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01.25.22

2022 Is The Year Emerging Markets VC Comes of Age. Here’s Why:

Listed #12 on the Most Free Economics List by Heritage Foundation, Georgia is fast becoming a dominant tech hub for the Caucasus region.

In Catapult’s last monthly update to investors, we offered recent market data evidencing three important venture trends:

(1) a dramatic acceleration in the amount of capital being deployed into smaller ecosystems outside the ‘big three’ US tech hubs of Silicon Valley, NYC and Boston;

(2) a ten-year low in the percentage of all U.S. venture funding deployed going into Silicon Valley companies; and,

(3) a boom of newly formed venture funds that have a defined geographic focus.

In response to these trends, we ask the overriding question that these data points suggest: Is 2022 the year Emerging Markets-focused VC funds come of age? We believe the answer is yes. Here are reasons why:

1. The Pandemic-fueled Dispersion of Talent is Here to Stay

As capital for credible founders became more accessible in recent years, the battlefield shifted. The fiercest competition between startups today is over talent, not capital. Over the past decade, engineers and operators led a not-so-quiet exodus out of high-priced tech hubs and repotted themselves in smaller markets — the Nashvilles and Miamis of the world — where they could ostensibly enjoy big city salaries while living in low tax (or no tax) states and in housing markets 30–50% less expensive. Pandemic took hold in the spring of 2020 and only accelerated that exodus by an order of magnitude.

While some of that tech talent may indeed return to the high priced, established tech hubs from whence they came, the majority of these new transplants are expected to stay put, thus enriching the tech talent pool in these smaller hubs both now and for years to come.

2. ‘Centers of Excellence’ are manifesting in smaller geos now

Beyond seeding smaller hubs with a deeper bench of talent with which local startups can build teams and achieve scale, this talent dispersion creates another phenomenon that we, at Catapult, call Centers of Excellence. In our nomenclature, a ‘Center of Excellence’ refers to a competitive advantage that a tech hub develops over time around a specific sector.

This competency arises for several reasons. One could be an inherent advantage that that hub has due to its long history in and association with a certain industry. (Think the Midwest and the Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) industry, or Los Angeles and entertainment.) A second reason could be the presence of university programs with a excellent reputation in a specific technical discipline. (Think Artificial Intelligence and Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh.) A third reason could be a hub’s history of successful companies focused on a specific domain that then created a diaspora that launched other startups focused on that same domain. Think data storage and Salt Lake City. A quick story about Fusion-io illustrates this third point well.

Fusion-io was one of the biggest tech successes to come out of Salt Lake City. After Fusion-io exited, many employees left to pursue other data storage-related ventures. Having spent years in the community and often with children enrolled in local schools, many ex-Fusion-io employees opted to stay in the area. After all, the cost of living in Utah was so much lower than doing so in the Bay Area, and there was already a robust talent pool of people with the idiosyncratic skills and expertise germane to data storage right there in Salt Lake City.

In short order, new data storage startups founded by the Fusion-io diaspora (i.e., Primary Data, Isilon, Qumulo, et al) emerged from the Salt Lake City ecosystem. Over time, it became widely believed that the brightest minds around data storage were probably living and working in and around Salt Lake City.

3. Domain expertise within tech hubs creates a flywheel effect

This phenomenon becomes self-fulfilling. As more startups focused on a certain sector see positive outcomes, the diaspora from those exited startups tend to settle in the local community, buy property, start families, launch startups of their own, start angel investing or forming VC funds, and re-enforcing that ecosystem’s inherent advantage in developing startups focusing on that domain. We are now seeing this phenomenon in a host of other geos that are not one of the big three U.S. hubs.

Given its association with Wall Street, New York was long considered the best place to launch a FinTech startup. Today, however, it’s facing stiff competition from smaller, less expensive hubs that are known for having robust FinTech ecosystems of their own. Think Frankfurt, Atlanta, Charlotte, and of course, London.

Oh, and the Wall Street as we knew it doesn’t really exist on Wall Street any longer either. It, too, has become distributed. The famed brokerage houses of Wall Street lore are now scattered across the greater New York Tri-State area, some even settling in Hoboken, New Jersey.

4. Having remote-first, distributed teams is now a competitive advantage

What all this talent dispersion means is that the world’s best data storage engineers, or FinTech experts, or AI specialists are more likely to be in places like Salt Lake City, Pittsburgh, or Toronto than in Silicon Valley today. Founders have already realized this. Many VCs are just now catching on.

This is transformative. And paired with the plethora of workplace collaboration platforms like Trello, Zoom and Slack, which did not exist a decade ago, it means talented teams can be spun up anywhere in the world almost overnight. Time zones be damned.

This means speed to market. This means teams can be collaborating 24/7. This means when developers are shutting down their laptops in San Francisco, their colleagues in Tbilisi are just booting up theirs.

In the fiercely competitive and increasingly global tech marketplace, this might not only be a nice advantage; indeed, it might be an existential threat to organizations not structured in this way.

5. New Venture Models Are More Adaptable to Remote-First, Cross Border Investing.

We last posted on this subject in our piece, VC 3.0 And The Democratization of Venture Capital, in which we examined how the VC 1.0 and 2.0 models from the ’80s and ’00s, respectively, were being challenged by a new wave of solo capitalists, rolling funds, and other innovative approaches which we loosely characterized as VC 3.0. An inherent advantage of these 3.0 venture platforms is the speed at which they can make decisions — i.e., fewer committees and fewer partner meetings required to approve investments — and how nimbly they can adjust to meet rapidly changing times.

While there may be some notable exceptions in VC, by and large in every industry the larger and more established and hierarchical an organization, the slower it tends to move and the more risk-adverse it tends to be.

The ‘atomization’ we’re seeing in venture capital as an asset class accrues nicely to emerging managers in emerging markets because small, nimble funds can spin up local investors with domain and geographic expertise quickly — either through a scout program or other mechanism — in order to source and support the best opportunities coming out of an emerging ecosystem. And because operating costs in emerging markets are often significantly lower than those in established hubs, emerging managers can take a risk on promising but still unproven market opportunities in ways an established, monolithic fund of the VC 1.0 model simply cannot.

6. Regulatory frameworks slowly achieving parity with U.S. standards.

Finally, for decades, U.S.-based startups possessed a clear advantage when fundraising from venture investors due to their status as a U.S. based company domiciled in the U.S., typically in Delaware. Delaware law was the gold standard. It was tried and tested. Investors knew what to expect under Delaware law. Moreover, the U.S. had bankruptcy laws and other regulatory frameworks that were generally investor-friendly and flexible enough for startups to hire/fire quickly so as to give them the best chance to mount an offensive against entrenched, better-financed incumbents.

Other nations were not so fortunate. Often bedeviled by red tape, archaic regulations, and mind-numbing bureaucracies, many nations outside the U.S. and a handful of others struggled to create systems and infrastructure that would support the innovation economies they said they so desperately wanted to create. But that’s begun to change.

Innovative leaders such as France’s Macron and Germany’s Merkel made strides to modernize their regulatory frameworks and their economies to be more startup- and investor-friendly. Moreover, some of the greatest progress in this regard has been made by post-Soviet bloc countries like Georgia, Estonia, Lithuania and Ukraine that have quickly modernized their systems, done much to root out endemic corruption, and developed infrastructure to help migrate them from the unsustainable, extraction-based industries that long defined their economies (i.e., oil, mining, et al) toward knowledge-based economies that attract high-paying jobs and stem brain drain.

The net result of this rapid modernization is that these emerging hubs are beginning to achieve parity with the U.S. in terms of their regulatory frameworks and investor protections. This will further erode the built-in advantages that U.S-based startups have long held over startups based in emerging tech ecosystems across Europe, Eurasia, the Caucasus and Africa in attracting venture funding.

The Road Ahead

While there is still much work to be done to build self-sustaining tech ecosystems in these emerging market hubs, recently there has been a dramatic shift. Pandemic was the obvious catalyst. While some nations looked to examples such as Estonia as evidence that even small, former Soviet-bloc economies can rapidly reinvent themselves into prosperous tech centers, others appeared too encumbered by long-standing business cultures to make the leap. Breaking away from long-held beliefs about the ‘way things are done here’ is difficult for any nation. Additionally, there were valid reasons why some countries were complacent. Extraction-based industries were profitable. Energy prices were relatively stable; and tourism provided consistent revenues. Pandemic changed all that.

As Covid took hold in early 2020, tourism revenue plunged. So did business travel and convention industry bookings. With everyone working from home, commercial real estate values tanked. Energy prices, while remaining high, became even more volatile.

Many emerging market nations began to accept that their economic futures were likely going to be tied to how well they migrated away from being reliant on things like tourism, oil and mining, to embracing science, technology and innovation in a fulsome way. And with less friction from having to wean off legacy systems already in place, these emerging economies could start fresh. They could quickly adopt best practices from what had worked in Estonia, the Nordics and other geos to lay the infrastructure for their own vibrant, startup-friendly ecosystems.

The data is now clear: VC investing in emerging markets is no longer a fringe activity practiced only by ‘true believer’ investors willing to withstand decades of losses before exits occur. The exits are now here and valuations are surging. Smaller hubs in Europe, Central Asia and the Caucasus are now catching up quickly with those in the U.S. on a variety of key metrics. Leading accelerators like Y Combinator and USMAC are increasing their presence in these regions to identify startups and import Silicon Valley know-how and mentorship. And global VC brands like us at Catapult are launching geo-specific funds to source, fund, and mentor the best founding teams building the next generation of global tech powerhouses.

It will take commitment. It will take money. It will take cooperation with compliant, forward-thinking governments working with us to design systems that support startup innovation for the long term. And that’s how it ought to be. The opportunities are enormous and we couldn’t be more excited for what’s to come.

07.20.21

How the Creator Economy is Helping Dismantle ‘Old Media’

Creators have quickly matured from crude meme videos to distributing full cinematic-quality productions to rival the best of Hollywood, with budgets to match.

Recent announcements across the worlds of technology, media and venture capital are serving as a harbinger for how traditional media will be fundamentally transformed in the years ahead. While none of these events might appear seismic on their own, in the aggregate they mark clear territory for the battles ahead that will both determine the future of media and the lasting influence of the Creator Economy.

In May, one of the industry’s most prolific venture capital firms, Andreessen Horowitz, rebranded its content site, Future, and issued statements implying it was evolving into a new kind of organization — one some characterize as ‘a media company with a venture arm’. Weeks later, Harry Stebbings, the 24-year old founder of the popular 20-minute VC podcast, announced that he had raised $140mm across a pair of inaugural funds, making his fledgling firm, 20vc, one of the largest seed investors in Europe virtually overnight.

So, in the space of a month a respected VC fund announced plans to become a content creator, while a respected content creator announced plans to become a VC fund.

Separately, in late May, Amazon announced it was acquiring media giant Metro Goldwyn Mayer (MGM), home of the James Bond franchise and 4000+ other iconic films, for roughly $8.5 Billion. The bold acquisition would ostensibly complement Amazon Studios, which has been occupied with producing TV programming, and would provide a wider audience (and greater monetization) for the deep MGM catalog of works.

Mega mergers between media companies and technology companies are nothing new, of course. Many still remember the AOL/Time Warner merger of 2000, the wave of mergers that that deal triggered, and the shadow that those pairings would cast over the industry for much of the next decade. Yet this Amazon/MGM acquisition feels different and has broad implications across media and tech. Let’s examine some history…

The Media consolidation era of 2000–’10

Twenty years ago, the media landscape looked very different. In the dot-com era, media companies were under enormous pressure as their traditional points of distribution — television stations, movie theaters et al — were increasingly being disintermediated by the internet. The level of centralized control and the cushy franchises that media companies had enjoyed for decades were eroding as consumers were increasingly able to access content by circumventing media companies entirely.

