Travis Steffen

Big rounds are back. VC Funding is flowing. In April, there were 28 fundraising rounds announced with >$10M in funding. We've seen private market (pre-launch) deals valued >$3B recently. Private Markets are hot. Public Market comps (FDVs) are hot. But who will buy our multi-billion dollar bags? Deal Flow Digest April w/: - Recap of largest web3 funding rounds - Airtable with ALL the data - Hackathons & Demo Days - VC Fundraises Read more here: https://lnkd.in/g7V4KrAj

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The Art of the VC Pitch: A Brief Guide to Maximizing Your Chances With Venture Capital Through Giving Better Pitches Pitching to a Venture Capital firm is different from any other kind of pitch. It's not like a sales pitch, a product pitch, or any other kind of presentation. This guide is a road map to the nuts and bolts of maximizing your opportunity when you manage to get in front of VCs

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Players in the VC world have access to tons of tools like what we're building at They Got Acquired Data. How badly does the lower-to-middle market M&A community want insight on private transactions, bootstrapped company sales, and who's buying? We're about to find out.

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Establishing an objective point of view on you B2B SaaS firm’s performance is VALUABLE exercise for Founders. Here are 3 lessons I’ve learned the hardway: 1. Identify relevent benchmarks to inform base of all opinions 2. Establish base rates (e.g. monthly average across trailing 12mths) vs focusing on most recent data 3. Prioritize customer retention and net revenue retention. This framework has transformed how I assess SaaS firms. How do you cut through the bias in your assessments?

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Should you ask a VC to sign your NDA before sharing information about your startup? Check out my latest Youtube video to hear my perspective on this divisive topic. I cover: - the reasons a VC will not sign your NDA - why its a bad tactic to ask - when its appropriate to ask Many startups thrive on outcompeting their peers through innovation. Its understandable that many startup founders will want to jealously guard information about their innovation, product, and business. But its not a good strategy to ask for an NDA because it creates unnecessary barriers and has very little utility in the early stage of the fundraising process and very hard to enforce. Also, there are ways to mitigate the risks of sharing sensitive info. I am not a lawyer, and nothing I say in this video should be construed as legal advice. This is my personal opinion from ~10 years of experience as a VC investor. #venturecapital #startups #investing #NDAs https://lnkd.in/dxyRyrbG

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Don’t discount your product before selling your business. Launching a massive sale of annual plans is tempting. Big sale = revenue bump = inflated valuation. But buyers see through this and either:  • Add a discount based on recent months  • Don’t touch the business. If it’s something like Black Friday, that’s okay... but it's best to avoid discounts altogether when prepping for a sale. #acquisitions #SaaS #founders

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I helped a VC company with over 400 portfolio companies & $1B raised in follow-on funding rank #2 with a link I built them… Here’s how: Two months ago I talked with the Marketing Manager of Forum Ventures an Early Stage B2B SasS fund. They needed a link-building partner to: - Reach out to relevant companies, media outlets, and bloggers - Setup off-page strategy that will increase brand awareness - Effectively establish meaningful partnerships - Facilitate industry-relevant backlinks They had a great brand, lots of authority, and were willing to invest in growing. Once we analyzed the industry and the website we immediately saw that one particular strategy would reap results quickly and effectively. Listicles. Yes..those "Best X" types of list articles. So using Ahrefs and Google search we: 1/ Extracted all relevant results. 2/ Setup a multi-layered outreach sequences 3/ Cross-matched them with the client's Ref. Domains 4/ Filtered out the best opportunities (based on Traffic/Relevance) ..and started reaching out. We began facilitating backlinks from such lists one by one and moving forward with adding more off-page strategies.. A week ago while on a call with the Marketing Manager at Forum Ventures, she casually mentioned that a few days before our meeting they invested in a SaaS company that found them through one of the listicles we built. (We facilitated an inclusion at #2 from a list of 92 companies) And it was all because we were able to understand: - Their Goals - Their Industry - Their Brand - Where they want to position themselves That said, if you are a SaaS/Tech company and you aren’t leveraging listicles, you could be missing out on a great way to: - Build brand awareness - Drive direct traffic - Earn industry-relevant backlinks - Scale your non-paid traffic We've helped over 10 companies in the last 12 months double first-page positions & non-paid traffic using industry-relevant off-page strategies while eliminating unnecessary micromanagement, allowing them to focus on their core product/service. I guarantee it could do the same for you. Want to learn how to implement it? Comment "Listicles" and I'll send you the framework we use for this strategy in detail.

