Tag: EC Column

Posted on

The 5 biggest mistakes I made as a first-time startup founder

Rami Essaid Contributor
Rami Essaid is co-founder and CEO at Finmark, a technology company that provides financial planning and modeling software for startups. He previously was co-founder and CEO at Distil Networks, a bot attack mitigation company acquired by Imperva.
More posts by this contributor

June 4, 2019 should have been one of the happiest days of my life.

At 11:30 a.m., a press release hit the wire announcing that the cybersecurity company I had spent more than eight years building was being acquired by a larger cybersecurity player.

What’s not to love about a successful exit? I’d be set financially, the investors who had given us $70 million would make money, and the technology we created would get new legs in an organization with broader reach and resources.

Still, I had regrets. For one thing, I initially hadn’t wanted to sell. (More on that later.) For another, I was nagged by the feeling that our company had fallen short of its true potential, and that the reason was me — specifically, several rookie mistakes I made as a first-time entrepreneur.

I don’t stew about those errors any longer. In fact, I believe my miscues at my first startup will help define my career from here on out. That’s why, as I grow my next company, I’m thinking about not only the things I want to do but those I’d never do again.

Here are five of them.

Trying to do too much myself

In management theory terms, I was a “pacesetter.” I’d be the first to jump into any project or task, I’d execute it as quickly as possible and I expected everyone else to keep up. I thought that was how a startup leader acted — super helpful and scrappy.

But it came at a big price: disempowerment of the team. I was hoarding not only control — nobody felt like they personally owned anything — but also the institutional knowledge that needs to be spread around as a company grows. I became a human GPS: People could follow my directions, but they struggled to find the way themselves. Independent thinking suffered.

I became a human GPS: People could follow my directions, but they struggled to find the way themselves. Independent thinking suffered.

After a few years, I had a frustrating sense that I had all the answers and no one else did. Well, no wonder.

I’m now leaving the pacesetting to NASCAR and marathons.

Thinking people can read my mind

I believed all I had to do was say something once and everyone would get it. I became irritated when that didn’t happen. “We talked about this three months ago,” I’d bark. Intimidated team members would say to themselves, “Yeah, but we really only got 50% of it.”

Posted on

Fintechs could see $100 billion of liquidity in 2021

Jake Jolis Contributor
Jake Jolis is a partner at Matrix Partners and invests in seed and Series A technology companies including marketplaces and software.
More posts by this contributor
Dana Stalder Contributor
Dana Stalder is a partner at Matrix Partners, where he invests predominantly in fintech, consumer marketplaces and enterprise software.
More posts by this contributor
Ben Altshuler Contributor
Ben Altshuler is a partner at Matrix Partners who focuses on fintech and infrastructure investments.

Three years ago, we released the first edition of the Matrix Fintech Index. We believed then, as we do now, that fintech represents one of the most exciting major innovation cycles of this decade. In 2020, all the long-term trends forcing change in this sector continued and even accelerated.

The broad movement away from credit toward debit, particularly among younger consumers, represents one such macro shift. However, the pandemic also created new, unforeseen drivers. Among them, millennials decamped from their rentals in crowded cities to accelerate their first home purchases to the benefit of proptech companies and challenger mortgage players alike.

E-commerce saw an enormous acceleration in growth rates, furthering adoption of online payments platforms. Lastly, low interest rates and looming inflation helped pave the way for the price of Bitcoin to charge toward $30,000. In short, multiple tailwinds combined to produce a blockbuster year for the category.

In this year’s refresh of the Matrix Fintech Index, we’ll divide our attention into three parts. First, a look at the public stocks’ performance. Second, liquidity. Third, we highlight one major trend in the sector: Buy Now Pay Later, or BNPL.

Public fintech stocks rose 97% in 2020

For the fourth straight year, the publicly traded fintechs massively outperformed the incumbent financial services providers as well as every mainstream stock index. While the underlying performance of these companies was strong, the pandemic further bolstered results as consumers avoided appearing in-person for both shopping and banking. Instead, they sought — and found — digital alternatives.

For the fourth straight year, the publicly traded fintechs massively outperformed the incumbent financial services providers as well as every mainstream stock index.