Telcos were facing an existential crisis of their own as consumers were increasingly going wireless and, hence, abandoning the landline services that had been the bread-and-butter of Telcos for generations. Yet, for Telcos the business of providing internet access was both not an especially attractive one and one that was rapidly becoming commoditized. In the face of this, Telcos such as AT&T and Verizon felt they needed to provide greater value to their consumers; accordingly, they went on a media company buying spree through much of the 2000s.

Over the next decade, Yahoo, AOL and TimeWarner would ultimately be passed around like hors d’oeuvres trays between these players as Telcos struggled to find ways to add value in combined offerings.

In the final analysis, however, many of these acquisitions failed and the acquired companies themselves were often spun off or otherwise disposed of.

2010–’21: Media rewires itself…

Over the subsequent decade, many media companies that avoided partnering with or selling out to a Telco during the 2000s went on to build internet businesses of their own. Tech companies, somewhat in parallel and in response to these potent offerings, determined that they needed to develop their own media companies.

Over the next decade, billions were invested in content development as companies such as Amazon and Netflix built their own robust film and television studios and, in short order, became major players on the media landscape.

…But not without an unwinding

More recently, many of the same Telcos that led the media buying binges of the 2000s have been shedding those assets. In 2019, Verizon unloaded Tumblr for a sum believed to be roughly $3 million, a far cry from the $1.1 Billion Verizon paid for the blogging platform in 2013. In 2020, Verizon sold Huffpost to Buzzfeed and took a $119mm loss on its quarterly earnings for doing so.

In early May, Verizon announced that it was selling AOL and Yahoo to PE firm Apollo for $5 Billion —half of the roughly $9 Billion it paid for the combined pair. This sale effectively ended Verizon’s decade-long troubled experiment with media production and advertising.

Separately, AT&T cut itself loose from Time Warner in a $43 Billion merger of WarnerMedia with Discovery, a deal that analysts have called a debacle for AT&T shareholders. Clearly, Telcos running media businesses turned out to be a bad idea whose time had passed.

Content becomes commoditized

Today, Telcos are grappling with the difficult question of where growth will come from in a world where consumers are increasingly circumventing their traditional business lines. Tech and media companies, for their part, are engaged in a fierce battle over slivers of market share across dozens of subscription services in an increasingly competitive landscape of siloed, balkanized content.

In response to all this upheaval, consumers are increasingly having to choose from whom they are going to purchase content; and those choices have only become more complex: “Do I go with the cable company bundle or just use Netflix? What about Hulu? or Disney+? Or Peacock? Would my Amazon Prime membership be duplicative to any of this?” And so on.

Will scale matter any longer in media?

In a world awash in media content, it’s clear that content itself has become commoditized and is no longer a differentiator. As such, no one platform can dominate when there is such diversity of quality content.

Traditionally, this is where size and scale brought enormous advantages. In the past, large media conglomerates would use their influence and scale to push content to consumers and, in the process, quash smaller players that didn’t have the balance sheet to compete in the content wars. But that world no longer exists.

The emerging threat to media companies is not coming from smaller media players any longer but from the creators themselves. Enter the Creator Economy.

How Creators are changing the content landscape

  1. Better Technologies. Fueled by vastly improved smartphones, inexpensive high-resolution cameras and user-friendly video editing software, user-generated content (UGC) has leapfrogged from the crudely produced parody videos of a decade ago to the full-length cinematic-quality videos of today. Across a host of social platforms from YouTube to TikTok, consumers are increasingly choosing to view this kind of content over the packaged offerings coming from major media outlets.
  2. UGC is edgier, more topical. Moreover, consumers find UGC more topical, edgy and relevant in the fast-paced media environment where a viral video can have global impact in minutes and can launch lucrative careers for content creators seemingly overnight.
  3. Immediacy. Current technologies enable a content creator to seize upon a news events or an emerging meme, produce a high-quality video, and distribute it to his or her millions of followers across an array of social platforms in just minutes. A media organization, with its Standards & Practices and other bureaucratic bottlenecks, cannot compete with that speed to market and relevancy.
  4. Content itself is changing. Formats are also becoming a factor. Less willing to sit through long, episodic content formats, an entire generation of consumers is being conditioned by TikTok and other social platforms to consume content in 15–30 second snippets. The staggering monthly active user numbers on these platforms bear this out. This shift is not temporal, and it’s changing how we think about content.

As content changes so do the economics of the media business

As the costs of producing high quality content continue to fall, as more content creators emerge, and as run-time lengths shrink, the economics of the media business will continue to erode. The increased balkanization of content means that producers of highly demographically-targeted content (i.e. Disney, et al) that can engender loyalty from niche consumer segments will have the advantage over producers of broad-based, mainstream content who will struggle to find an audience.

I predict that we will see another clumsy game of musical chairs across the media landscape as players scramble to partner or acquire their way to remaining relevant (and solvent) in the new world order of media fast coming into view.

Media decentralization and ‘Going direct’

This fundamental dismantling of ‘old media’ has many causes but one irrefutable driver is that content creators of all stripes are increasingly going direct. This includes groups as diverse as an Andreessen Horowitz or Coinbase—who’ve opted to tell their stories directly rather than relying on news organizations to do it — to a Tween influencer who still lives at home but has an 8k video camera and 2 million YouTube subscribers.

And that Tween influencer has no desire to communicate with her 2 million followers through an intermediary.

The ‘Creator Economy effect’ in the fields of music and journalism

This media decentralization is also evident in the fields of journalism and music. Musicians are increasingly producing their own music and distributing it directly to their fans, circumventing industry gatekeepers in the process. This is a dramatic shift from the days when industry players like now-defunct record store chain behemoth Tower Records (no relation, unfortunately) once held so much power that record labels would weigh which musical acts to sign based upon how artists would be marketed in the chain’s stores.

As with video content, audio content has also become dramatically less expensive to produce. What would once cost weeks of expensive recording studio time and take dozens of musicians to produce can often now be done on a Pro Tools-equipped laptop in a matter of hours.

In the world of literature and journalism, there is now Substack, which provides a platform for writers to build a following with loyal readers and then facilitates the means to charge for content.

‘Kardashianization’ of media and commerce

Once at scale, every content creator will want to control and monetize their relationships with their followers. One might call this new phenomenon the ‘Kardashianization’ of media and commerce — a nod to how Kim Kardashian and Kylie Jenner cleverly built billion-dollar media and branding empires by leveraging media platforms to get to scale and then migrating their millions of fans to their own platforms to monetize them through online and offline commerce. And we expect this trend to continue across broad swaths of the economy.

The Opportunities Ahead

While I believe we are likely in only the 3rd or 4th inning of a fundamental transformation of the media industry, the Creator Economy is as much a driver of this evolution as anything else on the media landscape today. As investors in the category, Catapult is enormously excited by the opportunities to support creators who wish to develop meaningful content, to find new audiences for that content across mediums they control, to communicate with their audience directly, and to generate significant remuneration for themselves, all unfettered by intermediaries. We believe transformational, billion dollar businesses will emerge from this period and look forward to partnering with many of those media innovators in the years ahead.

06.07.21

The Coming Post-Pandemic Economic Boom

From Kansas City to Kuala Lumpur, there is now a palpable sense that much of the world, with some unfortunate exceptions in India, Japan and elsewhere, is slowly returning to a pre-March 2020 normalcy.

As of this writing, more than 50% of U.S. citizens are fully vaccinated. Mask mandates have either been entirely rescinded in states where they were once in effect or there are plans to drop them in the coming weeks. While there will likely be friction here and there as businesses and governments determine how best to manage the transition back to a pre-pandemic, mask-less reality, there is now broad consensus that summer 2021 will, mercifully, look much more like summer 2019 than last summer.

Consumer, Unshackled

Consumers, thankfully, are not waiting for guidance from governments or local municipalities to resume their social activities and spending. Fifteen months without live concerts, sporting events or much in the way of a vacation have created a level of pent-up consumer demand that economists haven’t seen in nearly a half-century. Airbnb’s Brian Chesky stated recently that the vacation rental juggernaut now needs thousands of additional hosts on its platform to meet the surge in demand. Even cruise ship operators are reporting that they are fully booked for most of their excursions well into 2022.

To be sure, a robust stock market, which demonstrated surprising resilience over the last year, and government largesse has fueled some of this. Flush stock portfolios have encouraged many home-bound consumers, laptops at the ready, to splurge on luxury goods as a way to assuage the loneliness and monotony of months of lockdowns. Record-shattering sales in every category from fine art to designer handbags to collector cars are a testament to that.

Revenue delayed is not necessarily revenue denied

For many startups, this anticipated surge in consumer spend is not coming a moment too soon. As we’ve discussed in previous posts, after the pandemic hit there emerged a clear ‘tale of two cities’ of companies that were obvious Covid beneficiaries and those that were being disproportionately impacted. Fortunately, even within industries that were particularly sensitive to the demand shock of a black swan event like the pandemic, there were nuances; and those nuances now indicate that the long-term financial impact on many of those business may not be as severe as feared.

An example of this can be seen in our own portfolio in the form of Joy Wedding. Joy is an end-to-end wedding planning, gifting and event management platform. At first blush, one would expect that any business reliant upon in-person events as a central part of its revenue model would take a severe hit during the pandemic; and initially, that was true in Joy’s case. Weddings in 2020 were indeed summarily cancelled as the pandemic took hold; and, the company took evasive maneuvers and innovated on new ways to generate revenue to adapt to this new reality. But unlike other event-based businesses, Joy has been able to recapture much of the deferred 2020 revenue, albeit a year later.

People intent on getting married are still going to get married. Whether that event gets pushed out a year or so is not terribly significant. Joy was able to rationalize its business during 2020 and is now exiting the pandemic leaner, more efficient and with a flush pipeline of weddings to manage — both the anticipated 2021 season of weddings as well as all the weddings slated for 2020 that were postponed. Joy might be an edge case, but there are similarities across a number of startups.

The case of Joy, however, does not minimize the losses of many consumer businesses whose revenue cannot be so readily recaptured. Obviously, a hotel cannot rebook a cancelled reservation for a room that went vacant the previous night. That revenue is gone forever. Similarly, a musical artist whose 2020 summer tour was cancelled cannot simply book two summer tours in 2021 to make up for the cancelled 2020 shows. Last I checked, there is only a summer per calendar year.

Post-pandemic business models emerge

As in the case of Joy Wedding, the pandemic forced many leaders, from startup teams to Fortune 500 CEOs, to reappraise their businesses, rethink how they were engaging and transacting with customers, and innovate new business models to both diversify their revenue sources and harden their service offerings against future demand shocks. Granted, like the plexiglass barriers that greeted us all at restaurants and grocery stores the past year, some of these innovations were opportunistic and ‘bolted-on’ and will disappear as the post-pandemic economy arrives in a fulsome way and businesses return to standard operating procedures. But other innovations are here to stay and will usher in cottage industries to cater to new generations of consumers that, pandemic or not, will heretofore prefer to engage with companies in ways that were altered by the past year’s events.

