following the angelist syndicates announcement a few days back. The initial sentiment with the angellist event was that it will drive down VC fees, angels and founders will be king and take more control etc. However, a16z and by proxy (I suppose) silicon valley VC community is making a public announcement that they will not be funding series A anymore. It could be lead to some interesting outcomes.
1. Via Angellist syndicates it will be easier to raise up to $1 Million (maybe half). So you will have a bunch of companies that get funded via this super series/seed/angel model.
2. Then they will hit a roadblock, they will not get any $10-$20 Million to fund growth or get a true product/market fit.
3. The vast majority of the companies from step 1. will be wiped out because even if they have a hint of product/market fit, they will not get funding.
4. The tiny minority from step 1. that can get funding for Series B. in the range of $50Million or more will wipe out all other startup in the category and capture all the gains. This in turn means a16z and the likes will be able to extract a lot more stake out of the angels and the founders.
Net net, won’t be surprising if angellist and other crowd funders end up losers in the process and returns go to a16z and their compatriot VC’s.
Love VC double speak in the article. You know how politicians talk, when they have to pass some unpopular law they invoke the common man and the small business owner. Scott Weiss from a16z is a standup guy. Always fighting for the engineer founder. Fucking those MBA types since the beginning. Please elect him to be your VC. If AirBnB showed up at a16z do you think he would turn them down (non-engineering, MBA type company). Yeah, didn’t think so :-)
Just to be clear we didn't publicly announce that we are not doing Series A investments anymore. They remain the bread and butter of what we do. Scott was making a more nuanced point about a difference between how we look at consumer vs enterprise companies right now, and our relative preference for enterprise A's and consumer B's.
Re AirBNB, (a) we are an investor in AirBNB, and (b) the founders are extremely sharp product people and technically very deep. The CEO is a designer by background, like Ben Silbermann at Pinterest, another investment of ours. Both are hypercompetent product people with deep technical chops.
If you haven't found market fit on $5M, which you can raise on AL, you need to fold, not try to raise $10-$20M. No one will give you that kind of money without mega traction.
> and by proxy (I suppose) silicon valley VC community
I don't think it proxies that well. As the article points out, a16z raised a $1.5 billion fund, some top-tier firms might come close, but most of the mid- and bottom-tier VCs operate with the fund sizes in double-digit millions.
Also, for a highly contested B round, A round participants or brand-name VCs will get preference over a generic nondescript firm with a Sand Hill Road address.
Somebody from YC might correct me on this, but I think a16z's participation in automatic round upon admittance to YC comes with drag-along rights, which they can choose to exercise at either A or B rounds. So they don't have as much of a problem of missing on quality dealflow that others will miss on if they choose to skip A rounds.
It is also worth noting that this follows a major drought in enterprise startups. I don't have the numbers (you might know) but enterprise startup activity took a gigantic dip after the 2000 crash when large enterprises en masse all but stopped buying new enterprise technology from new companies.
Looking at 2013 exits (or financings) is missing the mark. VC is a game of 1000x returns. And those returns have come from companies like FB, Google, etc. Most of the value of YC's portfolio come from Dropbox and Airbnb. All of these companies are decidedly consumer companies.
Basically, they can't compete at the A level now against Angelist. If you're a fundable startup, would you take $5M from any VC (even someone as stand-up as AH) with control strings attached or would you rather raise on Angelist and stay in control?
So the real funding opportunity for AH is at the B round, where as Scott says, they will go in hard.
This is not something they are choosing - it is a market reality. Its now possible to start a company and essentially get to a B round without taking investment because cloud services make it so inexpensive that founders really don't need VCs any longer.
Cloud services have gotten cheaper but talented hires have gotten more expensive, and the latter is always the largest expense in scaling. And no, you can't scale a company and keep head count ultra tiny, there's just too much to do.
To me this is essentially admitting that Andreesen Horowitz is loosing the ability to identify impactful startups. That is fine, its harder to do at scale, but nothing is different now than 5 years ago. We have lots of people doing experiments, some hit early success, some pivot. Once you get product market fit, you raise that B/C/IPO on the back of the growth you've been able to afford thanks to your raises and revenue.
Just as Berkshire Hathaway had to change their investment strategy when they grew very large, it is fine for AH to do the same, but I don't believe for a second that things are hugely different in 2013.
Maybe you're right, but that's not what Scott was saying and that's not what I think.
