6 reasons for European Startups to go to New York

Big news struck the US financial sector this month: The New York based startup Etsy, an online marketplace for handmade unique items, made its initial pulic offering (IPO) at a valuation of $1.8 billion. Even more thrilling, it saw its shares and market capitalization almost double on Nasdaq the first day of trading.

 

Yuliya Chernova from Wall Street Journal describes this IPO conveniently as „Milestone for New York’s Startup Scene”. One reason is that big exits bring in cash, which will allow venture capital investors to spend that money on new venture while staying in the region. Her analyses completes particularly well our previous article in VentureBeat “Why New York City is the best choice for European Startups”. To sum up, we see New York as the place to be for any European startup identifying itself as a “born global” and the aim to scale globally. The City has some huge advantages:

 

  1. It has one of the strongest financial ecosystem worldwide. New York alone places more than half of Europe’s venture capital capacity and has a powerful banking sector.
  2. The average investment size is much bigger in NYC than it is in Europe, making the city the hotspot for later stage investments.
  3. New York has a strong Corporate Venture scene.
  4. With “Start-up NY” the city government is offering “tax-free zones” for qualified business within the first years of the company. Simply unimaginable in any of Europe’s high tax countries!
  5. 52 of 500 Fortune companies are in New York.
  6. Last but not least, New York is on the East Coast and is much closer to Europe than the Silicon Valley on the West Coast. Time difference matters if you work daily or weekly with off-shore teams in Europe.

The combination of these six arguments is the reason why we opened an Office in New York City. Alongside of other European investors, we are already seeking to create a landing platform in New York. Read more about this topic on VentureBeat.

Switzerland calling! START Summit in St. Gallen

Switzerland is the home of several world market leaders and excellent universities which makes it the perfect country to start a venture. On 17th and 18th April, startups as well as investors will meet at the START Summit, organized by students from the University of St. Gallen. The main objective of this event is to motivate and support young people to found their own business and spread the entrepreneurial spirit.

Speed Dating, HackRun, Workshops
The START Summit offers innovative workshops as well as sessions with highly influencial speakers. Some of the names include: Former chancellor of Austria Alfred Gusenbauer, Y Combinator Partner Dalton Caldwell, Futurist Jose Luis Cordeiro, Hailo CEO Ryo Umezawa, Egomnia Founder Matteo Achili and Omid Scheybani, New Business Development Manager at Google. Another highlight is the HackaRun, in partnership with the Entrepreneurs Club ETH and SAP. In this event, technical and entrepreneural students will form interactive groups and present their projects in front of a Jury on Friday afternoon. On the same day during the ETH Startup Speed Dating startups will be given the chance to expose their idea in a 30-second pitch to a selection of highly skilled participants such as researchers or potential co-founders.

On Saturday founders will get the chance to meet investors. The event will be held in a similar format to speed dating, where each startup will aim to convince investors in four minutes. Chosen entrepreneurs and startups will get the chance to pitch their idea for a limited amount of time in front of a jury and the whole START Summit crowd. The winner will receive 10.000 CHF.

 

Venionaire at the START Summit

We are delighted that our Managing Partners Martin Steininger and Berthold Baurek-Karlic are invited to participate at the START Summit. With our new Venture Capital Fund, which aims for a First Closing beginning summer, we will invest heavily into hightech startups with disruptive business models from Germany, Austria and Switzerland. We are certain to see great investment opportunities in St. Gallen. Of course, we are also looking forward to the legendary START Summit Afterparty at the Trischli Club! 😉

More infos about the event on the official START Summit website or on Digjitale.com.

Courseticket goes Tel Aviv

For startups in e-commerce it is essential to think, work and connect with people globally. Alexander Schmid (on the picture at the foreground) and Markus Kainz, founders of the education platform courseticket.com, are showing how it is done: After winning the first Pitching Days in London, they have been selected as one of nine Austrian startups for the next round from 8th till 11th february in Tel Aviv. The “Pitching Days” is an initiative organized by Junge Wirtschaft, Aussenwirtschaft Austria and the Austrian Wirtschaftsservice and offers young Austrian startups access to investors around the globe.