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📝 FOUNDER fundraising hack = write an investment memo for VCs (template linked below). Raising VC is a multi-step sales process. First you need to convince a single partner to invest, and then that partner needs to bring your deal to Investment Committee (IC) to convince the other partners. The initial VC partner (aka deal champion) will write an investment memo to convince the other partners to vote for your deal during IC. If a VC will write their own memo, why write one for them? Three reasons: 1. Control the frame = dictate how your story is told 2. Signal insider status = show you understand how VCs think 3. Reduce friction to $$$ = VCs will copy/paste from your memo to theirs 😂 🪟 Control the frame There are good ways and bad ways to frame your startup. It's possible that a well-meaning VC will write a memo that frames your startup in sub-optimal ways. The less experience and domain knowledge a VC has, the higher the risk. You want to arm your deal champion with ammo to tell a bullet-proof investment story. Don't leave this up to chance. Write a memo and share it with the VC to make sure they hit the right talking points in their own memo. 🥼 Signal insider status I love when founders provide a written memo alongside the usual pitch deck and financial model. It shows they're clued in to the game. They understand how VC firms work. They're an insider. VCs want to invest in insiders, because insiders are more likely to raise subsequent financing and get to an exit. Outsiders are learning how the game works for the first time and will make rookie mistakes on the VC's dollar. Don't be an outsider. 💵 Reduce friction to $$$ You know how great product companies obsessively reduce the # of clicks a customer needs to make before paying for the product? Speed matters. A 2006 Amazon study found that every 100ms in added page load time cost them 1% in sales. VC is no different. The faster you can make the diligence process, the more likely you'll be able to raise capital. Your fundraising collateral is your product, and a memo is a key way to reduce time to funding (TTF). Every VC will have a set of questions during diligence. Answer them up front in a memo, and watch your prospective investors eyes light up. Deals can be a grueling process involving several late/all-nighters, so the deal team will be thankful if you save them work and make their lives easier. Here is a link to the investment memo template I use. Feel free to repurpose for your own needs: https://lnkd.in/ekGBjGWs

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How do investors price pre-seed rounds?  This is perhaps one of the most misunderstood aspects of fundraising.  Oftentimes, founders want some framework to better understand what market value is when raising capital into their business.  Public equities and later stage privates have a well defined matrix of revenue/margin profiles that dictate valuation, surely there must be some framework for arriving at a pre-seed valuation. So how do investors price startups that are pre-revenue, or have maybe one of two early customers? In reality, pricing is more a byproduct of a VC fund’s portfolio construction model than any metric of the underlying business.  VCs model out portfolios to include a certain number of companies with an ownership target in each startup.  There are variations to portfolio construction, and the chosen strategy will have a direct impact on the types of rounds a fund will participate in. For example, an early stage fund might raise a $60M fund to lead investments in 30 companies and target 12.5% ownership.   After management fees, there is ~$48M in investable capital.  Assuming a fund holds back ~30% for reserves(this number varies across funds) that leaves ~$30M to invest in initial checks.   In this case a fund must average $1M checks at $8M valuations to reach their intended ownership target of 12.5%.   When you are in diligence with a fund, they are first and foremost trying to get to a yes on the investment opportunity.  When arriving at a valuation though, the math outlined above is the determining factor, more so than any multiple of revenue on the business, or the stated desires of where a founder wants to raise capital.  At the end of the day, a VC is trying to arrive at a valuation that works within their portfolio strategy. This means they are very unlikely to price a deal at $15M cap given the aforementioned portfolio construction, as they would either not own enough($1M = 6.67% ownership) or have to cut too large a check( $1.875M = 12.5%). The thing that is most likely to move an investor off their target valuation is another investor in the picture that is driving the price higher, but even then there are upward bound limits of how high an investor is willing to price a deal. I always advise our port cos to ask an investor early in conversations what their ideal check size/valuation is to make sure there is alignment with the founder's objectives.    

