I remember in the early days of Beyond Pricing, I always hated when a VC would focus on how we could become a unicorn.
We had a great idea, the market needed it, and we were growing! Heck, we probably had product market fit! Why wouldn’t you invest us!
Turns out, there’s some pretty basic math behind why a venture capitalist needs to hear a plausible story about how, in ten year’s time, your company could be worth $1 billion.
Venture Capital is an Asset Class
The first thing to recognize is that a venture capital fund, to those who invest in it (LPs), is just one of many other funds or other places to invest. These LPs can be university endowments, family offices, wealthy individuals. But they are all measuring the venture fund based on its returns compared to other places they could put their money. A very common benchmark is what you could make by just putting your money in an S&P 500 index fund. While that varies from year-to-year, the long-term averages is around 8% annual return.
So if you’re going to invest in a venture fund, which is inherently more risky than the S&P, you’re going to hope to get a decent premium to that 8%. By most standards, a decent VC annual return is 10% after fees, or 12% before the standard 2% annual fee VCs charge LPs. Moreover, the average fund will last 10 years. A little bit of simple math shows that the total amount of cash returned to the investors after 10 years needs to be over 3x the invested capital to hit that annual return target (1.12^10=3.1x). So a $100m fund needs to return $300m to make its investors a small premium over the S&P to account for A LOT more risk.
There’s been a lot written about VC math here and here but you can see both in the examples in those posts and in this spreadsheet which you can download and play around with, there’s almost no reasonable way to get to 3x without at least one $1 billion company in your portfolio as a seed investor. And if a fund can’t get to 3x, the investors were likely better putting their money in the S&P.
(Note: all of these analyses are oversimplified back of the envelopes and don’t model out the full impact of dilution and many other things that move the needle slightly one way or another)
With a fund with 20 companies (which is fairly typical), you would need two companies to sell for $300m, three for $100m, and four for $50m (along with some smaller exists or returns of capital, though that doesn’t affect the outcome much). Nearly 50% of your portfolio would need to sell for $50m or more. The actual average is closer to 10%.
A more likely (and still unlikely given the low percentage of VC funds that actually hit a 3x return) scenario if you’re lucky is to have a single unicorn, one that sells for $100m, and two that sell for $50m. In that scenario, over 75% of your returns are from the unicorn (which matches the general power law in venture capital)
So How Do You Show You Could Be Worth $1 Billion?
This is where TAM (total addressable market) comes in and why it matters. Basically, you’re trying to show, if everyone bought your product, how much revenue would that be. Then make some sort of assumption about what a reasonable market share would be (reasonable being the operative word; you should know what market share the most successful company in your space has and don’t assume anything more than that or risk losing credibility).
For instance, for Beyond Pricing we showed that globally, vacation rentals do about $180 billion annual in revenue. We charged 1% of revenue for our product. So our addressable (for our first product) was $1.8 billion. Given our first-move advantage, the tendency for vertical software products to achieve much higher market share than horizontal products, and the lack of well-funded competitors, we thought 10% market share was (justifiably) reasonable (and probably low). That would come out to a path to $180m in annual revenue.
You basically need to answer the question the VC has around what they need to believe for you to get to a certain amount of revenue. If they believe that’s doable, you’re in business!
The final question is, what amount of revenue equals a billion dollar company. I’ve written a bit about that before, but the key is knowing what the typical price-to-sales ratio is for your industry. In software, depending on your growth rate, that’s typically 6-10x revenue. If you’re building a venture-backed, billion dollar company, you’re probably growing on the fast end, so a 10x revenue multiple is reasonable, meaning you need to show a believable path to $100m in revenue.
That’s the magic number you’ll often hear a VC ask you.
What if there’s not a clear path to $100m in revenue?
If you can’t show that path, you probably have a really nice business but shouldn’t take on venture capital. There’s plenty of other ways to fund your business, but, as you can see from the math, venture capital just doesn’t make sense.