Besides a trip to Jerusalem and getting in contact with the Israeli culture, Alex and Markus visited Jerusalem Venture Partner (JVP), one of the most important startup accelerator in the region. Markus was fascinated by the company spirit: “The Israelian startup scene really embraces the culture of failing. If you have not failed at least with two startups before, JVP will not even consider to take you in their accelerator program. This mentality is probably a key factor why Tel Aviv is one of the most attractive places for building a startup worldwide.”

With their presentation at the pitching event Alex and Markus successfully got a step into this huge market and convinced investors and potential partners. Two leading Isreali investors are showing serious interest into courseticket and one of them already appointed a meeting in Vienna for more in-depth talks. Furthermore, Alex and Markus also found two new strategic partners for entering the Middle East markets.

“We really want to say thank you to the Austrian Economic Chamber  and the Austrian Wirtschaftsservice for this great opportunity and we also want to congratulate all the other fantastic Austrian startups pitching at this event”, Alex summed up. We also congratulate our portfolio company courseticket to the successful journey and are excited about the next steps ahead. See more great impressions from the Pitching Days on the Google+ profile of “Junge Wirtschaft Österreich”.

courseticket.com is Austria’s leading online marketplace for education and advanced training offers. Costumers are able to search for training offers from a wide variety of different providers. The company, co-founded 2011 by Venionaire CEO Berthold Baurek-Karlic, is still hungry for growth and gaining more and more traction every day.

CONDA expands to Germany and Switzerland

Great news from our partner! Yesterday CONDA launched its newly improved crowdinvesting platform www.CONDA.eu, where from now on, investors will find projects from Austria as well as Germany and Switzerland. Beside of the new and modern design, there are quite a few advantages for investors such as the improved transparency and comparablility of the projects or the possibility to discuss open questions with other investors, directly on the platform.

CONDA is a crowdinvesting platform and aims to connect investors with entrepreneurs by offering startups and SMEs an alternative to tradtitional roots of financing. By supporting projects with their consulting expertise, the broad business know-how of its mentors and the wide network of partners CONDA guarantees the success of local innovations. Investors from Austria, Germany and Switzerland participate – starting with an amount of 100 Euros – in the company’s profit and growth. Since 2013 the platform has closed 13 crowdinvesting projects that raised over 1.5 million euros from 1,500 crowd investors in total.

We concratulate our partner to the successful expansion and wish the best for the future!

Impact of Real Options on Venture Valuations

Many practitioners at venture capital funds use net present value (NPV) and discounted cash flow (DCF) as methods during their valuation process of early-stage companies. In fact, the International Private Equity and Venture Capital Valuation Guidelines focus mainly on those two methods. The weakness of these two methods is that they concentrate on a certain “expected scenario” of cashflows. For example they do not capture the flexibility of the management to adapt their strategy in response of an unexpected market development. Especially in the early stage world with strategy shifts very common, this “expected scenario” outlines a big restriction. Flexibility in the future while facing new information arrivals, which could change your investment outcome drastically, is key.

In our previous article, we introduced the First Chicago Method which addresses this problem in a trivial way. However, it is not dynamic i.e. there are scenarios which you can’t even consider right now because of their unlikeliness. This is the point where the concept of option pricing comes into play.

A broad theory has been developed over the last 50 years, first started with the celebrated Black Scholes formula. While these models initially were used to value traded options, in the recent years they found their way into Venture Valuation Methods. Benefits in a highly volatile and uncertain market are pretty obvious. The main purposes of using options are:

  1. Improving upside potentials
  2. Minimizing downside losses

This works well with Options, as they may be considered like an insurance. Actually, many venture investors are already using this concept without knowing, as they use “hedge terms” (like “anti-dilution” and such) in their shareholder agreements. Many transaction terms are equivalent to contingent claims. To differ between classic options based on financial assets and specific terms during a venture capital transaction, we will call them Real Options. Real Options are based on the investment project itself.

This fact enables a way to determine the strategic value of an asset, facing an investment/acquisition decision. Of course, this strategic aspect brings a lot of subjectivity into the process which aggravates the valuation process under the assumption of information asymmetry between the contracting parties.