An obvious example is in commercial real estate as we’ve all reassessed our relationship with (and our requirements for) working and transacting in physical spaces. We are seeing a wave of new technologies and robust innovation around this theme. Another area is the broad theme of experiences — creating them, sharing them, and even re-experiencing them. Finally, we anticipate even stronger growth across new digitally native brands and experiences where products and services are created, shared and solely consumed digitally, entirely decoupled from any physical footprint. While VR and AR technologies have been focused in this arena for ages, the pandemic has somewhat legitimized these ‘digital only’ experiences, products and services and catapulted the broad VR/AR industry past its long-held perception in the mainstream, fairly or unfairly, of building trivial tech that only had gaming applications.

At Catapult, we are enormously excited by what we are seeing as the world enters a post-pandemic economic recovery, fueled heavily by consumer spending. Despite some obvious concerns at the margins around inflation and political instability in some quarters of the globe, we anticipate robust growth across a number of macroeconomic measures and a wave of post-pandemic consumer demand that will fuel the next few years of technology innovation. We’re excited to share it with you.

05.07.21

VC 3.0 and the Democratization of Venture Capital

Steve Case, founder of AOL, and early evangelist of ‘rise of the rest’ cities, posited recently in an interview that we are now living in the third wave of the Internet. “First-wave companies like AOL were building the on-ramps,” argued Steve. “The second wave was building apps and software on top of the internet–think Facebook. This third wave is when the internet meets the real world. And it’s healtcare, it’s food and agriculture. These are big parts of our economy, and the domain expertise in those sectors and the partnerships you need to form to be successful in those sectors are often in the middle of the country, not on the coasts.”

Internet 3.0, meet VC 3.0

1960–2001: The VC 1.0 era

2001–06: VC 2.0 comes into its own

2010–2015: The super-angel era and the birth of micro-VC

2015-present: VC 3.0 comes into view

Global tech products require globally-oriented VCs

03.25.21

The Series A Gap in VC is Real and is Widening. Here’s Why…

1. A surge in new VC funds now crowd the Seed space

Innovation in VC is long overdue, but not without consequences

Venture capital has long been an opaque industry. That opacity traditionally favored a handful of legacy venture firms while constraining access to capital and mentorship to all but the most connected and geographically advantaged entrepreneurs. The prevalence of technologies enabling distributed teams and remote workforce collaboration, however, and the innovations in venture capital mentioned above are loosening those constraints.

The growth in Seed stage financings and late stage, $100M+ “mega rounds” have been profound. Yet, traditional Series A/B VC has been relatively flat

Seed funds are typically good at syndicating but few are in a position to lead a Series A round.

Lots of Indians; not so many Chiefs.

2. Series A funds are demanding more traction from startups than in the past.

3. Many traditional early stage VC firms have increased AUM and moved later stage.

The Road Ahead

01.11.21

4 Expectations for Tech and VC in 2021

The year fast coming to a close was unlike any other in our lifetimes. In prior posts, we shared our observations on the state of venture and tech as the market swooned; we foretold the waning influence of Silicon Valley as smaller ecosystems benefited from the exodus of tech talent (and now VCs) from the Bay Area; and, during the market’s March bottom we made our Bull Case for why LPs should stay the course and continue investing in the VC asset class, market gyrations be damned.

1. The “decoupling” of capital and geography, accelerated by Covid-19, expands and matures.

2. Numerous unicorn companies will be built on the Zoom platform as remote work becomes the new normal.

3. The “creator economy” picks up where influencers left off, enabling talent to go direct, own their brands, and their audiences.

4. Innovation and disruption in venture will continue to fuel a renaissance across the asset class.

10.29.20

Silicon Valley’s 70-year dominance in tech is ending…and that’s good for tech.

Earlier this month Stripe announced its $200mm acquisition of Paystack, a fintech startup from Lagos, Nigeria. For an African startup to exit at a meaningful figure at all is unusual enough, but that it had garnered a $200mm price tag would have been unfathomable by most observers a few short years ago — even by those long evangelizing Africa’s ‘emerging tech hub’ bona fides.

However, to certain observers and cross-border venture investors, such as us at Catapult, who’ve spent years shuttling between tech hubs outside Silicon Valley, stories like that of Paystack are becoming increasingly common. More to the point, they are a harbinger for things to come vis-à-vis Silicon Valley’s waning influence on the tech landscape; something that’s been underway for the better part of a decade and now accelerated by an order of magnitude by the impact of Covid-19.

The Rise of ‘Tier 2’ Tech Ecosystems Globally

While renown tech hubs such as Stockholm (Spotify, Klarna), Toronto (Shopify, Ecobee), and Tel Aviv (Waze, Mobileye) have generated significant technology companies for some time, the number of large exits originating from those geographies has skyrocketed in recent years. While this is to be somewhat expected, what is surprising is the emergence of technology leaders and meaningful exits from hubs heretofore largely dismissed by market observers. Think Dubai, and Uber’s $3.1 Billion acquisition of Dubai-based Careem; or Bogota’s Rappi and its rise to unicorn status; or Seoul’s Baemin, and its recent $4 Billion acquisition by Delivery Hero. Yes, Stockholm, Toronto and Tel Aviv are probably top of mind with most VCs by now, but I’d wager Dubai, Bogota and Seoul weren’t exactly on most investors’ bingo card.

It’s axiomatic that Silicon Valley has enjoyed an outsized reputation as the leading global tech hub since the 1960s and has cast a long shadow over the industry for decades. Silicon Valley lore is rich with heady tales of the days of Fairchild Semiconductor, XeroxPARC and the like. Technologies that emerged during that era changed the world. Talent attracted to Silicon Valley to work at those iconic companies would form a diaspora that would go on to build the next generation of technology juggernauts — Apple, Intel, Sun, Cisco, et al. The names of tech visionaries from that era and those of the investors behind them — Tom Perkins, Don Valentine, Gordon Moore, et al — are etched into the psyche of every entrepreneur and VC who came of age in the post-dotcom era.

From a geography to a State of Mind

We are a long way from the days of XeroxPARC and Fairchild Semiconductor, to be sure. Once just a patchwork of fruit orchards, Silicon Valley has become much more that its geography or its storied history.

Today, Silicon Valley is not unlike “Wall Street” or “Rodeo Drive” — iconic names that evoke in those that hear them ideas about something larger than the physical spaces they encompass. They’ve come to symbolize an idea, a culture, even a way of thinking. 

Most people across the world will never visit Wall Street nor Rodeo Drive, but their mere mention evokes an instant impression. This is true of today’s Silicon Valley. For many it means bold innovation, wide-eyed optimism, and limitless possibilities. And it will continue to have that meaning for decades to come, I am convinced. But it can no longer hold claim that it has cornered the market on those attributes.

Visitors who, after having consumed Valley lore for years, finally set foot on Silicon Valley’s nondescript 48.6-square-mile patchwork of land often come away disappointed. New York City, this is not. Perhaps it’s the boulevards that stretch endlessly and are dotted with manicured office parks and unremarkable strip malls filled with every suburban cliche’s smorgasbord of nail salons and karate studios. Perhaps it’s the lack of a thumping, thriving center. Or perhaps it’s the absence of iconic landmarks. (No, the Facebook “Like” sign on 1 Hacker Way does not count.) While turning David Packard’s Palo Alto garage into a Hewlett-Packard museum was a nod in the right direction of honoring some of the Valley’s great history, there is still scant little else for a tech tourist to come and see and do.

Wall Street, for its part, does not really exist any more in any literal sense either. Most iconic Wall Street firms moved out of Wall Street — and many even out of NYC entirely — in the wake of 9/11. Judging by the number of global financial services firms operating, one could argue that the real Wall Street today is located in Hoboken, New Jersey; or in City of London; or, in Frankfurt. So much for the power of place. But it doesn’t really matter that most ‘Wall Street’ firms don’t have a footprint on Wall Street any longer. And it won’t really matter for Silicon Valley either.

Geography no longer really matters

This wasn’t always the case. One could argue that twenty years ago if an entrepreneur wanted to build a global technology company he/she would have been well-advised to do it in Silicon Valley. The common argument was to liken being in Silicon Valley to being in Florence during the Renaissance. At its peak, Florence possessed perhaps the world’s greatest of network effects: a flammable combination of art, innovation, commerce and mentorship that became the envy of the world. As author Daniel Coyle explains in The Talent Code, “Davinci studied under Verrocchio. Verrocchio studied under Donatello. Donatello studied under Ghilberti. Michelangelo studied under Ghirlandaio. Ghirlandaio studied under Baldovinetti. And so on. All of them frequently visiting one another’s studios in a cooperative competitive arrangement that today would be called social networking.”

Like Florence, Silicon Valley possessed all the components and constituents necessary to build a global tech company — capital, investors, talent, co-founders, sage mentors, experienced service providers, and the like. Moreover, there was serendipity in being here — the launch parties; the Demo Days; the happy hour mixers at VC firms; the summer BBQs in Napa or Atherton; and, of course, the co-working spaces teeming with talented people working on exciting ideas. Above all, there was the knowledge that at all those events — both the exclusive and the pedestrian —talented people were ubiquitous. Any one of them could be your next co-founder, angel investor, mentor, or venture capitalist. They were everywhere; passing you on the street, or bumping into you at a launch party, or in line behind you at Blue Bottle. It was frisson. The energy was palpable. Everything was possible… And then Covid.

Being Remote and Global from Day One is now table stakes

Yes, the pandemic has caused a massive reappraisal of everything — which I’ve discussed in previous posts, here, and here — from sectors benefiting from the post-Covid environment to how venture is adapting. That said, while it’s a convenient argument, it’s inaccurate to assert that Covid was the catalyst behind this clear shift away from the Valley. As in so many things, the pandemic only accelerated — ok, vastly accelerated — trends that were already in evidence for some time.

Yet, now with no events to attend, few networking opportunities, and most everything being accomplished via Zoom, the pandemic has quashed one of the Bay Area’s most resilient arguments for tolerating the exorbitant housing costs and tax rates required for the privilege of living here.

As such, the exodus of tech talent and capital that began quietly over the past few years has reached full gallop.

A post-Silicon Valley world, facilitated by tech

Ironically enough, it has been technology itself that has enabled this dramatic shift away from the Valley. Today, startup teams can avail themselves of any number of tools and platforms —Slack, Asana, GitHub, Trello, et al — which enable them to be global from day one. The competition for tech talent is so fierce and global that startup founders must pursue the best talent wherever it exists, geography be damned. That often means that a startup might have a nominal presence in the Bay Area for fundraising, but maintain a Sales & Marketing effort in NYC, a DevOps team in Kiev, and a back office or distribution center outside Scottsdale, or Nashville, or Bangalore. Indeed, the notion of having all members and all functions of a technology startup based in high rent office space in downtown San Francisco became obsolete with the Palm Treo.

This has scrambled the long-held notions of geography and labor markets. And that’s a good thing. Tech companies will become more diverse as the labor pool widens. No longer locked into a Bay Area-centric pool of applicants from which to choose — who typically must be reasonably affluent to even live here to begin with — tech companies will cast wider nets to source the best talent from across a broader socioeconomic, educational and ethnic spectrum. This will result in a more diverse, inclusive workforce which will result, over time, in technology products and services with greater reach and that can address more fundamental global challenges.

The pandemic-fueled Bay Area tech exodus is accruing to the benefit of global tech hubs

In the absence of the world which existed prior to February 2020 where Bay Area startups expected their employees to come into the office, where meet-ups were the norm, where conferences were ubiquitous and in-person, and where Bay Area evenings and weekends were humming with live music, and a bustling food and bar scene, the Bay Area has experienced an exodus of tech talent of almost biblical proportions. As just one metric, San Francisco apartment rents have now plunged 31%, year over year — the largest in the nation. Geographies benefiting from this influx of ex-Bay Area tech talent? Colorado, Texas, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington State, to name just a few.