In my own words: consumer startups more and more have this very interesting "lightning in a bottle" effect where sometimes they take off like crazy and sometimes they just don't. I give full credit to the teams that figure out how to get the flywheel spun up, but it is also important to realize just how many highly capable founders are hard at work trying to get traction who don't. There are a lot of really excellent founders pursuing consumer ideas that just never work -- that's why companies like Yahoo and Google and others can do so many acquihires. So, if we have the theoretical ability to invest in a given category -- remembering that we can only make one primary venture investment per category -- in either the A or B round, we find it often makes sense to let other firms fund the A rounds before anything is proven and wait to see the early signs of lightning and then step in hard at the B. The end markets are so large for the winners that the investment returns in the B can still be outstanding, and we can still offer a lot of useful help to the companies at the B stage such as talent sourcing.
In contrast, enterprise startups are much more (take your pick) tractable, execution centric, brute force, predictable (as startups go). If you back a killer founder with a great engineering team, with a great idea, into a big market, the odds are high that magic will happen -- a very interesting product will get built, early customers will adopt, and value will be created. In other words, the link between founder/team competence and success is more direct. One thing that helps a lot is that whether the product will be adopted by customers or not is far less of a mystery -- you can simply go talk to the likely customers ahead of time and they will give you a very good indication. That plays well to our market development program where 1,200 big company management teams are coming through our office every year -- we ask them what they think about new ideas and they tell us. So here, backing the A round when possible makes more sense.
None of this is religion -- we still do plenty of consumer A's and enterprise B's. We just think it's useful to talk about these things in public so that entrepreneurs know before they come see us how we are thinking about things -- it optimizes their chances of getting to the right outcome with us (whatever that is).
Andreesen Horowitz is loosing the
ability to identify impactful startups
Pet peeve: it's losing, not "loosing".
I don't know if anyone can properly guess if a consumer startup is going to get traction until it does, especially in the mobile space. That said, they did manage to get a 312x return on their seed investment in Instagram (which they declined to invest in a second time as explained here: http://bhorowitz.com/2012/04/22/instagram/)
A-H offers seed investments to YC companies in order to get a foot in the door with the small fraction who will succeed. Offering blanket seed investments confirms that they really don't have any idea at first either. There's nothing wrong with that, it's just the nature of the beast. (http://venturebeat.com/2011/10/14/andreessen-horowitz-to-giv...)
Losing the ability to identify or losing the desire?
When you get down to it, if you have a $50m fund, you might want to invest in ~10 A-rounds at ~$5m each. If you have a $1.5bn fund however, do you really want to invest in 300 A-rounds?
Nope. The best way to spend your time is looking at the bigger, later investments. You probably still only want to have roughly the same number of total investments to oversee. So if an A-round company is gonna take the same amount of attention as a B-round or later, you shouldn't waste even a second of your time considering them.
It's nothing to do with ability to identify, just correctly prioritising the time the VC's have available to them.
Has the number of tiny trivial startups increased lately? Judging from demo days, I would say yes. The startup is the the new garage band. If you like what you hear, we're selling CDs after the show.
I suspect this is more of a PR move about their focus than anything else. We'll have to see how it plays out, but as a16z grows, I'm sure a ton of Series A deals are trying to get an intro, this leads to overhead and a mass of companies that a16z doesn't feel are a good fit for the exponential returns they are looking to get. Get rid of those companies by saying we don't do series A. But they'll still get deal flow through their contacts, and I'm sure if an amazing Series A opportunity comes through, they'll jump on it. Nothing here is stopping them from investing, they're just saying "if you're looking for Series A, don't come to us".
My question is how does investing in YC companies at seed stage, but then blanket refusing to invest in those companies Series A deals reflect on those companies? Or is this another reason to state loudly that they don't do Series A deals? That way it doesn't reflect badly on the early stage companies that existing investors aren't re-investing. Then, if they do decide to invest in a YC company series A, it's a positive response, rather than the expected.
I think Scott's interview is being overinterpreted. We aren't blanket refusing to do Series A investments -- in fact, we are working on multiple Series A investments right now (both consumer and enterprise). Scott was describing our framework for thinking about consumer vs enterprise in the current environment, not laying down the law on what we will and won't do.
At what level of traction would you recommend entrepreneurs start pitching for a consumer series A?
If an app has, say, one million (non-transactional) users, is that interesting? 100k?
One of the hardest things I found with fundraising was calibrating expectations for each stage. My last startup was enterprise, and there were investors who told us we needed one hundred customers to raise a series A and investors who told us two enthusiastic customers were enough. Nowadays, the expectations for enterprise have gotten clearer, but in consumer there's new ambiguity since you hear people say things like "10m users is the new 1m users."
I think it's mostly situational depending on the kind of business.