Although almost all professional venture investors use Real Options in their early stage investment process, few of them determine a value for them and even less startups usually see the implied discount given to their investor when accepting them.

Due to the enormous possible ways of setting up a term sheet and/or a shareholder agreement and the subjective nature of real options, it is a complex task to develop a consistent framework for the valuation of any real option. Nevertheless, there are real options which depend directly on the enterprise valuation. In these cases, we will first calculate the enterprise value following common valuation concepts and then determine the real option value conditioned on the assumptions we used for the enterprise valuation.

This approach fits Real Options which have “direct” impact on the investment return (e.g. liquidation preference). They don’t have a direct influence on the enterprise value, rather they are derived from the enterprise value in a linear way (in other words the dependence between the value of the enterprise and the real option is linear). Hence the expectation is a linear functional, the deal valuation expresses in the following way:

Deal Value = Enterprise Value + Real Option Value

Now we want to address values of Real Options which have “indirect” impact on the investment return (e.g. vesting). In general, the value of these options are far more difficult to measure. They are more adjustments to the assumptions you considered during your enterprise valuation process (similar to the concept of Bayesian inference). For example, if you have vesting as a term in your transaction you have to consider the change in the part of the risk-factor which belongs to the team. This thoughts lead us to the following representation of the deal value (“|” means conditioned on in this context):

Deal Value = Enterprise Value | Real Option

At Venionaire we have a sharp focus on Real Options as part of the valuation process. After calculating an enterprise value, we shift to Real Options trying to the hedge certain risks and enhance the flexibility as an investor. There are Real Options with a wide scope which deliver a good adjustment for many cases. On the other side, every transaction is unique and needs its own customized Real Options. Our team developed a framework to structure transaction in a way which fits best to the investor profile as well as the current stage, industry and region of a startup.

Finding Disruptive Innovation

Two years ago one of our Private Bankers introduced me to Dr. Günther Dobrauz, a Director of PWC (CH) and former Venture Capital Fund Manager, at a meeting in Zürich, Switzerland. This meeting turned out to be one of the most interesting ones I have had for quite a while. He explained to us a model (Technology BridgeTM)) he had developed and recently published in his book “Uptake Revisited – An Investigation into the Success & Failure Factors for Innovative Products in International Markets”.

We are always looking for innovative approaches to make better investment decisions and to improve our own models, which we use in our consulting activities. We examine new models quickly and test them internally for a while – as we need to convince ourselves of a significant impact on our field. When it comes to high-technology driven private equity transactions, we need to rely on facts instead of magic crystal balls.

This might sound funny, but there is a substantial number of private investors and venture capital firms out there who will not bother running a professional deal selection process. Simplified, this would usually consist of the following steps:

1. Does it fit our investment focus?
2. How does it score on standardized screening criteria?
3. Are there any “Red Flags” from a financial, technological or legal due diligence?

No kidding, quite a large number of investors will make an investment decision on a so called “gut feeling”, “goodwill” or “rule of thumb” method. We have observed this biased habit. Fair enough – there are some successful business angels who prove that this is not the worst idea, ever. In professional terms, however, this method is not predictable; rather, it is quite fuzzy, as these “success factor heuristics” can be very different and probabilities of success and failure are very unclear. It is like it is in gambling, once in while there are winners, but the odds are not in favor of the player.

This method concentrates on the quality of the team. There is a significant number of very successful founders, who have changed their entire business – sometimes through an accelerator program (e.g. Y Combinator or Techstars) or with a first mentor (Business Angel) on board. In a very early stage of a startup, I agree that it makes sense to concentrate on the quality of a team, much more than later in a venture capital round. In early stages products and technologies may change a couple of times.

Venture capital funds on the other hand need to be clear and transparent when it comes to their deal selection criteria. Investors of the funds (so called “Limited Partners”) will require a full understanding of the competitive advantages of a specific fund. They will be interested in how you will gather the best deal flow, –screen and select deals, perform best in business development and most importantly how you plan to exit your portfolio. All of this is required prior to an investment into a venture fund, where investors will commit money for 8 to 10 years, with the intention to get it back with a nice return on top. Therefore funds will follow their rule sets quite strictly.