Venture capital investors have, for their part, largely moved in lockstep with their portfolio company founders. At least in spirit. In the early days of the pandemic, many senior GPs at established funds turned their weekend homes into temporary offices. At first, most believed the lockdown would last just a few weeks. Then the weeks became a couple months, which became seven months, and which will likely be a full year before most VCs are allowed to return to their pre-Covid offices. In that time, most VCs have found that they’ve adapted extraordinarily well to investing remotely. Investment pace in 2020, particularly at early stage, has been nothing short of ferocious; and, most venture funds have continued to raise new vehicles.

The Bay Area may be going through a painful realignment but the tech industry has already largely adapted and is de-prioritizing the Bay Area as a place to source, found and build great companies going forward. Moreover, Silicon Valley VCs have been increasingly investing outside the Bay Area with some funds opening offices in Europe, Asia and elsewhere to deploy capital in those markets in a more fulsome way. And this accrues to the clear benefit of emerging tech hubs around the world which, at least for now, universally enjoy lower tax rates, lower rents and operating costs, less team attrition, and more rationale valuations for investors.

The Road Ahead

It’s folly to ever count out Silicon Valley, and this post is by no means a take-down of the world’s most recognized tech ecosystem. Far from it. A native New Yorker, I moved to the Bay Area to attend Berkeley as an undergrad. I founded three startups here as well as a VC firm that, as it happens, specializes in investing in emerging tech hubs outside Silicon Valley, while leveraging the deep networks my partners and I have built over many years of investing here so as to help those startups achieve global scale.

With the exception of two years in grad school in Philadelphia, I’ve called the Bay Area home since college. I was moved particularly by the Bay Area’s storied history of embracing the novel and the iconoclast. To borrow from a holiday film from my youth, the Bay Area was the Island of Misfit Toys. Those who thought differently, that were willing to challenge conventions, and that were perhaps a little out of the mainstream, were welcome here.

Failure and experimentation was a vital part of that history. But unlike in other parts of the world where trying a startup and failing might have meant a Scarlet Letter being stapled to your every job application for the rest of your career, failure here showed you had grit. You took a chance. You bet on yourself and your vision to build something worthwhile. You pushed the boat out, battled the currents, and put everything on the line. That was real world experience. And that experience was valued; sometimes, even saluted. If failure befell you and your venture, you’d always have a place to land. That was special, and incredibly rare.

Happily the rest of the world’s tech hubs have been studiously taking pages out of the Silicon Valley playbook for decades to help foster their own tech ecosystems. Some have succeeded better than others. Many still have work to do. But what’s clear now is that the vital elements that made Silicon Valley Silicon Valley 70 years ago — talent, capital, advisors, compliant governments, sane regulations, and a culture that embraces risk-taking rather than belittling it — are now in evidence in many ecosystems across the world. Silicon Valley seeded that.

Founding teams in those emerging tech hubs have no desire to uproot themselves to move to Silicon Valley to pursue their entrepreneurial dreams; happily, they no longer have to. They can now do it in their own hometowns of Barcelona, or Salt Lake City, or a myriad other locations. And the successes of those founders will create a new diaspora that will go on to found other great companies, or they will become angel investors, or venture investors, and become their own versions of the Tom Perkins’ and Don Valentines that had a such a profound impact on Silicon Valley. And, in the end that may end up being Silicon Valley’s greatest and most long-standing legacy of all.

05.27.20

4 Observations on the Current State of VC

A “new normal” is taking shape as startups and investors find novel ways to continue to innovate and support transformational companies.

In our last piece, 6 Emerging Tech Trends for a Post-Covid19 World, we discussed trends that we at Catapult were seeing emerge from the current crisis. The post focused on sectors and themes across the technology landscape that have been enjoying a Covid19 ‘bounce’ or, at the very least, renewed interest from tech investors who feel, as we do, that companies focusing in these areas are well positioned to benefit from the changes in consumer behavior and commerce provoked by the pandemic.

In this post, we’ll offer 4 brief insights into what we’re currently seeing in the funding environment. Hopefully, this will provide some clarity to startup teams, fellow venture investors, and limited partners (LP) who are seeking to best navigate the current market uncertainty and position themselves for the road ahead.

1. Portfolio ‘triage’ is non-trivial, but starting to abate.

As has been widely reported, many venture funds — especially those with established, mature portfolios — are having to spend much of their time going through their portfolios and systematically categorizing their companies according to immediate cash needs, runway, overall performance and other metrics. Funds are assessing their own reserves and having state-of-the-union type conversations with portfolio company teams to set expectations for the coming few quarters. This is particularly the case with funds with many mezzanine or later stage companies that have large cash burns and sizable headcounts that could require right sizing. Not surprisingly, this takes time to unwind as these conversations are complex, often uncomfortable, and can involve arriving at difficult decisions.

This presents obvious challenges to startups in a fundraising process that are seeking an audience with those venture funds that have largely turned their focus to internal matters. The good news, however, is that there are signs that this is beginning to abate. Shortly after the first market gyrations of late February, many funds got out in front of this cycle and began putting out their biggest fires first, which has allowed them to now slowly increase new deal originations and to have more ‘pipeline’ conversations with new relationships. As such, while getting on the Zoom schedule with a partner with check-writing authority at a fund that’s digging out of portfolio challenges is still difficult, it’s a lot easier than it was a month ago.

Clearly, this is also a fund-by-fund issue. Some firms with more troubled companies will be more preoccupied than others with firefighting distractions this year. Fortunately, this is not quite the case for newer funds without a legacy overhang of prior investments requiring attention. With valuations coming down, along with lower operating costs and more talent available, this is an exceptional time for newer funds unburdened by troubled companies to triage to be deploying capital on new investments.

2. Cadence of fundings at Seed/Early stage increasing whereas Mezz/Late stage companies still face challenges.

Of the investments that are closing, there is a clear bias toward Seed and early stage rounds. On one level, this is predictable: Seed/Early stage round check sizes are smaller; there is less of a company or product to diligence; and, funds are typically more comfortable approving and funding a $500k investment in a company they’ve never met in person than one they would for, say, $10mm.

On another level, this uptick has a lot to do with the market environment facing a Seed/early stage company versus a more mature one, and the kinds of expectations attached to a Seed investment. Investors understand that, typically, the first two years after funding a Seed stage company will be dedicated to building the product or service, not profitability or concerns about near-term macroeconomic conditions. In many ways, this makes a bearish market like the one we are experiencing now and will likely continue to inhabit for the rest of this year ideal for funding and growing a Seed stage company — a point we covered in detail in a prior post, The Bull Case for Venture Capital in a coming Bear Market.

In contrast, later stage companies are viewed through an alternate lens by investors and held to a different standard. The expectations are also different. Near-term market conditions carry much more weight; and, unless the company is in a sector that will likely be a clear beneficiary of Covid-19, those near-term market conditions are not terribly favorable.

Additionally, the pandemic has altered the late stage funding landscape which has, in turn, ratcheted up financing risk for many late stage companies that continue to burn cash. Six months ago when there seemed no shortage of Fund-of-Funds, Corporate Venture Funds(CVCs), and family offices eager to invest in promising later stage companies, financing risk was considerably mitigated. This is not the case today. While there is still a good amount of late stage capital available from non-traditional investors, it seems to be accessible now only by the strongest and most sought-after companies.

3. Overall mood improving as notions of the “new normal” come into view

While it’s still early days, in recent weeks the overall mood seems to have improved among broad constituencies in the asset class. The panicky nervousness of investors that seemed ubiquitous in the weeks following the market’s tumbles in late February and during the early weeks of shelter-in-place seems now to have been replaced with a more muted tone. Investors remain concerned, to be sure, but there now seem to be boundaries around those concerns and around what we can expect in the months ahead. Many investment mandates that were entirely put on hold in early March have now been re-activated. The performance the Dow, now that it’s recovered more than 60% of its losses since the market bottom in early March, has certainly helped; so, too, has the strong performance of the tech-heavy NASDAQ. This all serves as a harbinger that tech, writ large, is poised to perform well in a post-Covid world.

On the GP side, fundraising remains robust. There has been a record number of $1Bn+ venture funds raised in just the past quarter. While many of these fundraising conversations were already well advanced before Covid19 hit, there were still a number of funds that began marketing and had closes while the markets were just coming to grips with the pandemic. While some LPs have backed away from participating in these funds, there has been no shortage of other LPs willing to seize an opportunity to access a manager it long wanted to access and, thus, stepping in to take those available allocations.

4. Companies now need to prove they’re a Covid benificiary or are Covid-resilient

Finally, another evolution we are seeing is the kind of companies that are successfully raising capital now. While hotly competitive companies and those with high-profiles but perceived to only be temporarily impacted by Covid have closed financings in this environment, most companies securing new rounds are either clear beneficiaries of the post-Covid environment or possess a Covid-resilient business model. As such, founders are well advised to embrace the current market realities in their investor collateral and make a cogent case for how their businesses will prosper in this post-Covid world. Clinging to a marketing plan or investor deck from six months ago will appear to investors oddly tone-deaf. A better approach is to address the “elephant in the room” early in investor conversations, demonstrate how the current environment is ideal for the company’s product/service (or at least does not meaningfully impact it) and lay out a clear 18–24 month roadmap for how the company plans to navigate it successfully and emerge as an ostensible leader in its category.


04.26.20

6 Emerging Tech Trends in a Post-Covid-19 World

On January 30, the WHO declared COVID-19 (C19) a global health emergency. In the 9 weeks since, the lives of most everyone in the developed world has been radically altered.

Beyond the destabilizing personal and social impact of C19, the pace and breadth of these changes across the business world have been profound. As ones who’ve lived and invested through the dot-com bust and the Great Recession, as both company operators and as venture investors, we’ve collected our thoughts on some of the trends we see emerging from this current moment and how these shifts will inform future investment opportunities for venture firms and Limited Partners alike.

1. The Remote Workforce Collaboration Revolution shifts into hyper drive.

One of the clear early winners of the WFH boom has been the videoconference and team collaboration  platform providers and those companies providing related tools and services. As one oft-cited example of this, video conference company Zoom recently achieved a market cap of $45 Billion, making the 9-year old company worth more than General Motors. Granted, Remote Workforce Collaboration has been an active trend for some time — and a core investment theme for us at Catapult — as companies have increasingly sought to decouple their human assets (employees) from their physical assets (expensive offices.) This desire by enterprises, traditionally focused on cost containment, is not a new one. What’s changed has been how these same companies are recognizing more of the strategic advantages, not simply the cost advantages, in spinning up remote teams — i.e., speed to market, employee flexibility, the ability to access global talent pools, etc. While C19 clearly did not launch the remote workforce revolution, it has accelerated it dramatically.  As we exit this crisis, we expect the imperative to be ‘global from day one’ for many companies will become part of the standard operating playbook.

This will accrue to the benefit of not only those tools and technologies that facilitate these transitions, but to emerging tech ecosystems across the globe that can offer emerging growth companies many of the same advantages of a dominant tech hub, but with greater flexibility and at a fraction of the cost.

