SEOmoz started the VC process in June 2009, in possibly

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The worst climate for fundraising since 2001. You can see the stark contrast from our timing with the previous round in, arguably, the best environment since 2000. VC Invested 2007-2009 Graph of Venture Capital Invested by Quarter (via NVCA) Ventue capital is "expensive" money, not just in terms of the price paid in equity, but in the obligations and requirements that come with it. In our Series A, we took money more like a seed investment – Michelle & Kelly saw potential and wanted to see what could happen.


Raising another round meant aiming to hit the "home run." For those who are unfamiliar, the startup world has built an entire lexicon around the "seriousness" and exit-size focus of a company russia email list that ranges from "lifestyle" businesses that don't try to achieve multi-million dollar scale to "home runs" that exit for $1billion+. Note that there’s plenty of criticism of this model from both the venture side and from entrepreneurs and operators. Lots of other blogs have talked about the imbalance in interests between founders and investors and current market conditions vs.




expected VC portfolio returns. I won’t re-hash these, but as a broad overview, most venture funds have 100s of millions of dollars from their LPs (Limited Partners – folks like large endowment funds, pensions, government entities, extremely wealthy individuals, etc). In order to provide significant returns, they follow a model of investing in a few dozen startups, most of which will go bankrupt and, hopefully, 1-3 of which will provide most of the profits in billion dollar+ "exits" (an acquisition or IPO).