Dr. Dobrauz developed a smart, comprehensive approach to investigate the disruptive innovation potential of technology driven projects and companies with a true practical intention, namely for a venture capital fund he worked for at the time. His approach has a strong theoretical basis and is very simple to use. He explains in his statement of hypothesis: “The market cycle can be modeled as the development of five interlinked S-curves of “achievement over time” […]”.

These five interlinked  S-Curves are:

“sales of existing products”,
– “valuation of new product”,
– “technical development of new product”,
– “customer satisfaction of new product” and
– “sales of new product”.

He explains further that successful innovation most probably takes place in three windows of opportunity:

A – “Technology BridgeTM – “Innovation steps up!”
The existing product is selling well with 85-90% market penetration, but a replacement technology is in development. Although only 15-20% complete, the valuation of this product is already over 50% of its final value.

B – “Crossing the Chasm” – “Change in mass markets”
The new product is being sold to > 10% of the market (pre-chasm), even though only at 75% of technical “perfection”.

C – “Renaissance” – “The company needs something new to maintain value”
The new product has 50% of its eventual market penetration, technical development is complete and the valuation can top out. Soon the cycle will start over again.
The results show that market uptake can be predicted quite well using a simple set of five option selection principles (questions), which are the same for all three windows. This approach was tested with data of 291 companies, out of which 6 had positive answers to all questions. The five questions analyze technical, commercial and strategic specifications.

Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Technology_Bridge_by_Guenther_Dobrauz_Saldapenna.jpg

1. Positive ownership?
2. Positive advantage (to the costumer)?

Note: Deal screening needs to be performed very efficiently. As 80% of the opportunities have been filtered out after the first two questions (50% of the reviewed opportunities in this study were not found to be cleanly and legally owned by their proponents and a further 30% offered no advantage above already existing products and services) it is recommend by the author to use them first.

3. Positive potential buyers?
4. Positive returns (possible)?
5. Positive on deal?

In practice we have found the last question to be among the most important. A positive investment decision has to fit the availability of skills, time and money of the investor at a given time. Even the best deal in your pipeline will not have a full chance to perform at its potential if you – as the investor – lack resources. Startups and investors should think about this point very carefully!

We like this approach, even though we found some critics concerning the missing factor “team” discussing it. Team quality or qualification is not analyzed at all. If you would process this model stand-alone, you would most likely miss to investigate one of the most important potential success- or failure factors of an early stage startup. Venionaire Capital provides popular services for technical valuation and due-diligence support. Our clients (startups or investors) profit from our unbiased insights, high quality research our proprietary mix of valuation and analytic models. Over the past few years we have developed a number of extensions for standard models and some internal models for technology- and company valuation. We work closely together with a number of universities and leading academic professors. Contact us to find out more.

How to value Startups

Work hard and grow fast! Take your opportunity and work global. Digital technologies allow startups to address global markets. It has never been as easy to build such a scalable business. Aside from a fabulous idea, a great team and a phenomenal product, receiving enough funding is essential to succeed on a global scale. As viral growth is rather considered a myth or a so called black-swan than a standard – it is hard work and still quite capital intensive to achieve an international brand awareness for your product.

Unfortunately 90% of all startups will neither receive an Angel Round, nor a Venture Capital investment. So the question is: “Why is it so tricky to get early stage funding?” Most startups usually do not have strong enough historic financial records, which may be inserted in a “standard” business valuation framework. As a result banks and other “traditional” investment institutions, will not be able to calculate the risk of default and will therefore back off. What remains are Business Angels and Venture Capital Funds, who are specialized in high-risk investing and usually provide much more than just money – so called “smart-money”.

In order to come up with a valuation, early-stage investment professionals will take factors like competition, technology risk, capability and quality of the founder team, attractiveness of the market and scalability of a business case, into account. Hence the fact, that most of those highly scalable enterprises focus rather on traction, than on revenues and profits in early stages – they will have a quite significant burn-rate in their first years. Investors and startups will find it difficult to consider this fact regarding classic valuation concepts, and therefore need to use different valuation approaches.

Two main questions remain:

“What is the Enterprise Value of a startup?”

and,

“How do you measure this Enterprise Value?”

