We sold Sparrow to Google with this model and the founders are now millionnaires.
but this is not what I'm saying. You're reaching profitability first and you're building a big company just after.
Market Size is the most important but it's not because your market size is big that you have to take risk and hit the wall without enough cash to survive. Profitability/Breakeven is giving you the time to raise as much money you need/want
Not in our case, we love startups reaching profitability by just raising a seed round. It's most of the time the best way to confirm that the business model is right.
It's also easier to raise a big round after that, invest a lot and grow.
1/ For next rounds, we are almost all the time leaving our seat to the new investor (if it's a good/great one. Not if it's a shark VC)
More than 50% of our 2010/ 2011/2012 investments raised a Series A, Series B and more. So nope, you're not right. We have excellent reputation in the ecosystem.
We invested in 220 startups. Had this right to join board everywhere and never used it until now but I still prefer to keep this right.
2/ Discordance between cofounders (in case they are not sharing the same strategy) is not always a startup implosion. Sometimes we just need to come and become the 3rd vote who can decide which founder strategy we will choose.
Agree with you, it's certainly better to be at the same place, but there are hundreds of counterexamples of huge successes with VCs not living near the companies. In Europe, Israel, Russia, we have plenty of them.
We are also investing with a lot of local investors and they are sometimes managing the local relationship (or mostly making things worse :-()
Last but not least, many of our companies are targeting a local market (China, India, Pakistan, Switzerland, France, Argentina, UK, Germany...).
They have nothing to do in the Silicon Valley.
The YC model is awesome.
No doubt on that.
but there is room for many other models.
(and thanks God, we invested in Rapportive before they went to YC ;-)).
Check also what my partner is building : 1000Startups, the biggest incubator in the world in the center of Paris
http://1000startups.fr/en/
Check the SLA on the homepage:
"-request the right to a board seat (2 founders, 1 investor) but we do not take the seat unless required to solve founder conflicts and have no intention to tell you how to run your company."
Wix and Zlio: We had the same investor. Mangrove. They discovered Wix when they came to Israel for a Zlio Board. They know own 25% of Wix.