Due to the fund economics of early stage investing it may not make sense to do a pro-rata, or follow-on investment with a $5M Series A in order to maintain our 20 percent. As the entrepreneur continues to raise capital, the early stage investors will continue to experience a valuation dilution or divergence in their investor shares, effectively

If a business loses customers, we can now turn that into a metric (churn rate) and benchmark it against an industry average. If the churn rate goes up slightly but most customers upgrade to a higher pricing tier, we can use dollar revenue retention to better understand business performance on a YoY (year-over-year) basis.

I would say relying on career fairs or job postings isn’t necessarily that helpful. I didn’t get any of my internships or jobs based off of those postings. It was all about reaching out to a person.

To layer your own insights on top of market data is always incredibly valuable. For instance, if a market does not have a current leader, this means there’s room for a newer startup to take over. After doing 20 minutes of research through my school’s database, I found out that there’s no real Uber or Seamless of edtech and the market is considered

Contracts for debt financing can also contain debt covenants, or requirements that a company may need to follow every quarter or risk defaulting on the loan. Such covenants usually require a company to hit certain performance metrics.

Free cash flow is also a metric to keep track of profitability. Positive free cash flow means a company is generating a solid profit. If the free cash flow is negative, it usually signifies that a company cannot cover operations solely from running the business. In the universe of early and growth stage technology companies, most business have not

Events are a shortcut to connecting and networking with venture capitalists, as well as entrepreneurs, and help you to land a job in the industry. Since VCs go to events and pitch festivals to find new companies, so should you. There are always startup events to attend.

In the 1980s, if a technology company needed to build a factory or buy several pieces of equipment, companies preferred to take out loans instead of giving equity away for something that was not directly linked to hitting the next milestone.9

A study by Bessemer Venture Partners notes that an acceptable annual customer churn rate is anything below 7 percent, which comes out to about a .58 percent monthly churn.15