taptaptap (via betaworks)

Rafer sez:
Andy, do you really feel this way? I can’t believe that. Here’s a copy of the comment I left at taptaptap:

This is good advice packaged but packaged in a terribly destructive way. I certainly try and design my startups to work well on bootstrapping or angel money, delaying institutional VC indefinitely. That MO tends to be much better for founder equity and employee returns, user-responsive product design, growing at a speed that is good for the company, etc.

On the other hand, WTF? Take a cold shower or something. The level of anger being displayed here has no place in this discussion or this community. Every market segment has its bad actors, both at the individual and corporate granularities. VC doesn’t have a greater share of bad actors than the ecommerce or gaming sectors. Large-scale, software VC is simply a formerly great business in decline, and there are a lot of good, smart people who haven’t made in VC yet who are worried about their (and their families’) economic futures. It’s not evil — it’s their job and they may not feel they can switch. This is a group of very smart people who are fighting for ever-fewer capital-intensive deals, and it’s getting ugly. Their economics are clear, and the bigger the fund the worse the problem.

Fred Wilson’s been publishing a good series of posts on VC economics. In the latest one, he inadvertently outs one of the main problems with running a VC-backed startup.  When your business is doing well, the VCs have have every incentive to push you to take more money you may not need — it’s the only way they can be as profitable as they need to be. Fred’s got a relatively small fund, great empathy with entrepreneurs, and is near the top of the heap for any number of reasons. However, he has that same problem — the interests of the Common Stock held by the founders/employees and the interests of the Preferred Stock held by the VCs is divergent in many, many more cases than the Conventional Wisdom suggests. It’s the reason why the VC asked about 100 iPhone apps, et al.

The software VCs are in a different business than we are, but one that is largely dependent on us. It’s a business that used to overlap with ours heavily but where the overlap is decreasing more quickly than capital could ever leave the sector. That leads to market consolidation, market share fights, and VCs requesting startups perform unnatural acts — all of which are ugly, and none of which are evil.