Securing Venture Capital, The Right Way
This article is written by Jeremiah Uke, a Contributor Author at Startup Istanbul.
Yoram Wijngaarde founded Dealroom.co in 2013, a platform that provides market intelligence to corporates, investors & tech companies to help stay ahead of the competition. Before that he worked for 10 years in investment banking, advising media, telco, and internet companies. At Startup Istanbul 2014, Yoram delivered a speech where he shared his startup journey and Dealroom.co with the audience.
Before founding Dealroom, Yoram made a safe choice by working at Lehman Brothers between 2004 and 2008 in the Media Investment Banking Group in New York and London. According to Yoram, Lehman had the biggest bankruptcy in the world. After Lehman’s collapse, 6 years after working in investment banking for the Wall Street firm, Yoram and two colleagues from Lehman created NOAH Advisors (also known as Noah Conference), an independent tech M&A boutique.
Yoram worked at NOAH from 2009 to 2013. Yoram completed 21 M&A deals with over $10bn in combined value and led the sale of Fotolia.com to KKR for $500 million, the acquisition of Bigpoint by TA/Summit ($350m) and the sale of Softonic to Partners Group (€275m).
Startups struggle when dealing with venture capitalists, being able to work with venture capitalists and acquire funds is a huge task on its own for entrepreneurs, getting it right or wrong most of the time sets the future of the startup and most times, you want to make sure you get it right, during his speech at Startup Istanbul, Yoram uses Dealroom to explain dealing with venture capitalists.
Dealroom allows you to work with top Venture Capitalist funds and super angels of your choice, the question to startups is “How many of you have made money from a venture capitalist, angel investor or super angel?”, once your startup is gaining traction, venture capital funds will come to you and show interest in investing in your business, the question now is “what do you do next?”. Historically, as a founder you basically have two options when you reach the point of interest from venture capital, one is to do everything yourself and the other is to hire an advisor.
If you do it yourself, you don’t have to pay anyone so you save a lot of money on fees, It also makes you in control of everything, but the disadvantage is that you do not have a network so you only speak with the people who have found you, and those might not be the best people to work with.
Also, you do not have any tactical experience so when a venture capitalist pulls up a contract and asks you to sign, you don’t really know what to do, you ask yourself questions like “is this the right moment to sign?”, “what happens if I sign?”, “do I speak with more people?”, “are they really going to give me the money or not?”, and if your talks with venture capitalists go the wrong way and don’t go anywhere, what do you do? . This happens a lot. In the news and around you, you only hear the success stories, but sometimes it can go wrong.
https://youtu.be/XftPqP3q1Kg