Monthly Archives: February 2022

The Power Law and Venture Capital (part 3), planners and improvisers, betting big or diverse

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Mallaby is a marvelous storyteller – thanks to his team probably as he mentions at least 15 collaborators in his acknowledgments. This is part 3 of my posts about the Power Law, following part 2 and part 1.

You will discover so many figures of venture capital and entrepreneurship that it would be impossible to mention them all. But here are illustrations. If you do not know them, chek their names at the end.

What is really impressive in Mallaby’s book, is that whatever the strategy of the investors – for example being improvisers or planners, betting big or small in a small or large number of opportunities, replacing or mentoring the founders, the power law prevails.

As a side and unimportant comment, Mallaby is great at story-telling, he is less good with numbers. But valuations of startups can be tricky when you mix pre-money and post-money, dilution and stock options. Page 155-6 : “The founders tentatively suggested a valuation of $40million up from just $3million when Sequoia had invested eight months earlier. […] Son duly led Yahoo’s Series B financing providing more than half of the $5million […] In a bid without precedent in the history of Silicon Valley, he proposed to invest fully $100million in Yahoo. In return he wanted an additional 30 percent of the company. Son’s bid implied that Yahoo’s value had shot up eight times since his investment four months earlier.” I am not sure all this is correct. I let you check. Or page 147 : “Rather than merely doubling in power every two years, as semiconductor did, the value of a network would rise as the square of the number of users. Progress would thus be quadratic rather than merely exponential; something that keeps on squaring will soon grow a lot faster than something that keeps on doubling.” As Etienne Klein has often said, the “exponential function” is heavily mistreated in the media and now abusively assimilated to a function whose only characteristic is to grow very quickly…

The founders:
Nolan Bushnell, Jimmy Treybig, Bob Swanson, Sandy Lerner, Bob Metcalfe, Mitch Kapor, Jerry Kaplan,
Rick Adams, Marc Andreessen, Jerry Yang, Pierre Omidyar, Larry Page, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Elon Musk.

The funders:
Don Valentine, Mike Moritz (Sequoia), Tom Perkins, John Doerr (KP), Jim Swartz, Arthur Patterson (Accel),
Bill Draper, Masayoshi Son (Softbank), Bruce Dunlevie, Bob Kagle (Benchmark), Peter Thiel, Paul Graham.

The Power Law and Venture Capital (part 2) Fairchild and Rock

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Following my previous post about the book The Power Law and Venture Capital, I can only confirm it is a fascinating book about the history of Venture Capital. I have now read chapters 2 & 3 which covers the sixties mainly through Arthur Rock and his funding of Fairchild and the Traitorous Eight.

About Fairchild

Coyle pulled out crisp dollar bills and proposed that every man present should sign each one. The bills would be “their contracts with each other,” Coyle said. It was a premonition of the trust-based contracts – seemingly informal, yet founded, literally, on money – that were to mark the Valley in the years to come. [Page 35]


Source : https://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Tracing-Silicon-Valley-s-roots-2520298.php

Each of the 8 founders put $500 for 100 shares ($500 was two to three weeks of salary), Hayden Stone (through Rock and Coyle) 225 shares at the same price per share and 300 reserved for future managers. Fairchild put $1.4M as a loan to be compared to the initial $5,125, with an option to buy all the stock for $3M. It happened making the founders rich but not as rich as if there had not been that option. Fairchild had made a profit of $2M at the time of acquisition and price to earnings were easily 20x to 30x. SO I had to do my usual cap. table from foundation to exit. Here it is:

What VCs such as Rock looked for

I just scanned pages 48-49 and this is very similar to what you could find in slideshare slides in the previous post.

“Some winning venture capitalists claim to look almost exclusively at the backgrounds and personalities of the founders; others focus mostly on the technology involved and the market opportunity the venture addresses” from The New Venturers, Wilson (1984)

“They look for outstanding people without worrying too much about the details of product and marketing strategy. The right people have integrity, motivation, market orientation, technical capability, accounting capability and leadership. The most important is motivation.
Rock’s style was supportive of entrepreneurs with an implacable will.” from Wilson (1984)

In 7 years, the Davis & Rock $3.4M fund would return $77M or a 22.6x multiple… [Page 50].

If you do not fully understand what I talk about read Mallaby! And of course watch Something Ventured.

The Power Law and Venture Capital – according to Sebastian Mallaby

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Sebastian Mallaby has just published a new book about Venture Capital which looks very interesting. I have already explained here what the Power Law is and will not do it again. But I will quote Mallaby as I do when I read good books.