2. Digitally Native Brands extend well beyond CPG and Fintech.

Digitally native brands — those born on the web untethered from brick and mortar origins — is not a new phenomenon. Yet, it was only in the past decade that brands like Dollar Shave Club and Casper became household names and established in the business world firmament the direct-to-consumer (DTC) category. My partners and I were early investors in both Casper and Dollar Shave Club. Dollar Shave Club cleverly bypassed the Byzantine channel conflicts inherent in the razor blade industry and is credited with pioneering the now-ubiquitous subscription ecommerce model. Casper jettisoned the painfully inefficient and expensive showroom sales model and offered no-questions-asked returns policies to gain early adopters. Predictably, in the wake of the huge successes of both DSC and Casper, there has been an expansion of the DTC playbook well beyond CPG. Neobanks or challenger banks are one example from the Fintech world but there are many others. We expect to see a continued and rapid expansion of digitally native brands that will sweep across dozens of categories and sectors where, heretofore, such brands were not considered viable.

As discussed above, the C19 age is rapidly decoupling physical assets–be they office space, showrooms, bank branches, or retail stores–from the sale of goods and services. For some time now, consumers and businesses have been increasingly comfortable transacting in a virtual world that offered little to no human interaction. However, what we now see are more consumers and businesses preferring to transact that way. For many, the less human interaction in a transaction, the better. As such, today’s virtual experience is no longer considered a poor replacement for an in-person transaction; it’s often considered an improvement over it.

3. VR/AR & Immersive Experiences come of age.

Roughly a decade ago, a new wave of Virual reality/Augmented reality (VR/AR) technologies emerged, generated a great deal of interest and fanfare in the tech community, and went on the raise sizable amounts of venture capital. One notable company, Oculus, went on to be acquired by Facebook for roughly $3BnShortly thereafter, however, investment activity in the sector cooled significantly. Candidly, many of the early technologies were still quite crude: serviceable enough to play certain games but not of a professional grade sufficient for most business applications. Unable to shake the market impression that they were niche-y toys, most of these technologies were not deemed serious or reliable enough to become mainstream. However, C19 is now fueling a renaissance in the VR/AR space, which now includes other fields in the broad “immersive experience” genre. This renewed interest in VR/AR technologies is spurring new investment and innovations designed to shed the “gamer” associations which bedeviled prior VR/AR technology generations. We expect to see a new crop of companies (and new investments) focused squarely on developing hardware and software solutions aimed at vastly improving the current state of VR/AR and, in so doing, extending into new categories and applications within enterprise/business services and ecommerce heretofore not considered practical or viable for prior VR/AR solutions.

4. GovTech accelerates

One bright story which has been lost in the drumbeat of dour C19 news has been one of how a tiny country on the Baltic Sea not only managed to effectively weather the C19 crisis, but how it is leading the way for other nations on how best to protect itself from the next one. That nation is Estonia. At the onset of the crisis, Estonia did what most other European countries did. It closed its borders, shuttered its schools, and prohibited the operation of businesses where people gathered. While Estonia still experienced C19 casualties, it did not experience civil unrest. Perhaps it is because Estonia’s economy is almost entirely digital and, as it happens, one of the nations best prepared for the consequences of a pandemic. Most of Estonia’s government services are entirely digital. Voting is done online, and a single piece of I.D. stores a citizen’s person information, which includes health, tax and police records. Except for marriage, divorce, and the transfer of property, every other transaction can be (or must be) done electronically. As such, when the government ordered its citizens to work and study at home, it cause barely a ripple. As we exit this crisis, we expect to see renewed interest and investments in the broad GovTech space; technologies and that facilitate the migration of municipalities — and, indeed, entire governments — to predominantly (or exclusively) online services and solutions.

5. TeleCommuting/Virtual work elevates its image

On a personal level, we have all learned, at rapid speed, how much can be moved online with minimal friction. The C19 crisis has forced so much into the virtual sphere that it has unquestionably caused a reappraisal of what being “virtual” means and its value to both consumers and enterprises. For decades, “telecommuting” was often viewed skeptically by many traditional corporations. Employees that telecommuted — either for necessity or lifestyle reasons — were often viewed suspiciously by management and even fellow employees. Were they really working the hours they insisted they were working? How effective were they outside the office? How could they possible be ‘in the loop’ when not physically in the office and privy to the water cooler conversations that often sets a company’s culture? Would their ‘virtual’ status hurt them when promotions were on the line?

C19 is not going to settle all those issues, but it is lending a legitimacy (and, now, urgency) to telecommuting and is elevating the practice. More seriousness is be given to virtual work and virtual teams. Millions across the globe are, at this very moment, upgrading their WFH set-ups and creating virtual Zoom backgrounds. Millions more are finding that they have been surprisingly productive in a WFH context and are rethinking the traditional ‘5 days a week in the office’ routine which defined much of their professional lives. Across the country, companies are evaluating how when the crisis lifts whether it makes sense to reconstitute their teams entirely back in their offices as they existed pre-quarantine or, perhaps, shift to flex time.

Companies around the world are having these conversations. By their very nature, tech companies have more experience working with distributed teams. As such, their transition to even further virtualization and distributed workforces will be easier. More traditional companies that have been reliant upon the classic centralized workforce playbook and have struggled to adapt to the recent WFH mandates will continue to experience challenges, but the evolution is decidedly taking place.

6. The Virtualization of (almost) everything

Finally, as discussed above, the rapid migration of so much of what we do and how we interact to a virtual context is stretching our notions of what can exist virtually and what cannot It will also lead to new categories of experiences that will exist only in a virtual context. As VR/AR/Immersive Experience technologies improve, they will no longer be utilized to replicate a poor facsimile of an experience better had in person and in real time. Peloton is one company that’s pushing the boundaries in the fitness space by creating a user experience that’s more than just a grainy virtual reproduction of what attending an in-person spin class would be. Peloton — not a Catapult portfolio company; we’re just fans — has integrated novel technologies and features that create a rich user experience that even the most highly advanced state-of-the-art fitness facility would find difficult to match. Nowadays, fitness centers are scrambling to add technology features to their facilities to compete with Peloton.

Given the rabid devotion of many of Peloton’s fans, the Company is clearly doing something right. Beyond just virtual representations of a brick a mortar experience, we expect to see a wave of new experiences — in entertainment, sports, education, healthcare, etc — designed entirely to be consumed virtually, with no brick and mortar counterpart. These experiences will leverage the idiosyncratic advantages of being virtual to make them unique which, by their very nature, will create competitive moats.

In conclusion, as saddened as we are by the human and economic toll of C19, we at Catapult remain sanguine about the future of tech innovation and the investment opportunities that will emerge from this crisis. The themes discussed here are just a handful of the trends and behavioral shifts that we are already witnessing and serve as a harbinger for what’s to come in the months and years ahead. We believe these themes will present enormous market opportunities for those investors and company leaders that stay the course.

As a famed investor commented during the last market reset, fortunes are made and lost during times of transition. The ‘fortunes made and lost’ part is a bit premature to assess, but we are certainly undergoing a time of profound transition. If history is any guide, the tech sector will withstand current market headwinds better than most and those investors and companies that remain disciplined and engaged will weather this storm and emerge stronger for having done so.

03.27.20

The Bull Case for Venture Capital in a coming Bear market

Don’t fear the bear. History suggests that we may be entering a superb time for tech investing.

 A Black Swan Health Crisis; Not a Tech-lash

As sad and horrific as the human toll of COVID-19 is, from a market perspective what we are experiencing is not akin to the wholesale collapse of tech valuations following the dot-com bust of 2000–01. COVID-19 was (and is) a black swan health crisis, not a tech-specific market selloff.

While some recent tech IPOs have not fared well, the reasons for the public market’s lukewarm response to those debuts have more to do with the underlying fundamentals of those businesses. It should be noted that the market has not soured on tech companies per se; it has soured on wildly unprofitable tech companies with wobbly unit economics, unsound management practices, and still-unproven business models.

While a bear market will encourage investors to be even more skeptical of such businesses — and, in some cases, to conduct actual due diligence, not simply the illusion of due diligence — it will not unduly prejudice the technology sector.

Bear Markets present exceptional opportunities to build sustainable businesses

While it’s true that great companies are founded in all markets, as is often repeated, some of the biggest technology names were formed during challenging economic times: AirBnB (‘08), Yammer (’09), Square (‘09), Stripe (‘09), Facebook (‘04), Uber (‘09), Groupon (‘08), Playdom (‘08), Adobe (‘82), and Microsoft (‘75), to name just a few.

Arguably, a bull market may be the most challenging time to launch a startup. Witness what we’ve experienced in Silicon Valley and in a handful of other established tech hubs in recent years: a ferocious competition for talent; unprecedented hiring challenges and wage levels; costs for office space and service providers at all-time highs; tight housing markets; skyrocketing rents and living expenses for employees; community backlash; and so forth.

While a bull market might more easily enable a budding entrepreneur to secure funding for her lofty startup vision, it often enables many other budding entrepreneurs to secure funding for directly competitive ideas.

Those startups are then forced to exhaust a good amount of their investors’ capital competing against each other and not focusing on the incumbents. In the end, the infamous Peter Thiel quote proves accurate: an enormous amount of the venture capital that startups raise in a bull market ends up in the pockets of landlords, service providers and of companies like Google and Facebook, not taking on incumbents and building sustainable businesses.

Bear Markets ‘lower the volume’ so teams can focus

Great companies and robust products take time. In frothy markets, startups feel undue pressure to continue raising capital and guarding their flanks against competitive startups launching in their wake, seemingly every week. In a bear market, there’s a flight to quality and, as a consequence, fewer competitors are securing funding. As such, those teams that do raise capital can actually focus on building a great company, a robust product and a sustainable market position. And, unlike in bull markets, startup CEOs are not unduly preoccupied with team attrition; their best engineers are not constantly being poached by better funded, more established rivals. Team cohesion improves as a result.

Bear Markets typically generate better venture returns

Correspondingly, bear markets are exceptionally good markets in which venture capitalists and limited partners should be actively investing. Much as startups can take advantage of a less hectic pace to build consequential companies, venture capitalists can also spend more time with their portfolio companies to coax those companies into their fullest expression. VCs still must work as hard as ever, but the focus seems more channeled and directed, less scattered, and less driven by FOMO.

Moreover, the trickle down benefits of a bear market to a venture investor — lower OPEX costs for one’s portfolio companies, more available talent, more rational valuations, a smaller competitive set, etc — has the effect of making a GP’s capital go a great deal farther than it does in a frothy bull market. And those lower valuations and longer runways for portfolio companies for the same invested capital has a direct and positive impact on venture returns.

For LPs, similar dynamics are at play. Historically, the best VC fund vintages tend to have been those that were invested during bearish markets. For LPs to step away from venture now when valuations will almost assuredly come down, capital will go farther, and ownership stakes for that same capital will increase, would be a mistake.

LPs that were spooked after the dot-com bust and sat out the 2002-06 period missed the Consumer Internet/Web 2.0 wave and some of the best VC returns in a generation. Similarly, those that retreated following the GFC of 2007–08 missed enormous returns generated in the venture asset class from investments made in startups between 2009 to 2015.

Tech Innovation does not stand still

The global technology innovation boom shows no sign of abating; if anything, it is accelerating. Technology progresses irrespective of where the Dow sits that week. Moreover, in turbulent times there is an even greater focus by both enterprises and consumers on controlling costs, which naturally favors startups deploying technology solutions to drive efficiencies.

At Catapult, which has a specific focus on investing in emerging tech ecosystems outside Silicon Valley, we spend a great deal of time in nascent tech hubs across North America, the EU and Central/Eastern Europe. In our extensive travels, we have found that it is in some of the most under-served markets like Istanbul or Tbilisi where the entrepreneurial spirit is most in evidence; and those markets have virtually no venture capital ecosystem to speak of; just incredibly resourceful entrepreneurs with an indomitable spirit to compete and win.

