Response to Aaron Batalion’s DealMemo Challenge:
Hi Aaron, great post + I would like to accept your #DealMemo challenge if you will accept my slight change to it…
You see, I am a lawyer + entrepreneur and own/run my business Silicon Valley Counsel | Legal + Growth for Startups (I used to work with Jeremy + Ravi when I was at a much bigger firm Cooley) so I can’t talk about any of my existing clients or even anyone promising I learn of due to heightened attorney-client confidentiality. Still I have a clever solution for DealMemo that I would like for you to consider.
To confirm, per your partner Alex Taussig’s post re: references, I would like to see if Ravi Mhatre + Jeremy Liew remember two distinct conversations we’ve had:
- Ravi at the Sand Hill Sharon Park Starbucks when I was VP of Corp + Bus Dev & GC at a search engine startup founded by former Googlers. Our team was exceptional and most went on to do very interesting things. To your point… “Even better if you can show others a track record of consistently picking the right ideas and right teams at the right times”… at the company, I was employee #7 and it was my job to prepare the investor slide deck presentation which resulted in a $25M Series B at a pre-unicorn unicorn-like valuation at the time from some very smart people such as the Chairman of Walmart, early investor in Baidu + Chairman of VM Ware. Needless to say running the BD + Legal parts of the Board meetings were quite an experience, and in part based on a memorable conversation with Jeremy (see below), I was the one who sourced, negotiated + closed deals with Hulu + AOL-Mapquest at the time. These were very important to our company — offering video + maps made our search technology significantly more competitive + comprehensive.
- Jeremy at the old Chestnut Street Grove which is imminently to turn into the Paypal investment group Tacolicious, where we talked about the 5–6 main consumer industries that can most effectively be leveraged. I recall he’s had a post on this since then on the LVP blog.
The company turned out to fail unfortunately (so there is no confidentiality to maintain to anyone though everything I am posting is clearly already public). Still I would say my role there was a success. After all, in addition to
— building a successful pitch deck that related well and got the deal,
— closing noteworthy BD deals and implementing them with the tech team,
— I also helped product development and drafted 8 patents (though did get a patent attorney to improve/finalize) of which 7 were acquired by Google and have been implemented into the Google’s search offering.
On top of that I was front + center crisis control when it hit the fan, we launched to more traffic than Yahoo:
crashed famously, and more or less tripped over ourselves before trying a dead cat bounce.
From my perspective, the idea that Silicon Valley embraces failure is not always true. The good part of that though is though if you can provide value, new opportunities will present themselves in Silicon Valley. Thankfully, it’s part of nearly every CEOs and VCs job to identify top resources for their business. Since then, I have been involved in many more startups + my approach is to always provide leverage.
For example I rescued a consumer hydration company as Turnaround CEO, then graciously transitioned to another CEO, and the company subsequently raised ~$10m.
I have worked with many other companies that have grown significantly in part because of some key contribution along the way (though can’t talk about that publicly).
My challenge of course is I have to prove myself over + over again.
So I would like to accept your DealMemo challenge + show you what I can do and in return if you vet me w/Jeremy and Ravi + you like what you see, you would introduce me to your portfolio companies to do similar things. Per a recent post on the importance of referrals, was glad to see this recent tweet by my former professor (also known for her book: Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother):
An interesting side note here: I was fortunate to be in Prof Chua’s 1L contracts class at Duke Law (she now teaches at Yale). She is a remarkable person and one day we had a conversation and she said “Mr. Szymanski (she memorized the photos all 200 people in our class before the first day + referred to us only by last names)… you need to go to Silicon Valley.” While she is an outstanding professor, in my opinion she would perhaps also have become an excellent VC.
Likewise, my name may seem familiar from Mattermark archives. Just this week I was featured twice on the same days as you and Jeremy.
Here are my four most recent posts, all of which were in MM (among others):
— IPO Process + Key Takeaways from the Q1 2016 Tech IPO Drought
— 2016 Tax Tips for Startup Stockholders
— 5 New Tips + Tools for Valuation/Dilution Modeling
— Notes from #MetricsMatter by @Mattermark
As you say:
The most important part of being a VC is finding incredible founders building non-obvious solutions to problems that will be massive someday.
So here is the non-obvious solution… I am the Founder of a Legal + Growth Business. Check out my Medium post reply to Josh Felser on how ops experience does matter in my case, and Medium post on Network Effects (the mathematician in Jeremy Liew should enjoy the latter).
How many companies today from Airbnb to Lyft to your fast-growing SaaS companies face legal + deal issues. In the Notes from #MetricsMatter by @Mattermark post for example, Jason M. Lemkin and Danielle Morrill pointed out:
From my perspective, VC work has to be incredibly hard. You have to compete with others for the best deals of which there are very finite number. You have to relate in a way to close the deal correctly; you have to see talent + opportunity before others do. Top funds probably invest in 1/1000 or more potential deals you might see, and as another top VC used to tell me, ‘you have to put points on the board’ (i.e. show an alpha return) so there is much more talent + skill involved than a lot of people who want to be VCs can even begin to understand.
Moreover, as the backgrounds of Lightspeed indicate (Jeremy + Ravi both have consulting backgrounds), Mike Moritz was a journalist, Mark Suster and many others consultants, Jason Lemkin and many others were attorneys. As Jeremy pointed out in his post on how he ended up at LVP:
It was a very circuitous path…. If you know what your end goal is, I think that these are all bad plans.
At the same time, what I do has VC elements. I look for opportunities where I can add value, connect with a team + look to provide leverage.
The great thing about what I do is that I don’t know anyone else who has my background + can pull it off this way.
My biggest challenge is getting discovered to work with great teams beyond my immediate network; hence these posts. The value is that sometimes the benefit to the company can be very significant.
To close, the loop… I am not asking for a job at Lightspeed. What I am proposing it that on paper it should make sense for open-minded VCs who already know me as having “some small part” of the following Steve Jobs Silicon Valley ethos:
to provide an opportunity that is mutually beneficial to their LP investments, and portfolio companies + of course I like working with more top startups.
As Jason Lemkin said in the #MetricsMatter crowdcast, he in part looks for companies with problems he can solve. I am offering to do the same even though it will be hard for me to reap any upside from the Linkedin itself.
In return, if you like it, you do as you’ve asked others… introduce me to your portfolio companies where there may be a good fit. My expectation is to get engaged on a trial with them with Legal + Growth deals. Full disclosure: In the past I have typically taken equity + cash for my advisory services. If there is a fit it’s usually very quick to see the benefits and the work turns out over the long-term, so there is a lot of the right kind of value there. I am full stack legal (i.e. can handle all of the necessities) for early stage startups + growth/deal counsel for startups of the size LVP typically invests in ($10+M in funding).
So, what do you say?
To recap: Not much of an obligation for you other than to know my expectations + of course you could always say the analysis is not useful. *No one has to replace their outside law firm since I work as on-demand/outside GC + Growth in many cases.
Let me know your thoughts.
Thank you again for the posts, and other LVP posts. I enjoy them + they are valuable for me. Best regards, wishing you a great morning!