About the term : “Venture capital” had also cropped up in 1938 when Lammont du Pont, the president of E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Company spoke before the US Senate Committee to Investigate Unemployment and Relief. “By Venture Capital I mean that capital which will go into an enterprise and not expect an immediate return, but will take its chances on getting an ultimate return” du Pont clarified. […] but this phrase making did not stick and the term was not widely used until at least the 60s. [Note 28 page 418]

And what about this : “All progress depends upon the unreasonable man, the creatively maladjusted. Most people think improbable ideas are unimportant, but the only thing that’s important is something that’s improbable”. From Vinod Khosla [Page 3]

About the return of VC. The normal distribution applies to size, weight of individuals, traditional stock markets, but the power law applies to the exceptional – wealth of individuals when not really regulated, as well as venture capital: Like the 7-foot NBA star, unexpected large price jumps are rare enough and moderate enough that they do not affect the average. The S&P500 budged less than 3% in 7763 days out of 7817 between 1985 and 2015, that is 98% of the time. […] Now consider venture capital. Hosley Bridge is an investment company which had stakes in venture funds that backed 7,000 startups between 1985 and 2014. A small subset of these deals, accounting for just 5% of the capital deployed generated fully 60 percent of all the Hosley Bridge returns. [Page 8]

Examples of Khosla’s deals [Page 10]

Startup Investment Return Multiple
Juniper Networks $5M $7B 1,400
Siara A few $M $1,5B >150
Cerent $8M Bought for $7B

About predictions: The revolutions that will matter – the big disruptions that create wealth for inventors [and investors! HL note] and anxiety for workers, or that scramble the geopolitical balance and alter human relations – cannot be predicted based on extrapolations of past data, precisely because such revolutions are so thoroughly disruptive. Rather, they will emerge as a result of forces that are too complex to forecast – from the primordial soup of tinkerers and hackers and hubristic dreamers – and all you can know is that the world in ten years will be excitingly different. […] the future can be discovered by means of iterative, venture-backed experiments. It cannot be predicted. [Page 11] “I always tell my CEOs, don’t plan. Keep testing the assumptions and iterating” Khosla again. [Note 32, page 416] All this of course reminds me also about the Black Swan.

Why is venture capital so different from other sources of finance? Most financiers allocate scarce capital based on quantitative analysis. venture capitalists meet people, charm people, and seldom bother with spreadsheets [*]. Most financiers value companies by projecting their cash flows. Venture capitalists frequently back startups before they have cash flows to analyze. Other financiers trade millions of dollars of paper assets in the blink of an eye. Venture capitalists take relatively small stakes in real companies and hold them. Most fundamentally, other financiers extrapolate trends from the past, disregarding the risk of extreme “tail” events. Venture capitalists look for radical departures from the past. Tail events are all they care about. [Page 14]

[*] Academic survey work confirms that one in five venture capitalists do not even attempt to forecast cash flows when making an investment decision. [Note 36 page 416]

All this is from the introductory chapter only and I liked it very much. Maybe more soon but in the mean time, you can always have a look at my visual history of venture capital.

Exclusive license vs. ownership of Intellectual Property

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Intellectual Property (IP) is a sensitive and often cleaving topic. I have already addressed the topic here, check the hashstag #intellectual-preperty (or also #licensing). But even once the general value of IP is addressed, there are tons of secondary issues.

One is the specific question of how ownership of IP by a startup vs. an exclusive license granted by an academic institution is considered, in particular by investors. On January 27, 2022, I send an short email to 300+ investors and I got about a 10% response rate. In parallel, I mentioned the topic on my LinkedIn account and I got additional comments. Although, there is a rich argumentation about pros and cons of both situations, so that the reader may want to have a careful look at the full answers, here is my synthetic understanding:

There is no fundamental difference between license and transfer from the point of view of the startup’s strategy, except what happens in the event of bankruptcy or liquidation. The license is not an asset and therefore the intellectual property is no longer usable. With this nuance, admittedly significant, there are two additional points:
– Some investors think that the owner pays for the maintenance of the IP and suits the possible “infringers” to defend this property. I don’t think that’s the case because in my experience it’s the licensee who does that.
– In case of a trade sale, it is important that the license can be transmitted and this is a major item, that is to be guaranteed. There maybe political or strategic issues though.
Finally, a price for the transfer may be added when or if possible.
There is no doubt that the reputation of the institution and the stability of these acts are essential. (There would be more to add like equity vs. (capped or not) royalties in the license terms, milestones and many details… I tried to be as short as possible).

You can download here pdf file Survey on license vs ownership of IP.

Survey on license vs ownership of IP – Lebret – 1Feb2022