And whether a startup team is in Kansas City or Kuala Lumpur, it is most likely using Slack, or Zoom, or Trello, or any number of workforce collaboration platforms that can enable it to be both globally competitive and cost competitive as it sources the world’s best talent, regardless of where it resides.

Today’s worries over COVID-19, unnerving as they are, will only accelerate interest in companies and investors squarely aimed at fueling the current remote workforce collaboration revolution. This is a core investment theme at Catapult and an area in which the partners have been long-time investors. As the COVID-19 crisis abates, whether in weeks or months, there is no reasonable likelihood that interest in remote workforce collaboration will suddenly go fallow. This is not just a trend; it is a fundamental shift in how enterprises and workplaces will look and function going forward. There is no going back from this.

Silicon Valley, which has enjoyed a 70-year reign as the world’s dominant tech hub, will likely experience a contraction in job growth and economic expansion during the coming cycle. However, we believe this contraction will ultimately accrue to the benefit of the Pittsburghs, Berlins, Lisbons, and Barcelonas of the world where technical talent has quietly been coalescing, where valuations and costs have remained reasonable, and where low cost of living and quality of life has long been a draw for the well-educated, newly affluent and tech-savvy.

In Summary: Tech and VC is increasingly a global driver of economic growth.

Finally, while a bear market may temper the rate of the current global innovation boom it will by no means extinguish it because the catalyst behind this period of innovation has little to do with capital and much more to do with the irrepressible entrepreneurial spirit and with the desire of founders to apply technology solutions to address fundamental global challenges.

It also has to do with increasingly compliant governments around the world that see the promise of technology innovation to re-tool their economies from those long driven by old world industries like mining and manufacturing to ones that prioritize high value intellectual work and entrepreneurship. This, in turn, stimulates job creation, quells the brain drain, expands the tax base, and creates the flywheel effect of a robust tech hub, which attracts future generations of visionary founders to those geographies.

With the recent advancements in workforce collaboration technologies and the availability of low cost bandwidth and cloud storage, addressing these challenges becomes a question principally of ingenuity, not capital. And there will always be sufficient capital for mission-driven founders with bold ideas that are addressing fundamental problems and have the potential to achieve global scale. For us at Catapult, we’re excited by the enormous opportunities in the years ahead for tech innovation and tech investment and we’re decidedly open for business. You should be as well.

03.09.20

Traditional Late Stage VC is Being Disrupted. Here’s How:

Venture capital is experiencing a sea change. Consider just a few of the things we’ve witnessed in recent years:

  1. A 20x increase in the number of seed funds deploying capital in and around Silicon Valley since 2009. (I credit Ahoy Capital’s for this stat.)
  2. Most legacy firms raising larger and larger funds with every fund cycle, with a few notable exceptions. This upward migration has caused many of these same Ivy League venture names to largely move away from Seed stage investing and, in some cases, even move away from what was traditionally considered “early stage venture investing.”
  3. The rise of fast-emerging ‘Tier 2’ tech ecosystems outside Silicon Valley that are catching up quickly with Silicon Valley and now challenging the Valley’s once-indisputable hegemony as the dominant ecosystem for tech innovation; and, finally,
  4. The flood of late stage investment capital and an influx of new investors, many of whom are recent arrivals to the asset class.

While each of the first 3 bullet points would individually merit an entire post to its examination (which I may explore in a forthcoming piece), it is this last point on which I want to focus. I believe mature and maturing tech companies will be funded in coming years in fundamentally different ways and from fundamentally different types of investors and investment products from what we’ve traditionally seen. With those changes, I believe we are seeing some structural and lasting changes in the late stage venture landscape and a possible winnowing of pure play late stage-only venture firms unable to adapt to new market realities. Allow me to lay out some of the elements to this argument…

1. The ‘arrival’ of debt

While private debt, in some form or fashion, has been around the venture ecosystem for decades we are undoubtedly seeing a renaissance in the perception of debt and its utility as a means to fund emerging growth companies. With this renaissance comes a long overdue re-appraisal of some of the less-than-favorable connotations about debt — some fair, many antiquated — that have traditionally soured venture investors and founders on debt as an funding option. There is also a newfound recognition that as technology companies mature and as their revenues achieve a level of predictability the notion that equity is the only “tool for the job” for accelerating growth is being challenged. A number of recent blog posts on the subject — Alex Danco’s ‘’ stands out here; Ali Hamed’s ‘’ picks up where Alex left off and adds nuance — have elevated the conversation further within venture circles. Both are worthwhile reading.

I agree with many of the arguments posited therein; namely, that debt will become a more common tool for financing later stage, mature technology companies that enjoy predictable revenue streams, high customer retention, and long-term customer contracts.

As more technology companies mature and develop revenue models that possess these characteristics, the argument for raising large amounts of dilutive equity for these companies becomes more difficult to make. I expect to see a marked increase in the number of institutional investors offering low cost, highly flexible, minimally dilutive, innovative debt structures to mature technology companies. In many ways, these firms and their offerings have already arrived.

2. The influx of ‘non-traditional’ late stage investors

Late stage venture investing has long held a broad appeal to a wide swath of investor types: from pure-play late stage VC firms, to corporates and strategics, to non-traditional types such as (SWFs), family offices and financial investors typically known for focusing on other asset classes, such as hedge funds and real estate. What’s different today is the dramatic increase in the number and the activity of these more ‘non-traditional’ groups on the venture stage.

In addition to active LP groups that are banding together to invest later stage in co-invest deals (see #3 below), corporate/strategic investors, financial investors such as hedge funds, and arms (CVCs) have also grown in prominence in recent years. By some estimates, strategics/corporates and CVCs are more active now than at any time since the peak of the dot-com era. While some detractors may argue that these groups have been known to abruptly shutter their VC investment arms or curtail their activities at the first hint of a market downturn, this current trend feels different. Many of these groups seem more thematic and committed to the asset class this cycle. The strategic imperative of corporates building a pipeline to access emerging technologies and innovations is more acute than ever and, some might argue, somewhat inelastic to market gyrations in the fiercely competitive environment that corporates find themselves in. As such, when the inevitable downturn comes, I don’t believe we’ll see the exodus of CVCs and strategics as some cynics might predict. Many appear to be here to stay.

3. The boom in late stage co-invests and in ‘going direct.’

In the current climate, most every LP active in the venture asset class will profess that they are interested in seeing and investing in . At my firm, , we see the same dynamic. My partners and I have been venture investors for 15+ years and have invested more than $660mm in 275 companies in the aggregate, so we are fortunate that many of our prior portfolio companies return offering us allocations in their follow-on rounds. Often the allocations are too large for our Main Fund but perfect to share with LPs interested in co-invest opportunities in highly vetted, de-risked later stage companies. Like many VC firms, we offer late stage co-invest opportunities to LPs as a kind of “membership has its benefits” perk to them for being investors in our fund.

This increased appetite from LPs for late stage co-invest opportunities has added a fairly new dynamic to the late stage venture ecosystem. It has also extended the reach of VC firms that would typically not be very active after, say, Series B. Today, with LPs willing to provide capital to enable VC firms to continue to support their breakout companies, these firms can now lead and follow on in these rounds in ways that would not have been possible a short time ago.

Moreover, some () and institutional investors have developed discrete programs to productize late stage co-invests, essentially providing seed and early stage VC firms with a turnkey solution to offer allocation opportunities in later stage companies to LPs.

Finally, in addition to going the co-invest route, more LPs are simply ‘going direct’ in venture opportunities. By building robust deal sourcing mechanisms and instituting some process and post-deal support, these LPs are bypassing the VCs altogether. Yes, there are myriad pros and cons to taking this approach, which has been of late so I won’t rehash them here, but it’s axiomatic that this is occurring more frequently now and altering the landscape.

4. The ‘platforming’ of VC firms and the advent of the Opportunity fund.

These days, it seems that if you throw a rock down any street in downtown San Francisco or Palo Alto you will hit five seed stage VC firms that recently launched a ‘Continuity’ or ‘Opportunity’ fund to sit alongside their seed stage-focused Main Fund. The logic behind these vehicles is obvious: more capital to continue to support a VC firm’s breakout companies as they scale and require more capital. These Opportunity funds also enable the VCs themselves to maintain or even augment their ownership in the underlying companies rather than incur the equity dilution from not following along in subsequent rounds in a fulsome way. Where these vehicles differ from the late stage co-invests discussed earlier is that these Opportunity funds are discrete, committed vehicles established and managed by the GPs, whereas late stage co-invest opportunities are simply allocations offered to a firm’s LPs without any obligation on the part of the LPs to invest in those companies.

As discussed earlier, the increased presence of these Opportunity and Continuity funds is enabling more seed and early stage VCs to continue investing larger amounts and at later stages of maturity than before, which is impacting the value proposition of a new, late stage financial investor — who might only be contributing capital and ostensibly some growth stage operating expertise and capital markets expertise — coming into the round.

5. More investor syndicates keeping their best companies “in the family”

Finally, and perhaps most controversially, there’s been a trend in recent years of syndicates of seed and early stage investors choosing to continue funding their breakout companies themselves rather than, as they once did, taking their best companies to late stage institutional firms when growth stage capital is required. Some investors have taken to calling this practice “keeping it in the family.”

Part of this rationale is returns driven. The most famous (or infamous, depending on your perspective) example of this was being the sole institutional investor in By providing essentially all the venture money WhatsApp required, Sequoia went on to reap a to . Other firms have taken notice.

Another part of this trend is the benefit of avoiding the ‘upsetting the apple cart’ dynamic that often occurs when a new investor appears, especially if it’s a traditional late stage VC firm. That new investor routinely demands a Board seat, which in turn often necessitates a previous investor either reducing its Board involvement or stepping off the Board entirely. This is not always ideal or welcome. A well-functioning Board of Directors is a highly prized, somewhat rare, and delicate organism. Well functioning Boards often like to stay intact. As such, by contributing most of a startup’s capital requirements internally (or through affiliated groups that won’t require a Board seat) and not bringing in new investors there is a higher likelihood that the current Board composition remains unaltered.

Finally, ego and the tension that sometimes exists between early stage and late stage firms has a role to play here as well. Sharp elbows exist in all areas of finance; venture is no different. Some early stage investors admit openly that they avoid taking their best companies to traditional late stage firms where follow-on capital is required.

While this perspective may be an extreme one, in some ways this overall trend should not be surprising or discounted. As discussed earlier, more early stage firms are raising larger sums of capital themselves, either in a Main Fund or through a platform strategy/Opportunity fund, or through partnerships with their LPs or other groups. With more capital around the table, the imperative to go outside to raise late stage capital from new financial investors is mitigated significantly, notwithstanding some of the signalling issues inherent in inside rounds with no new investors joining. With capital abundant for great companies, late stage investors have to compete fiercely to put capital to work in the most sought-after companies. As such, Boards of directors can be very picky in choosing which late stage investor should be given the opportunity to invest. In most of these cases, the late stage investor who is ultimately selected is bringing more than capital to the table. This gives a significant advantage to a strategic investor or a CVC who can deliver highly desirable channel partnerships, domain expertise, cross-border capabilities, a name association “halo” effect, and a plethora of other advantages far greater than simply capital.