For the classic, pure, viral, social and/or user-generated content businesses -- that will probably be monetized with advertising -- the generic headline metrics like daily/weekly/monthly active users and engagement/retention rate are important. There are just so many new products that attempt to be the next Facebook/Twitter/Youtube/Pinterest that showing that you are already punching through the noise is pretty important.
For two-sided marketplaces (the next eBay/Etsy/AirBNB/Uber) it's most important to have a real theory about how you're going to get both sides of the flywheel spun up. The traction doesn't need to be gigantic but there needs to be a real plan. We still see too much handwaving in this category -- it is REALLY hard to spin these up from a standard start and most simply languish and die.
For ecommerce and ecommerce-like busineses (the next Fab/Ziluly/OneKingsLane/Zulily), the most important thing is showing a model, with initial proof, of how the cost to acquire customers is less than the lifetime value of those customers. For example, in recent years it has become harder to build these businesses based on Google keyword advertising -- search volume isn't growing very fast, and lots of people are trying to acquire customers in most categories, and so keyword ad rates often get bid up to just past the point of unprofitability (the delta is the amount of excess funding going into businesses in these categories). So creativity on customer acquisition -- and showing that in economic terms -- is key.
I think that a credible team with any of this in reasonable shape from a seed round is not going to have trouble raising an A in this environment. But for those that have already raised an A, it has become really critical to have these factors nailed (whichever are appropriate) to be able to raise a B.
Finally, probably obvious but worth saying -- investors are all over the map on all of this stuff all the time. It's very valuable to be able to prequalify investors for interest and knowledge about particular categories -- and frankly IQ and judgment -- prior to meeting with them. Good advisors and angels can be very helpful with this. This is also why we try to be transparent on these topics (such as with Scott's interview) -- better for us and for entrepreneurs to know how we think before they walk in the door.
Somewhat odd because some of the most valuable enterprise ventures recently have begun as consumer plays with a path to the enterprise. Dropbox is one example. The iPhone was consumer before enterprise. Github focused on individual debs before it made its enterprise play. I'd argue that AirBnB kind shows the same because I've noticed an uptick in the number of business travelers requesting to stay with us (i.e. they expense they Airbnb stay).
The enterprise is increasingly consumerized so any play that offers that opportunity should be interesting.
Great post, but I think when they talk about consumer they are talking about totally free consumer facing time-sink eyeball-monetization companies like Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest. I don't think they consider consumerised enterprise to be in the same category. I could be wrong though.
Two things are worth highlighting in your comment. One is that the examples are "yesterdays" companyies that are not all that new (in dog years;). Two, is that the entry point and the profit sweet spot were not the same. The Bet now (as per the article) is that markets that before were not likely adressable directly, are now so. Ie, there is a change in the enterprise maket (ie, latent demand) that is now directly accessable as a go-to-market strategy.
I will go on record to say that Rap Genius is the most ridiculous investment ever, and that it will tank with not a dollar in sight within ten years. If this is the type of startup Andreesen Horowitz are backing away from in B2C I would understand, but this is one of the consumer plays they did invest in. And now the message is that they want to invest in solid consumer startups only. Makes no sense to me.
I worked for a consumer startup that fit the profile. CEO would come up with an exciting business model, raise money with the dream, staff up, fail the execution and then 6 months later lay off half the company to go lean, pivot and repeat. They've squeaked by with 4+ years in business doing this, raised tens of millions from good investors. I could definitely see why any VC firm would want to steer clear of a business like that
Correct -- this is a key consideration for actually running one of these funds that is not always obvious on the outside. A $5M A round investment carries an implied commitment to invest $10-15M more in later rounds.
[+] [-] gfodor|12 years ago|reply
Properly pivoting an idea probably should not be too disruptive to investors' investment thesis, since the pivot is happening because a new, clearly better route has been uncovered in the process of the first idea that the team can leverage their past efforts in executing on some tangible way. If you're really going to just try a completely new idea from scratch, it would make sense to refinance the business and give investors a chance to take their money out, but that's hard to legally structure obviously and would take too much time.
So I get the sense that AZ is saying a lot of startups aren't pivoting really but just pitching and starting over too often if they fail to get initial traction quickly enough. This combined with the illiquid nature of startup investments forces them to not really know what they are investing in and be stuck with it once it materializes.
People have started to forget that startups generally take a long time and a lot of work to build momentum. It's easier to just pitch what you have and jump into the next shiny thing. Particularly when you have ridiculously long runways due to low costs and absurd valuations. I blame the ridiculous liquidity in deals right now combined with the "fail fast" culture.
[+] [-] prostoalex|12 years ago|reply
The classic example was PicPlz and Burbn (renamed Instagram after the pivot), the VC in question was a16z
http://thenextweb.com/insider/2012/04/23/ben-horowitz-on-why...