There is no such thing as a one and only, true value for a startup company. There is a set of valuations, which all need to be considered and paired with negotiated deal-terms – combined they may be used to set a specific price for a transaction. In order to understand the full picture it is necessary to avoid a selective analysis. The following standard valuation approaches are determined by different external and internal circumstances.

We usually differentiate between, three standard approaches for Enterprise Values (EV):

1. Fair Market value – the value of an enterprise determined by a willing buyer and a willing seller – both conscious of all relevant facts – to close a transaction.
2. Strategic value – the value the company has for a particular (strategic) investor. The positive effects like synergy, opportunistic costs and marketing-effects are considered and calculated for this valuation approach.
3. Intrinsic value – the measure of business value that reflects the entrepreneur’s in-depth understanding of the company’s economic potential.

Fair Market Value

The “Fair Market Value” implicates full knowledge of all the “relevant” facts on both sides. In other words, information symmetry between Startup and Investor – in practice this will be highly unlikely to establish. In case of a young company, without meaningful track record and often a lack of understanding of the product on Investor’s part, it is more likely to have systemic information asymmetry. Because of the nature of startups, it is tough to determine a “Fair Market Value”. Market values of startups will turn out arbitrary, as stakes of privately held companies are infrequently traded assets.

To overcome this problem investors tend to compare the transaction to other deals within a peer-group, which as a group executed a large number of transactions. This sample delivers a statistical figure, also known as a Multiple. The weak side of this method should be adequately considered, as there is a considerable incomparability of Startups. Never the less it is a benchmark.

Strategic Value

The “Strategic Value” is deeply influenced by the Investor himself. A strategic investor always carries a hidden agenda. There are synergies, opportunistic costs and potential advantages in terms of market competition, among other factors, which will lead to a certain strategic premium. This premium could eventually lead to a higher valuation of a startup he is willing to acquire.

It is difficult for startups, to get a feeling for this strategic premium an investor might be willing to pay. This premium will most likely appear if you have a very good understanding of the buy-side industry, the specific buy-side company, or if there are a view companies in competition for a transaction. On the other side strategic investors may be highly valuable partners for startups, if they have troubles to overcome difficulties, in terms of go-to-market or production scaling. Synergies with a strategic partner in this sense could be a huge asset and eventually lead to a discount of a startup valuation.

Deal parties will need to weigh out carefully who will profit the most out of a deal. A Startup and its potential investor need to evaluate how much worth support, experience, contacts and knowledge of markets have. On the other hand, they need to value the amount of savings (e.g. cheap external R&D), additional returns or the ability to hold a market position, an investor may enable due to a partnership.

The valuation is strictly correlated with potential future synergy effects, and is usually implemented through premiums or discounts to a certain Multiple or a given valuation (so called “Anchor”).

Intrinsic Value

Also known as the fundamental value it requires detailed knowledge about the company, product, market, current trends and a good feeling for probabilities in future business development. A qualitative and quantitative analysis of the business model is necessary to estimate the future impact on the market. Technological competitors, advantages and disadvantages also need to be considered as key risks.

One of the most common valuation approaches in this case is the Discounted Cash Flow method. This method has been criticized a lot. A Valuation is calculated through the sum of discounted future cash flows (so called “present value”). The discount factor is another critical factor, it determines the riskiness of the business case. The discount factor is a composition of the required rate of return (ROI), the time value of money and a risk premium, which is directly correlated with the deviation of future cash flows and other aspects of the startup. Small changes of the discount factor lead to large changes of the valuation. Hence there is no uniform Methodology (yet) to determine the risk-premium, the output of the DCF method is not satisfying for many cases.

Conclusion

We have introduced three standard valuation approaches and explained the backgrounds for potential tensions and conflicts, when it comes to negotiations and the complex question of a company valuation. Early stage startups offer great chances, but bare various risks, which are hard to calculate.

Some Business Angels and early stage Venture Funds concentrate primarily on founder teams – as they believe there is no point in calculating any models. This approach is not as trivial as it sounds. Current studies have shown that it is hard to find reliable criteria for successful teams and that statistically investors will not do very well if they only trust on their expert knowledge and life-experience. From aprofessional perspective I would call this “gambling”, which certainly does not mean that it will definitely lead to a fiasco – sometimes gamblers win too, the odds are just not good enough for us. In a professional transaction process investors and startups will build up trust, take external research into account, calculate a couple of models for negotiations and eventually find a deal structure, which takes most of the considerable likely hoods into account.

