When to try to raise a series A round? When you BOTH need the money to ramp up your work AND you are ready to take on investors who want at least a tenfold return on their investment.<p>Generally your series A investors will, between them, hold a majority of shares in your company. If you have enough leverage to retain a majority share for the founders and employees, you're probably already funding at least part of your work from revenue. In that case you may not desperately need the investment.<p>Before you raise a series A round, be sure you understand the meaning of "Participating Preferred Shares."<p>Don't celebrate getting a series A round by using some of it to buy fine wine (unless you're in the wine business). You wouldn't celebrate getting a payday loan either.
"The longer a company has been in business – or the less good a founder is at telling a story – the more concrete and certain the metrics of that business need to be. Part of the challenge companies that have raised too much seed money face is that the requirements they face for an A are significantly higher than for those who raise less. They generally wait longer for their As, so investors expect to see associated progress."<p>The tension that investors look at between time to executve and how much progress has been made is really interesting. Is the the time horizon (and thus expectation) very different for different industries? Is it relative to existing incumbents and competitors?
If you're raising 1M+ in the midwest, it's straight forward. Get a meeting with a VC associate in the region (Chicago: HP VC, Origin, OCA) and they will tell you exactly what they're looking for in a Series A.<p>I've never had any success with getting institutional money at the seed stage, but if you do get it, it's even easier to bypass some of the troublesome checklist items you get in the A round.
I work at a profitable product startup that has managed to avoid raising series A. As long as we can maintain the level of growth (which is honestly close to breakneck with integration work for each customer site) I think it's feasible to avoid raising/diluting while continue to grow but it's not the easiest experience I've had. Lots of blood sweat and tears, particularly from one of the founders.<p>I know some people might think the payout could be better raising series A and hiring to support growth as is the more common road. The founders are going a different route and so far it's going well. We can hire when we need to so not to worried there. I don't know if this is a weird case?
I think this more answers the question "when <i>can</i> you raise an A" than "when <i>should</i> you raise an A".<p>Series A and later are really helpful in growing quickly. You should raise a series A when it will give you a lot of growth per dilution -- that is, when you have a clear plan for how the money will help you grow quickly, and some evidence that your plan will actually work.
Hmm. I honestly prefer Manu's blog post and phrasing from 2012: <a href="http://www.k9ventures.com/blog/2012/05/31/hope-and-numbers/" rel="nofollow">http://www.k9ventures.com/blog/2012/05/31/hope-and-numbers/</a>
I think the other article referenced ( <a href="https://blog.ycombinator.com/process-and-leverage-in-fundraising/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.ycombinator.com/process-and-leverage-in-fundrai...</a> ) provides better guidance, specifically :<p>> Because most venture returns are driven by a tiny number of companies, investors know that they need to invest in those companies in order to make money.<p>The trick, then, is convincing investors that your company will be one of those outliers.<p>The missing part in this article about "when", imho, is that _when_ might have a lot to do with the timing of a startup's outlier story and how well it matches with a particular VC's fund size.
I found a series A to be very ambiguous. Some people thought of it as a big late-stage seed and others had more series B type expectations.<p>IMHO the series thing is outdated. Just call it R0, R1, R2, R# where # is round number and be done with it... or move to a continuous fine-grained fund raising model.
> This sounds good, but we’ve seen As happen for Saas companies with ARR between $200k and $9m with plenty of companies failing all along that range.<p>Is that intended to say failing or falling?
akharris --<p>Any pointers on the most polite but firm way to defer speaking with investors when you're not ready to raise?<p>We just raised Seed, and get 5-10 inbounds per week asking about Series A. I usually write something like:<p>"Thanks for the note. We recently closed our seed round and are not looking to raise at the moment. But we will definitely reach out when that changes."<p>Hopefully that's not too curt/dismissive? Thanks in advance for any tips.
TLDR<p>"...this doesn’t provide the sort of certainty I know founders want in answering the question of when to raise. However, I think that knowing that there is no clean answer is important because it provides a framework for thinking through the relative advantages you have when thinking about a raise."
Tldr, series A is a balance between traction or more young, charismatic ivy league graduates. The less you have of one the more you need of the other.<p>I'm always amazed how much it takes for people to say pretty simple things.