[+] [-] derefr|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] npalli|12 years ago|reply
1. Via Angellist syndicates it will be easier to raise up to $1 Million (maybe half). So you will have a bunch of companies that get funded via this super series/seed/angel model.
2. Then they will hit a roadblock, they will not get any $10-$20 Million to fund growth or get a true product/market fit.
3. The vast majority of the companies from step 1. will be wiped out because even if they have a hint of product/market fit, they will not get funding.
4. The tiny minority from step 1. that can get funding for Series B. in the range of $50Million or more will wipe out all other startup in the category and capture all the gains. This in turn means a16z and the likes will be able to extract a lot more stake out of the angels and the founders.
Net net, won’t be surprising if angellist and other crowd funders end up losers in the process and returns go to a16z and their compatriot VC’s.
Love VC double speak in the article. You know how politicians talk, when they have to pass some unpopular law they invoke the common man and the small business owner. Scott Weiss from a16z is a standup guy. Always fighting for the engineer founder. Fucking those MBA types since the beginning. Please elect him to be your VC. If AirBnB showed up at a16z do you think he would turn them down (non-engineering, MBA type company). Yeah, didn’t think so :-)
[+] [-] pmarca|12 years ago|reply
Re AirBNB, (a) we are an investor in AirBNB, and (b) the founders are extremely sharp product people and technically very deep. The CEO is a designer by background, like Ben Silbermann at Pinterest, another investment of ours. Both are hypercompetent product people with deep technical chops.
[+] [-] not_that_noob|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] prostoalex|12 years ago|reply
I don't think it proxies that well. As the article points out, a16z raised a $1.5 billion fund, some top-tier firms might come close, but most of the mid- and bottom-tier VCs operate with the fund sizes in double-digit millions.
Also, for a highly contested B round, A round participants or brand-name VCs will get preference over a generic nondescript firm with a Sand Hill Road address.
Somebody from YC might correct me on this, but I think a16z's participation in automatic round upon admittance to YC comes with drag-along rights, which they can choose to exercise at either A or B rounds. So they don't have as much of a problem of missing on quality dealflow that others will miss on if they choose to skip A rounds.
[+] [-] asanwal|12 years ago|reply
The reality is that tons of VCs have already migrated away from consumer startups.[1][2]
Data to support above
[1] 84% of 2013's largest exits in tech have been to enterprise companies - http://www.cbinsights.com/blog/trends/enterprise-tech-consum...
[2] 70% of 2013's largest tech financings have been to enterprise - http://www.cbinsights.com/blog/trends/venture-capital-enterp...
Disclaimer: I'm a co-founder of CB Insights - the firm that put out this research.
[+] [-] pmarca|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sillysaurus2|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Axsuul|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hype7|12 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] not_that_noob|12 years ago|reply
So the real funding opportunity for AH is at the B round, where as Scott says, they will go in hard.
Makes total sense.
[+] [-] pmarca|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] outside1234|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wensing|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pmarca|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 3pt14159|12 years ago|reply
Just as Berkshire Hathaway had to change their investment strategy when they grew very large, it is fine for AH to do the same, but I don't believe for a second that things are hugely different in 2013.
[+] [-] pmarca|12 years ago|reply
In my own words: consumer startups more and more have this very interesting "lightning in a bottle" effect where sometimes they take off like crazy and sometimes they just don't. I give full credit to the teams that figure out how to get the flywheel spun up, but it is also important to realize just how many highly capable founders are hard at work trying to get traction who don't. There are a lot of really excellent founders pursuing consumer ideas that just never work -- that's why companies like Yahoo and Google and others can do so many acquihires. So, if we have the theoretical ability to invest in a given category -- remembering that we can only make one primary venture investment per category -- in either the A or B round, we find it often makes sense to let other firms fund the A rounds before anything is proven and wait to see the early signs of lightning and then step in hard at the B. The end markets are so large for the winners that the investment returns in the B can still be outstanding, and we can still offer a lot of useful help to the companies at the B stage such as talent sourcing.
In contrast, enterprise startups are much more (take your pick) tractable, execution centric, brute force, predictable (as startups go). If you back a killer founder with a great engineering team, with a great idea, into a big market, the odds are high that magic will happen -- a very interesting product will get built, early customers will adopt, and value will be created. In other words, the link between founder/team competence and success is more direct. One thing that helps a lot is that whether the product will be adopted by customers or not is far less of a mystery -- you can simply go talk to the likely customers ahead of time and they will give you a very good indication. That plays well to our market development program where 1,200 big company management teams are coming through our office every year -- we ask them what they think about new ideas and they tell us. So here, backing the A round when possible makes more sense.