One of the most complex valuation questions may be solved easily if you define clear terms along side your investment. In practice professionals will consider external advice and research to obtain a different and unbiased point of view. They will compare valuation concepts, weigh synergies and will consider premiums and discounts. Offers will come with a Term-Sheet, which will show a valuation and a corresponding deal-structure.

We consider deal-structuring as an art! Even with drifting valuation beliefs it is easily possible to close satisfying deals for both sides – if you find the right structure. Contact us to find out more!

 

Co-Author: Sasan Haji-Hashemi, Senior Analyst – Venionaire Capital

TV Celebrity Christian Clerici invests in courseticket.com

The founders of courseticket.com proudly announced a first closing of a new funding round with a well-known celebrity in German speaking countries. Most people know Christian Clerici as a journalist, speaker, extreme sports athlete, hot-rod enthusiast and some do know him as a Business Angel. “Christian is active as an Angel since around 2 years and has digged himself into his role, as a supporter, connector, motivator – talking to him about changing the world together makes him smile – I really think being an Angel is a passion for him.” Alexander Schmid (CEO, courseticket.com).

courseticket.com offers a SaaS solution for vendors in the education industry and a transparent marketplace for potential clients, who look for the right training and would like to compare prices and quality. Courseticket is the leading marketplace for education and training in Austria, with more than 250,000 users visiting the platform monthly, a two digit-growth rate and more than 10,000 active deals offered at the marketplace. The company aims to go international within the next two years.

Christian Clerici underlines his decision to support coureticket, with a brief comment:  “The market for this kind of business is breath taking, with more than EUR 45 billion only in Germany, EUR 85 billion in UK and over 1,3 trillion in the US. On the other hand it is very fragmented, has some entry barriers and is very competitive. Courseticket is not my first tech investment, therefore I know we have some challenging and exiting years coming up! I am looking forward to change the world of education with this ambitions team!”

The investment took place shortly after, courseticket was awarded to be one of the most promising startups in London, at a pitch-event of the Austrian Trade Commission, where UK based Investors spend an inspiring evening with more than twenty startups of Austria.

Related stories / Media coverage:

https://www.deutsche-startups.de/2014/11/05/tv-moderator-clerici-investiert-courseticket-und-mehr/

https://diepresse.com/home/wirtschaft/economist/3893659/Auf-Investorenjagd-in-London

 

Advantage Austria Pitch Days in London: Austrian Startups meet UK Investors (16. – 17.10.2014)

Around 50 guests followed the invitation of the Austrian Trade Commission (AWO) on Thursday 16, October in the London, near Hyde Park for the first “Austrian Pitch Days” in Britan. 20 carefully selected companies, have been invited to present their business models and products to top-tier UK Business Angels.

“Our startups did well,” said Bernd Litzka of the i2 business angels, right after the competitive Pitch Event. Jenny Tooth (Managing Director of UK Business Angels) announced two winning startups, which got the best feedback from the crowd. zizooboats.com and www.courseticket.com convinced most of the attending investors at the venue to have a promising business case. Blitab – a project idea for an iPad for visually handicapped people – received the social award of this event.

Markus Kainz of courseticket stressed that his team was ready to expand his business into UK, if investors are willing to support this step. “The energy in London is simply fantastic” the young entrepreneur said with a big smile. The UK market is the most exciting in Europe for courseticket.com – the #1 marketplace for Education in Austria with more than 10.000 listed courses.

Events, like this one – supported by the Austrian Trade Commission – are very important to build trust and a strong network, both crucial to enter a new market. “Startups need international stakeholders to support them in the process of growth and new market entries”, Berthold Baurek-Karlic (Managing Partner, Venionaire Capital) explained to the press.

WHERE TO FIND US

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A-1010 Vienna, Austria (EU)
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London N3 3LF
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Venionaire Capital exclusively invests through the European Super Angels Club, for more information and application please go to the website. We do not accept direct investment proposals via this website.