In Summary

As is often said about the venture capital asset class, investing in venture capital is playing the long game. VC funds are typically closed-end, 10-year vehicles (with 1–3 year extensions) and it can take years for trends to appear, the dust to settle, and for industry standards to emerge. Portfolios take a long time to mature. Venture investors often won’t know for many years whether they are any good at venture investing. As such, I am not predicting the end of the traditional late stage VC firm. Indeed, some traditional late stage firms have been superb partners to many of my portfolio companies, have added real value, and have been great to work with. That said, there is no denying that the landscape of late stage venture capital has changed in fundamental ways. With more ‘platform’ VC firms building a latticework of multiple funds under management, with innovations in debt structures and new funds deploying such solutions, with more non-traditional investors active in the space willing to right sizable checks at generous terms, and with more early stage investors reluctant to go outside their syndicates for follow-on capital unless that capital comes with very specific value-adds, I believe how late stage technology companies will be funded going forward has being altered dramatically and both the value proposition and the future of all but the very best late stage venture firms is in question.

02.20.19

Joy Raises $10M Series A

End-to-end wedding management and services platform Joy recently announced the close of its $10mm Series A round, led by Avalon Ventures with the participation of Sound Ventures and the support of existing investors. The company has been accelerating nicely and establishing a solid position in what is inarguably a crowded space for wedding apps, platforms and service providers. Building a business that demonstrates solid network effect in the wedding space has long been the holy grail of the sector. Due to the seasonal and cyclical nature of the wedding business, the question becomes how does a wedding-focused business build a strong brand and virality and repeatability when its customers are typically single use. As such, it is critical to provide real value to the broader ecosystem of wedding guests, venues and service providers; and we think Joy has done a masterful job of provider a simple, elegant solution that drives value across that ecosystem.

The fresh capital will enable the company to continue building out its suite of solutions and to expand its team. More information on Joy can be found here.

02.20.19

20 Questions with Jonathan Tower

Jonathan Tower, Managing Partner, Catapult

The following is the transcript to an interview with Catapult Managing Partner Jonathan Tower that appeared on Taiwanese Television Network, CTV. The interview was conducted in Taipei City, Taiwan on January 25, 2019.

Q: Welcome back to Taipei City. You were here only a couple months ago. What brings a venture fund from Silicon Valley all the way to Taipei?

While Catapult is headquartered in Silicon Valley, the firm has a global investment orientation. It’s a guiding principle of the firm. We’re focused on working with the best entrepreneurs wherever they compete that are developing meaningful, transformational innovations, and we’re committed to helping those companies achieve global scale. That’s our core value proposition. Geography is not a gating issue for us.  And we have a specific focus on investing in underserved markets outside Silicon Valley, which would include a place like Taipei.

Q: But you still invest in Silicon Valley, yes?

Of course. Silicon Valley has been a dominant innovation hub for decades. Historically, we’ve been very successful investing in Silicon Valley companies, and we will continue doing so. But the tech innovation story is no longer just a Silicon Valley story. Great entrepreneurs and transformational innovations are coming from every corner of the globe, not simply from Silicon Valley. And those startups are typically utilizing the prevailing technologies of the day which are making the world a lot flatter and, hence, mitigating the traditional barriers of geography and time zone differences.

Q: How so?

Well, whether you’re a startup based in Mountain View or Madrid you’re likely using something like Amazon AWS and any number of technologies like Slack, Github, Trello, or Asana which are all making working across disparate teams in multiple time zones both more effective and efficient.  Moreover, your customers are likely global customers and—unless your product or service has a particularly high-touch local context like prepared food delivery from local restaurants, for example–your customers likely don’t care where you’re headquartered.

Q: True, but what about the concerns about finding talent?

Great teams and great talent are bubbling up from everywhere. When you look at the smaller tech hubs what you often find are many of the same characteristics that made Silicon Valley into the Silicon Valley we know today: world-class universities and research institutions; a great quality of life; an affluent, tech savvy, well-educated population; a deep pool of technical and creative talent; and so forth. What’s not in evidence in most of those smaller innovation hubs is a robust venture capital ecosystem and sufficient mentorship and know-how to help those startups scale beyond their local ecosystems which, by their very nature, are too small.

Q: What about the argument about talent in Silicon Valley being better than that elsewhere? Or that entrepreneurs in other geographies are not as ambitious?

I think these are stereotypes. I spend much of my life on airplanes crisscrossing the globe and I’ve met with all manner of entrepreneurs. I’ve concluded that any notion that only Silicon Valley entrepreneurs have grit or hustle, or a strong work ethic is nonsense. Of course, there are cultural differences here and there. But that does not mean those differences are inferiorities. In many ways, entrepreneurs in smaller geographies, or “geos,”  have more of a chip on their shoulder precisely because they know their home markets are small; so, they must think global from day one.

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“…any notion that only Silicon Valley entrepreneurs have grit or hustle, or a strong work ethic is nonsense…”

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They know that most venture investors will insist that their startups have the potential to expand to the major geos – north America, greater Europe, Asia, and so forth. Dominating a small geo that’s not growing much is like saying you’re the prettiest ballerina in Amarillo. In other words, no one cares. The pond you’re swimming in is simply too small, and the startups you are competing with in that market are not strong enough.

Q: We’ve read recently that there are now more people moving away from Silicon Valley and the Bay Area than moving there. Is that true?

That’s accurate. There has been an exodus of startups away from the Valley and toward other markets—some nearby and some farther away. There is a talent shortage and operating costs have soared. Other areas are picking up the slack. Oakland is booming, for example. Los Angeles is experiencing a nice growth spurt with new VC funds focusing on the region. We like Nashville and Miami also. It’s happening all over. This is not necessarily at the expense of Silicon Valley, mind you. Like I said, the Valley is not going anywhere. It’s a tremendous ecosystem and has had a remarkable track record. But, as I mentioned, we are in a global tech innovation boom. And I’d say we are in the 2nd or 3rd inning of this boom, so we have a long way to run. And, ironically, it is technology itself which is enabling these startups to exist anywhere and to become successful.

Q: Is this apparent exodus of people and startups from Silicon Valley a cost issue?

Partially, yes, but there are many factors. The Bay Area has long been one of the most expensive places in the world to live and/or operate a business. That said, it’s an amazing place and will always attract people and companies that want to be here.

The challenges of living here and/or running a company here are non-trivial, however: hiring, real estate, legal, healthcare, overhead, the constant fear that your best talent will be poached, etc. Many companies are finding it difficult to remain competitive in Silicon Valley so you are seeing some companies move elsewhere and/or have their workers be remote.  A top engineering candidate in Silicon Valley might be 2-3x as expensive as a comparable hire in a Tier 2 market. This has real impact for both companies and investors.

Q: How so?

Well, for one thing, your capital does not go as far in an expensive market. As an investor, I want Catapult’s portfolio companies to have enough capital to achieve their objectives, but I also need to be efficient with my firm’s capital, which comes from our limited partners. In a perfect world, an early stage venture investor wants to take as little financial exposure as possible while its startups are navigating the high-risk stage of getting to product-market fit.  It’s not clear there is a real business there yet. Seed stage investing has a high morbidity rate because startups are iterating on lots of new ideas. Perhaps there’s a crude product. Maybe there are a few pilots underway. Perhaps there are beta customers. That’s often about it. There is still much that must be de-risked. As such, you don’t want a lot of your precious capital going to landlords and the like when it needs to be allocated very deliberately to investing in whether there is a real opportunity.

Secondly, by its very nature, a less expensive market will give you a longer runway. A modest seed round in a Tier 2 market might provide a company 18 to 24 months of runway. In a more expensive market, perhaps it provides 8-12 months of runway. That’s a huge difference in terms of how far along a startup can develop its product and business before having to return to the capital markets to raise more money. As an early stage investor, I would much prefer that my portfolio company teams be working heads-down on product for 18 months or two years and building something amazing than them having to return to the capital markets in 8 months because they’re running low on cash due to high operating costs. This is a huge advantage of operating in less expensive markets.

And, third, there is the management distraction and the all-consuming nature of fundraising. Every VC wants their companies back at work and every entrepreneur I know wants to get off the fundraising trail and back to focusing again on the business. If you can extend the length of those fundraising cycles, all the better.

Q: Do you see this trend of “remote work” as a fad or a long-term trend?

I prefer to characterize this as “decentralizing the enterprise,” and it’s a theme we have been thinking about a lot.  And I do consider it a long-term trend. We are seeing more companies embrace the notion of hiring the best people and teams wherever they exist, geography be damned. And it’s a big departure from the BPO (business process outsourcing) trend of the early 2000’s. It’s no longer about outsourcing call centers. I issued a term sheet for a company a while back where the CEO was based in Seattle, the company’s sales and marketing team was in New York, all technical development was in the Ukraine, and they were a Delaware C Corporation. So you have to ask: where do you exist as a company?

This distributed nature of enterprises creates all kinds of opportunities. It also means great talent does not need to uproot itself to work in its chosen field. It’s becoming more feasible than ever to stay put, live where you wish to live, raise your family where you to wish to, and have a fulfilling career in your chosen field. I think this is very liberating and very exciting—for companies, for their employees, for communities, etc.

Q: We’ve read that talent retention tends to go up outside Silicon Valley and other dominant tech hubs. Do you find that to be the case also?

I think that’s true. The battle for talent is very real and it’s probably most fierce in places like Silicon Valley where the sheer number of startups means talented hires have lots of options of where to work. Moreover, bear in mind that that talent is being fought over not simply by other startups, but by the tech juggernauts as well—Google, Facebook, etc—and they have almost unlimited resources with which to woo the best. And that level of competition drives up compensation and people churn more as a result.

Q: You mentioned that underserved markets had many of the same characteristics of Silicon Valley but on a smaller scale, but that they lacked mentorship and other requirements. What did you mean?

One of the primary challenges we find in many underserved markets is that their venture capital ecosystems, processes and infrastructure tend to be relatively immature. Obviously, this is a generalization and there is wide variation in the issues being faced in a more mature tech hub like, say, Toronto and those in emerging hubs like Nashville. But, for many emerging tech ecosystems one of the primary challenges for startups is finding sufficient venture funding options and sufficient mentorship. In many emerging hubs you might have some active angels and a few regional VC firms of some consequence locally. But oftentimes, those angels and VCs are little known outside that local ecosystem and have little to no footprint in Silicon Valley or other dominant VC hubs. The established VC firms simply don’t know them well.

The challenge this presents is that a startup in a small geo can often times be successful in securing capital locally from angels or seed VC funds, but fairly quickly they exhaust the local VC ecosystem long before they’ve gotten to a scale where they can attract a branded VC firm from Silicon Valley or elsewhere that can help that company achieve global scale.  And this presents a problem because many established Silicon Valley firms have gone on to raise increasingly larger funds in recent years. With more capital under management, it becomes difficult for larger funds to justify making small investments in markets that are thousands of miles away. As such, many established funds prefer to wait to invest into a startup that is far away in a market they don’t know well until that startup has gotten to some level of scale, but the Catch-22 is that often these startups never get to scale because their local ecosystem of VCs are not able to continue to fund the company for it to reach the level of scale that it would need to attract an established Silicon Valley VC.

Q: Hence, the Catch-22?

Precisely. At the end of the day, venture capital is a relationship business. VCs typically like to work with other VCs that they know and like and have collaborated with in the past. They have built up scar tissue with these other VCs over good investments and ones that fared poorly. There is a trust that is created over time. These networks are built by having co-invested together. Unfortunately, when a startup is not funded by well-known investors, and is not demonstrating very compelling traction, and is in a small geo far away from established VC hubs, it presents a real challenge.