Our own representation of the public fintechs’ performance is the Matrix Fintech Index — a market cap-weighted index that tracks the progress of a portfolio of 25 leading public fintech companies. The Matrix fintech Index rose 97% in 2020, compared to a 14% rise in the S&P 500 and a 10% drop for the incumbent financial service companies over the same time period.

 

2020 performance of individual fintech companies vs. SPX

2020 performance of individual fintech companies versus S&P 500. Image Credits: PitchBook

 

Fintech incumbents and new entrants vs. the S&P 500

Fintech incumbents and new entrants versus the S&P 500. Image Credits: PitchBook

E-commerce undoubtedly stood out as a major driver. As a category, retail e-commerce grew 35% YoY as of Q3, propelling PayPal and Shopify to add over $160 billion of market capitalization over the year. For its part, PayPal in the third quarter signed up 15 million net new active accounts (its highest ever).

Posted on

Unpacking Chamath Palihapitiya’s SPAC deals for Latch and Sunlight Financial

This morning, investor and SPAC raconteur Chamath Palihapitiya announced two new blank-check deals involving Latch and Sunlight Financial.

Latch, an enterprise SaaS company that makes keyless entry systems, has raised $152 million in private capital, according to Crunchbase. Sunlight Financial, which offers point of sale financing for residential solar systems, has raised north of $700 million in venture capital, private equity and debt.

We’re going to chat about the two transactions.

There’s no escaping SPACs for a bit, so if you are tired of watching blind pools rip private companies into the public markets, you are not going to have a very good next few months. Why? There are nearly 300 SPACs in the market today looking for deals, and many will find one.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on Extra Crunch, or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

Think of SPACs are increasingly hungry sharks. As a shark get hungrier while the clock winds down on its deal-making window, it may get less choosy about what it eats (take public). There are enough SPACs on the hunt today that they would be noisy even if they were not time-constrained investment vehicles. But as their timers tick, expect their dealmaking to get all the more creative.

This brings us back to Chamath’s two deals. Are they more like the Bakkt SPAC, which led us to raise a few questions? Or more akin to the Talkspace SPAC, which we found pretty reasonable? Let’s find out.

Keyless locks = Peloton for real estate

Let’s start with the Latch deal.

New York-based Latch sells “LatchOS,” a hardware and software system that works in buildings where access and amenities matter. Latch’s hardware works with doors, sensors and internet connectivity.

The company has raised a number of private rounds, including a $126 million deal in August of 2019 which valued the company at $454.3 million on a post-money basis, according to PitchBook data. The company raised another $30 million in October of 2020, though its final private valuation is not known.

As Chamath tweeted this morning, Latch is merging with TS Innovation Acquisitions Corp, or $TSIA. The SPAC is associated with Tishman Speyer, a commercial real estate investor. You can see the synergies, as Latch’s products fit into the commercial real estate space.

Up front, Latch is not a company that is only reporting future revenues. It has a history as an operating entity. Indeed, here’s its financial data per its investor presentation:

Doing some quick match, Latch grew 50.5% from 2019 to 2020. Its software revenues grew 37.1%, while its hardware top line expanded over 70% during the same period. So, the company’s revenue mix shifted more towards hardware incomes in 2020.

That could be due to strong hardware installation fees, which could later result in software revenues; the company claims an average of a six-year software deal, so hardware revenues that are attached to new software incomes could lowkey declaim long-term SaaS revenues.

While some were quick to note that the company is far from pure-SaaS — correct — I suspect that the model that will get some traction amongst investors is that this feels a bit like Peloton for real estate. How so? Peloton has large hardware incomes up-front from new users, which convert to long-term subscription revenues. Latch may prove similar, albeit for a different customer base and market.

Per the deal’s reported terms, Latch will be worth $1.56 billion after the transaction. And the combined entity will have $510 million in cash, including $190 million from a PIPE — a method of putting private money into a public entity — from “BlackRock, D1 Capital Partners, Durable Capital Partners LP, Fidelity Management & Research Company LLC, Chamath Palihapitiya, The Spruce House Partnership, Wellington Management, ArrowMark Partners, Avenir and Lux Capital.”