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I once negotiated with a seed-stage founder who wanted a +$100 million valuation. His main argument? A TechCrunch article about an adjacent business with a sky-high valuation. My guy had <$1 million in revenues. Founders, you must understand the difference between AVERAGES & MEDIANS. One outlier like OpenAI can skew the average massively. That article? It highlighted an outlier, not the norm. That's why it was newsworthy. I tried to explain: comparing to a flashy headline without context is a dead end. The investment didn't happen. Not sure what became of that startup, but given their unrealistic expectations, it would have made headlines if they raised anything. This isn’t rare. Too often, I meet founders chasing hype over building solid businesses. Focus on creating real value. #startups #venturecapital #investing #media

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Please... if you’re selling a business, don’t do this. A founder wanted to maximize the sale of his business. He came up with a plan: - Slash marketing & R&D team - Inflate recurring revenue by discounting their annual plan This is a bad plan. Buyers will see right through this with a little due diligence. Instead, do this: - Reduce churn rate - Document & automate operations - Make the business work without you - Clean up your books and records There are concrete steps to make your business worth more at sale. But *hacking* your valuation will hurt you later. #acquisitions #founders #saas

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The state of venture capital is wild right now. We are witnessing a surge of innovation across the spectrum: - Funds merging - VC doing PE - PE doing VC - Secondary funds - Buyout funds - Spin-out funds - Debt funds - Continuation funds - Infrastructure funds - GP turnover - Hard Tech surging - Family Office uptick

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Most venture studio investors get it wrong from day 1. Why? They're doing due diligence on a studio like it's a traditional VC fund. But here's what they're missing: A studio isn't just an investor. It's not just an operator. It's not just a founder. It's all three. And each role requires separate due diligence: Founder Role ↳ Can they consistently identify opportunities? ↳ Do they have startup building experience? ↳ What's their founder-market fit process? Operator Role ↳ What's their track record of operational success? ↳ What operational capabilities exist in-house? ↳ How do they support portfolio companies? Investor Role ↳ How do they structure initial investments? ↳ Do they understand follow-on dynamics? ↳ What's their capital deployment strategy? Miss any one of these, and your studio investment could be DOA. 💭 Which role do you think is most critical for studio success? I'm Matthew Burris, venture studio design expert. And joined by JT Benton!

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Today's Boring Biz: Pool Leak Detection Company - $2.3M Revenue - $610K Cashflow - South Carolina - Day 39 of "50 States In 50 Days" Note: We do not represent this deal, highlighting for informational purposes only for viewers What do they do? 1. Leak detection services 2. Electronic detection equipment 3. Pool inspections Investment Highlights 1. Strong market demand 2. Established reputation 3. Business systems in place Investment risks/concerns 1. What is the competition 2. Customer concentration 3. Length of contracts #SMB #ETA #finance #Cashflow #investing #search #searchfund #privateequity #microprivateequity #smallbusiness #venturecapital #vc #entrepreneur #business #businessowner #pool #leakdetection #southcarolina #servicecompany Disclaimer: Hypothetical and illustrative only. Please do your own research (DYOR) or work with tax and legal professionals before making a decision. This video are intended for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal or tax advice, nor should be construed as an offer to sell, a solicitation of an offer to buy, or a recommendation for any security by SMB PE LLC or any third party

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SaaS founders that cracked $10M ARR have two things in common: 1/ Focus on Onboarding > Marketing  Churn is the obstacle for hitting 8-figures. Experimenting with pricing often and offering solid trials, educational materials, & customer support is key. 2/ Build a Great Team  You can get far with a tiny team, but there’s a threshold. To surpass $10M, you need to find top-tier talent and get out of their way.

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