From time to time, we meet super ambitious teams with a unique insight around a big problem and a roadmap to take their solution to the market.  In these cases, teams are complete, the early product is in production and there are signals of some product-market fit, represented by a few loyal, paying customers.  They have done a remarkable job taking their idea to this stage and now need venture capital to accelerate their go-to-market.  They also rightly expect to be rewarded for the good job they’ve done with a high pre-money valuation.

The scenario I describe above is ideal for us, as an early-stage VC with a fund size of $150m.  It ticks many of the boxes we look for in our pipeline and typically we decide to extend a term sheet.  However, frequently, the valuation we attach to the business is lower than the team’s expectations.

The primary reason for this is that at the stage we focus on, the ultimate success of these companies is dependent on multiple factors, all resulting in a positive outcome.  Not only does the team have to continue to execute brilliantly, but their competition also has to execute more weakly and the regulators need to cooperate and the business cycle has to continue strongly and their market needs to grow as they predict, and so on and so on…

Their ultimate success is predicated on a long list of combined probabilities.  Facing these types of “butterfly effect” business models, one needs to take into consideration the resulting long odds of success and price investments accordingly.  Compounding probability is a notion that is not obvious to many founders.

Today UIPath announced its new round of funding taking the company to a post-money valuation of $1.1b (The news had leaked on Friday and Techcrunch had already run the story).  I actually dislike the unicorn fetish and find the obsession with it meaningless, but I could not resist the headline of this blog post.

What is great about the story at UIPath is that it’s a validation of a key thesis of ours at the Earlybird Digital East Fund:

Innovation is not under the monopoly of Silicon Valley and bright engineers from underserved venture capital markets will continue to build great companies.  There is an attractive VC opportunity in focusing on regions with a strong tech talent base.

Congratulations to everyone involved, starting with Daniel and Marius, my partner Dan Lupu, who was the first to spot the talent in the founding team, Ondrej, Reshma, and Luciana, who have been on this fantastic journey.

I am a product of a rationalist education. After my schooling, my career progressed in a way that made me more of a disciple of the rationalist cult.  As a strategy consultant, we were brought in to be analytical, usually getting rewarded for overly complex models and frameworks that our clients used to make decisions (or, more often, validate decisions they would like to make).

My rational mind was also in the driver’s seat when I launched my first startup in 1999.  It was the first time I was facing critical decisions about the strategy and tactics around a company, and I found it easy to build analytical frameworks for those decisions.

1999 was a horrible year to start a digital business.  From the peak of the dot-com bubble, we hit the crash head-on.  The next few years were full of anxiety, tough choices and blood, sweat & tears.  It was then that I realized that in a lot of the decisions we were making as a team, my co-founders and I were also relying quite a bit on our intuitions.

Following my exit, I returned to my hometown of Istanbul and started to get to know the startup landscape there.  I found myself falling back into my analytical habits.  Perhaps, the lack of familiarity made me suspicious of my intuitions.

Now that it’s been 12 years since I have been back, I find that my intuition is playing a larger role in how I make decisions.  As a VC, we spend a lot of effort looking at data and building frameworks around sectors, markets, and companies.  However, I keep getting amazed how well my intuitions generally guide me.  A lot of my regrets were results of me ignoring my intuitions.  One of my 2018 resolutions is to focus more keenly on that inner voice.

This was inspired by a post on the great Farnam Street blog.

Since the dot-com boom in the late 90s, the venture capital industry has become a popular pop culture topic.  The mythology around young executives getting to place bets on the future of technology with other people’s money has a certain appeal.  Add to that the irrational exuberance of the 90s, the stories of overnight fortunes and the drama of the crash that followed, and the public interest in the industry was firmly cemented.

Since then, the fascination has only grown.  We’ve had the Hollywood take on how tech innovation and VC works in The Social Network.  VCs such as Peter Thiel, Jim Breyer, Fred Wilson, Marc Andreessen and Bill Gurley have become household names.  Charismatic founders like Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Reed Hastings, Jeff Bezos, Travis Kalanick and Evan Spiegel are now celebrities.

The price our industry pays for this popularity is what we are now witnessing, with scandals like those at Rothenberg Ventures, Binary Capital and 500 Startups,  and the fight on the board at Uber becoming front page news.  This public drama has its toll on VC firms and startups involved.

I’ve been thinking that what we see in Trump’s White House must be making the writers’ job at House of Cards very difficult.  Now I am thinking the same about the writers at Silicon Valley.

In the business of financing technology businesses, one of the most tricky areas is how you treat the forecasts in the pitch decks.  Typically, you are taking a very limited, usually heavily biased, data set and using it to provide a baseline for forecasting a much longer trajectory.  If you are familiar with probability, you’ll know that while this is possible, the result will have a very low confidence level.  Therefore, you need to discount these forecast very, very heavily.

I was reminded of this when I read the Bloomberg New Energy Finance press release on Electric Vehicle sales forecasts.  The headline is that Electric Vehicles will Accelerate to 54% of New Car Sales by 2040.  I a sure there’s sound methodology behind this work, and the resulting graph looks great:

Now, please consider that Tesla Roadster, the first street-legal, serially produced EV with a viable range was introduced in 2008. When you are taking a 1% market share figure and growing it to 54% over 25 years, a tiny variance in that slope can end up with a vastly different figure.

As a VC, you come across enough forecasts to intuitively discount the out years.  This is not really a science but more of a sense.  However, it can make a massive difference in the eventual exit size and how much capital the business may end up consuming.

It would not be controversial to classify 2016 as a tough year, both in Turkey as well as the rest of the world.  We have seen increased terror attacks globally, and surprises like the coup attempt in Turkey, the Brexit vote and Trump’s election.

Startups require relentless focus on execution.  Yet, founders are human and they, like everyone else, are vulnerable to the distractions caused by the barrage of shocking events.  Add to this the ups and downs of a startup – landmark client wins, finding your company in the headlines, your competitors releasing new features, your co-founder leaving… The list can go on for pages.  With this much hitting a founder’s psyche, they have to work hard at keeping their focus and not get swayed too much by external factors.

I’ve always felt that helping our founders absorb these shocks is one of the ways we as investors and board members can be valuable to our portfolio companies.  We are there to remind them that it’s usually not as bad (or as good) as it feels at the moment, and that they are in a marathon, not a sprint.  They need to keep their  dual focus : one eye on the horizon, at their destination, and the other one on their desk, at their immediate next step.