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“…a startup in a small geo can often secure capital locally from angels or seed VC funds, but fairly quickly they exhaust the local VC ecosystem long before they’ve gotten to a scale where they can attract a branded VC firm…”

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Fortunately for us, my partners and I have been investing in Silicon Valley for 10+ years over dozens of companies, so our networks here are well-developed. Having done this a long time and having established a strong track record with tier one VCs, I think I can say with some immodesty that we are now a respected “feeder fund” to established VC brands. Our reputation precedes us now such that when we fund a company and make an intro to an established VC firm we’ve worked with in the past, that firm—assuming the startup is a fit for their stage and sector focus—will take the company into consideration because of the degree of social proof that our involvement provides. This, of course, does not guarantee that one of our portfolio companies will be offered a term sheet from one of these VC partner funds but it certainly helps connect our portfolio companies to global pools of capital, which is one of the most important things a seed or early stage investor can do for its portfolio companies.

Q: Do most established Silicon Valley VC firms avoid underserved markets?

Not all the big firms avoid small markets, but many do when the startups are very early.  There are reasons for this. Like I’ve mentioned, VCs like to refer deals to one another and like to work with other investors they have some reputational currency with. That’s why you rarely hear a VC admit that he or she financed a startup that came in from a cold email over the transom. VCs like opportunities to be referred by trusted sources. In smaller geos, that’s harder. The local investors are typically not as well known among the established VC community. There hasn’t been an established track record of companies emanating from that ecosystem. It’s harder for the established VCs to diligence that opportunity given they likely do not know many people in that ecosystem—other investors, founders, partners, etc—with whom they can run reference checks on the founders, help with recruiting, and so forth.

Then, there are the partner dynamics at that firm and the post-investment issues. What partner will want to fight the good fight at the Monday meeting trying to convince the other partners why he or she is spending time chasing a seed stage company with a Cap Table of investors that the firm does not know, that’s perhaps thousands of miles away, where there are no ways to clearly diligence the opportunity, and where it is not clear who would be supporting the company or taking a board seat post-investment. For these and many other reasons, established VC firms prefer to focus on companies closer to home and that come through established networks they already have and only consider startups far away when they are much further along in their evolution.

Q: So how do startups coming from these smaller hubs resolve this challenge?

Well, the throwaway response is to build an amazing business such that no one can ignore you. But the more practical approach is to work with investors who can help you bridge the gap between your local VC ecosystem and the more established VC and strategic partner ecosystems in Silicon Valley and elsewhere. Work with investors that are willing to invest in your company when it’s still early but can really add value when you are ready to tap into global pools of capital. Ideally, have an least one investor around the table that can bridge that divide. Having many local angels might be sufficient to get a first product out, but they probably don’t have more capital to deploy beyond their initial check nor the credibility to bring in tier one VCs from Silicon Valley or elsewhere when the startup is ready for its next round. Those investors also might not be as conversant in knowing what established VCs want to see in terms of metrics and traction to support a next round.

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“…work with investors who can help bridge the gap between the local VC ecosystem and the more established VC and strategic partner ecosystems in Silicon Valley and elsewhere…”

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One of the advantages of being in Silicon Valley every day as we are is having that granular sense of what’s happening here on the ground among the investors and helping our portfolio companies navigate that opaque environment. What are the themes that VCs here are thinking about? Which sectors are in vogue; which are overfunded or out of favor? What firms are ascending. Which partnerships are imploding? Which partners are on the way up; which partners are transitioning out? Which firms just raised a new fund and are actively looking to deploy capital, and which firms are at the end of their fund life? This may seem like a lot of ‘inside baseball’ but it’s critical when contemplating a fundraising process. When a startup’s investors are far away or are not actively networked in Silicon Valley, that level of detailed market knowledge is missing from the equation. The net effect can often be a lot of wasted time pursuing and pitching the wrong investors, or not being aware of the right investors who might resonate with the company and the offering because the company’s existing investors don’t know who they are and/or how to approach them.

Q: Are you implying that most startups still need to raise capital from Silicon Valley to scale their businesses and/or to be taken seriously?

I’m not suggesting that all top VCs are based in Silicon Valley, or that they need to be. Fortunately, there has been a boom in new VC firms forming across the globe. This is great for founders. And, to be sure, there are many highly respected VC firms in smaller geos. My point is that in order to build dominant global companies it is often necessary to have investors that are global as well. And even with the boom in new VC brands, many of these new firms are sub-$50mm funds and focused on seed. Having firms that can straddle those stages and geos is vital.

Additionally, most of the venture capital being deployed on the planet is still being deployed in the US; and within the US, Silicon Valley is far and away the dominant VC ecosystem. Silicon Valley still holds tremendous sway in the VC/tech economy and is a powerful brand in its own right. There remains a powerful halo effect that is conveyed to a startup when an established, highly respected and recognized Silicon Valley VC leads a large round. This is particularly true when the startup had its origins elsewhere. It creates positive signal.

Q: What other differences are you finding in your travels to these emerging tech hubs? Are you investing any differently by looking outside Silicon Valley?

It’s axiomatic that every ecosystem is idiosyncratic and has its pros and cons. When Catapult was founded a lot of time was spent in the formation stage studying how other firms had successfully and not so successfully navigated the challenges of investing cross-border. Obviously, Catapult would not be the first firm to look for startup opportunities in markets far away. We quickly determined that “drive by” investing, however, does not work.

Q: What do you mean by that?

What I am referring to is the practice of flying into a market once a quarter, holding a couple days’ worth of meetings with founders and other investors, and then flying back. That approach doesn’t work. To invest successfully, a firm needs to make a commitment to the ecosystem and develop a ‘boots on the ground’ approach to deal sourcing and post-investment support. This does not necessarily mean spinning up an office in that locale and taking on the OPEX burden of doing so, but it does mean having resources there 24/7. For us, we have adopted a seed scout or venture partner strategy. Our Seed Scouts are often angel investors we already know and have co-invested with in the past, former and current founders the firm has worked with in the past. and people like that who have strong deal flow from the area but are not institutionalized in any sense. They might be writing small checks on their own but that’s it. We bring them onto our platform, provide more capital for them to deploy on our behalf, and share economics with them on investment on which we collaborate. It’s a win-win. These relationships provide us local and cultural expertise in a new ecosystem, and a point person to lead investments and provide mentorship. It also provides the firm an asset who can liaison with the constituencies in that ecosystem daily – coffees with founders and angels, meetups, launch parties, demo days, and the like – and build our brand and our access to great founders and opportunities, writ large. The net effect is to provide Catapult first look at many, if not most, of the exciting startups emanating from that emerging ecosystem in ways that other VCs simply won’t have.

Q: Have you identified areas of strength or differentiation in these ecosystems?

Like I said, there are innumerable differences in these emerging tech hubs. We have a thesis around identifying ‘centers of excellence’ and investing in those areas. When you consider many of the emergent areas of what’s often referred to as ‘frontier tech’ that’s garnered a lot of attention these days—artificial intelligence, machine learning, autonomous vehicles, and so forth—you find that many of the strongest technology teams working today and focused on these areas are coming from smaller tech hubs than Silicon Valley. Take AI, for example. I’d wager that it’s hard to argue that a fund is a serious investor in AI if they are not spending a lot of time in Toronto, or Pittsburgh, or Tel Aviv and speaking with the incredible teams working in those geos. The same can be said for Fintech and places like London, Atlanta and Frankfurt. And there are many others. Therefore, it stands to reason that if a fund has a strong investment thesis in any of these areas they need to be investing in the best teams in these sectors, and these teams are often coming from smaller geos.

Q: How many markets do you focus on now?

We have identified a dozen cities in North America and Europe where we have now or will have shortly a local investor working with us as a Venture Partner or seed scout.

Q: How do you think about Asia?

Obviously, I am a fan of Asia and am closely watching the different ecosystems here. I am in Taiwan today, I leave for Beijing tomorrow. I was in Tokyo in September. Later this quarter I will be in Southeast Asia. I am meeting with all manner of founders, strategic partners, limited partners and co-investors that could work with us here over the long haul. But, for the moment, we are focused on the markets we have already identified. We are still on Fund I and not entirely done with fundraising, so we are being cautious and calibrated in how we scale the firm. But, for sure, there are enormously exciting things happening in Asia and I am confident Catapult will be here in due time.

Thanks for your time. We are excited with what you are doing. Please let us know when you are back in town and we will catch up again on your progress.

Will do. Thank you for having me.

04.10.18

Our Investment in Preemadonna

We are excited to announce our investment in Preemadonna, an emerging consumer lifestyle brand and the company behind the Nailbot, a robotic manicurist which uses a smartphone camera to print full color art on nails in seconds. The Nailbot uses Bluetooth to decorate each nail with only a swipe. Artwork from a smartphone—think photos, emojis, logos, or a custom design—can be rendered into nail art through Nailbot’s inkjet-based technology, which combines the phone’s camera, machine vision and other technologies.

We’re pleased to be participating in this current round alongside Halogen Ventures, SOSV, Draper Fisher Jurvetson co-founder Tim Draper and prominent angel investors. Our journey with the company began in the fall of 2014 when we first met Co-founder, CEO and “lead Preemadonna” Pree Walia. For the next few years we tracked the Company’s progress, including its successful turn at TechCrunch Disrupt SF in 2015, its inclusion as one of only five companies admitted to an accelerator program created via a joint venture between Founders Factory and beauty juggernaut L’Oreal, and at a myriad of other events where the Nailbot was an instant favorite despite a heady field of competitive consumer hardware offerings. At every turn, we have consistently been impressed by the team’s grit, tenacity and vision in taking Preemadonna from raw concept to a company that is now poised to become a leading lifestyle consumer brand with a specific focus on young women.

At Catapult, we found Preemadonna an attractive investment on a variety of dimensions. The Catapult team has a long history of success investing in disruptive ecommerce companies and consumer brands competing in the lifestyle and beauty category, most notably Dollar Shave Club (acquired by Unilever for $1Bn), Jet.com (acquired by Walmart for $3.5Bn) and Madison Reed, a leading subscription ecommerce company focused on women’s hair color and haircare, using chemical-free, fragrance-free and sustainably sourced products. While these companies differ in many ways, the commonality across them was their focus on enormous markets that had seen little innovation in decades; that were rife with channel conflicts and inhabited by complacent incumbents; and, where there existed few technology-enabled solutions. Our thesis behind the investment in Preemadonna was a direct distillation of our experience as investors in DSC, Jet and Madison Reed and our recognition that the nailcare category was another enormous market that was both ripe for a disruptive technology-enabled solution and where a new brand entrant that could build community and fierce loyalty among young women could spur real innovation in the category and delight users. Finally, Preemadonna aligned well with the Catapult brand, culture, how we think about supporting female founding teams (Pree’s co-founder is hardware engineer Casey Schultz), our proclivity for startups tackling relatively overlooked but large markets, our desire to invest in robotics companies focused on the consumer space, and our desire to support mission-driven startup teams that adhere to common goals of diversity and inclusion and are focused on building companies that can achieve global scale.

Yes, Preemadonna is tackling an enormous market opportunity in the nailcare segment. That’s axiomatic. Yet, it doesn’t stop there. The founders have a broader vision of empowering young women and girls by creating technology that nurtures self-expression and originality while simultaneously spear-heading a technology movement in the beauty and lifestyle category. We’re excited to join Pree and the Preemadonna team on this journey. We think there is a great deal of white space ahead and we feel Pree and Casey are the right startup team to coax Preemadonna into its fullest expression.