None of this is religion -- we still do plenty of consumer A's and enterprise B's. We just think it's useful to talk about these things in public so that entrepreneurs know before they come see us how we are thinking about things -- it optimizes their chances of getting to the right outcome with us (whatever that is).
[+] [-] aaronbrethorst|12 years ago|reply
I don't know if anyone can properly guess if a consumer startup is going to get traction until it does, especially in the mobile space. That said, they did manage to get a 312x return on their seed investment in Instagram (which they declined to invest in a second time as explained here: http://bhorowitz.com/2012/04/22/instagram/)
A-H offers seed investments to YC companies in order to get a foot in the door with the small fraction who will succeed. Offering blanket seed investments confirms that they really don't have any idea at first either. There's nothing wrong with that, it's just the nature of the beast. (http://venturebeat.com/2011/10/14/andreessen-horowitz-to-giv...)
[+] [-] adwf|12 years ago|reply
When you get down to it, if you have a $50m fund, you might want to invest in ~10 A-rounds at ~$5m each. If you have a $1.5bn fund however, do you really want to invest in 300 A-rounds?
Nope. The best way to spend your time is looking at the bigger, later investments. You probably still only want to have roughly the same number of total investments to oversee. So if an A-round company is gonna take the same amount of attention as a B-round or later, you shouldn't waste even a second of your time considering them.
It's nothing to do with ability to identify, just correctly prioritising the time the VC's have available to them.
[+] [-] codex|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] outside1234|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pedalpete|12 years ago|reply
My question is how does investing in YC companies at seed stage, but then blanket refusing to invest in those companies Series A deals reflect on those companies? Or is this another reason to state loudly that they don't do Series A deals? That way it doesn't reflect badly on the early stage companies that existing investors aren't re-investing. Then, if they do decide to invest in a YC company series A, it's a positive response, rather than the expected.
[+] [-] pmarca|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jamie|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brandonb|12 years ago|reply
If an app has, say, one million (non-transactional) users, is that interesting? 100k?
One of the hardest things I found with fundraising was calibrating expectations for each stage. My last startup was enterprise, and there were investors who told us we needed one hundred customers to raise a series A and investors who told us two enthusiastic customers were enough. Nowadays, the expectations for enterprise have gotten clearer, but in consumer there's new ambiguity since you hear people say things like "10m users is the new 1m users."
[+] [-] pmarca|12 years ago|reply
For the classic, pure, viral, social and/or user-generated content businesses -- that will probably be monetized with advertising -- the generic headline metrics like daily/weekly/monthly active users and engagement/retention rate are important. There are just so many new products that attempt to be the next Facebook/Twitter/Youtube/Pinterest that showing that you are already punching through the noise is pretty important.
For two-sided marketplaces (the next eBay/Etsy/AirBNB/Uber) it's most important to have a real theory about how you're going to get both sides of the flywheel spun up. The traction doesn't need to be gigantic but there needs to be a real plan. We still see too much handwaving in this category -- it is REALLY hard to spin these up from a standard start and most simply languish and die.
For ecommerce and ecommerce-like busineses (the next Fab/Ziluly/OneKingsLane/Zulily), the most important thing is showing a model, with initial proof, of how the cost to acquire customers is less than the lifetime value of those customers. For example, in recent years it has become harder to build these businesses based on Google keyword advertising -- search volume isn't growing very fast, and lots of people are trying to acquire customers in most categories, and so keyword ad rates often get bid up to just past the point of unprofitability (the delta is the amount of excess funding going into businesses in these categories). So creativity on customer acquisition -- and showing that in economic terms -- is key.
I think that a credible team with any of this in reasonable shape from a seed round is not going to have trouble raising an A in this environment. But for those that have already raised an A, it has become really critical to have these factors nailed (whichever are appropriate) to be able to raise a B.
Finally, probably obvious but worth saying -- investors are all over the map on all of this stuff all the time. It's very valuable to be able to prequalify investors for interest and knowledge about particular categories -- and frankly IQ and judgment -- prior to meeting with them. Good advisors and angels can be very helpful with this. This is also why we try to be transparent on these topics (such as with Scott's interview) -- better for us and for entrepreneurs to know how we think before they walk in the door.
[+] [-] malandrew|12 years ago|reply
The enterprise is increasingly consumerized so any play that offers that opportunity should be interesting.
[+] [-] jval|12 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] pmarca|12 years ago|reply
Good luck in jail!
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[+] [-] twiceaday|12 years ago|reply
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.