http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2013/01/26/should-startups-announce-their-funding/

General Information

• Industry convention only requires VCs to put up 1% of the total capital of the fund – the perhaps misleadingly named GP “commitment”. (source: Founder's Fund)

• At Founder's Fund, about 20% of the total capital they manage is their own capital. (source: Founder's Fund)

• So in a certain respect VC funds are very similar to hedge funds.

Entrepreneurs who didn't take VC funding

• Tuft & Needle

  • 2016.01.15 - Forbes - How Mattress Startup Tuft & Needle Said No To VC Money, Borrowed $500K And Opened Its First Store

  • 2018.08.21 - Forbes - Mattress Upstart Tuft & Needle Agrees To Merge With Serta Simmons In Big Win For Cofounders Daehee Park And JT Marino

    • They sold for between $200 to $800 million and the vast majority of the equity was owned by the two founders.

Non-Date-Specific Links

• TheFunded

• Angel.io - Startup Valuation Data

• AngelCalc

• Quora

  • http://www.quora.com/Whats-the-most-typ ... es-A-round

Date-Specific Links

• 2012.08.31 - TechCrunch - Convertible Equity, A Better Alternative To Convertible Debt?

• 2012.09.05 - BothSidesOfTheTable - The Truth About Convertible Debt at Startups and The Hidden Terms You Didn’t Understand

• 2014.09.17 - BothSidesOfTheTable - Bad Notes on Venture Capital

  • HN discussion

• 2014.04.16 - Raising a Series A amid the Crunch

• 2014.05.16 - An Algorithm for Seed Round Valuations

• 2014.11.05 - Pando Daily - What’s beneath the recent spike in Series A valuations?

• 2015.12.27 - NYT - When a Unicorn Start-Up Stumbles, Its Employees Get Hurt

• 2017.07.08 - TechCrunch - Why SAFE notes are not safe for entrepreneurs

• 2017.07.11 - YC - Safes are not bad for entrepreneurs

  • This was written in response to the July 8th TechCrunch article (see above).

  • They reference https://angelcalc.com/

  • The authors’ point may be that they believe priced equity rounds are preferable to using safes because all parties better understand how dilution works.

  • Unfortunately, priced rounds are not as simple and fast a funding mechanism as safes (or other convertible securities).

    • The transaction costs of a Series A round average $60,000 dollars, and the industry standard is that companies pay for BOTH their own legal counsel and the investor’s legal fees. That standard practice is not safe for entrepreneurs.

    • There are several other non-obvious pitfalls for founders when doing priced rounds (including potential loss of board control, the consequences of which may be even more poorly anticipated than dilution), and priced rounds take longer.

  • We believe that, more often than not, the trade-offs make the safe a better choice for early stage startups.