Leaked emails between founder and VC
To: Brett (Greyloft Capital)
From: Tom (Neighbordoor)
Subject: Series A raise for Neighbordoor 🦄
Hey Brett, long time no talk! How is your son, age 9, plays soccer, doing? We’re currently raising our next round — let me know if you have 20 minutes to chat next Tuesday after Barry’s.
To: Tom (Neighbordoor)
From: Brett (Greyloft Capital)
Subject: Re: Series A raise for Neighbordoor 🦄
cc clara to schedule thx
To: Brett (Greyloft Capital)
From: Tom (Neighbordoor)
Subject: Re: Series A raise for Neighbordoor 🦄
Brett, great talking in person today. Hope your daughter’s dance recital, at 7PM this Thursday, which you will be late to because of a portfolio company’s office warming, goes well.
Addressing some of your follow-up questions here:
- On how we calculated the TAM -
- some key assumptions here:
- (1) all women will need/want our product
- (2) half of all men will want our product but order secretly
- (3) our product is 100% not fake
(total_num_women) * $70/year + (total_num_men/2)* $50/year = $4.5B in revenue/year. We also have verbal agreement for $100M in sales/year from my parents (they’re accredited investors).
But of course our actual TAM is flexible because we plan on disrupting the market. We will enter multiple verticals as levers to conquer the consumer packaged goods industry, so you can add another $450B too.
2. On how we’re spending the round -
- Red Antler re-brand: 60K for naming services; 120K for permanent brand style guide; 40K for Patagonia/Arc’teryx/Common Projects-specific brand style guide
- Paid acquisition: $30 CAC from Facebook ads. Our ML engineer figured out that this will go down exponentially after we hit a critical mass of 1M customers. Word of mouth will make our product go viral and so CAC should go down to $0.
- Manufacturing: COGS — $35/unit; GAAP — $2/unit; EBITDA — $3/unit
- Our ROCKSTAR team is made of unpaid interns (all 1099s), so employee costs are trivial.
3. Yes, I am free for cuddle-puddle this Friday.
To: Tom (Neighbordoor)
From: Brett (Greyloft Capital)
Subject: Re: Series A raise for Neighbordoor 🦄
will circle back with the other partners to double-click on how this fits within incentive structures here. let’s touch base on fri. cc clara to schedule thx
To: Tom (Neighbordoor)
From: Brett (Greyloft Capital)
Subject: Charles (Valur Capital) <> Founder
hey founder, meet Charles from Valur here to help us with due diligence. cc his clara to schedule thx
To: Tom (Neighbordoor)
From: Brett (Greyloft Capital)
Subject: followup
After discussing with some partners here — while we are super bullish on your team, [Company] is a bit early for us at this time. We’d love to be proved wrong though. Please keep us updated on the progress, we’d love to stay in touch. Let us know how we can be helpful.
To: Brett (Greyloft Capital)
From: Tom (Neighbordoor)
Subject: Re: followup
but we gonna IPO next year
To: Tom (Neighbordoor)
From: Brett (Greyloft Capital)
Subject: Re: followup
Not sure it fits our investment thesis, since we only invest in founders that use “<>” in their subject lines. Not a good fit at this time. Again, please keep us in the loop. How can I help?
To: Brett (Greyloft Capital)
From: Tom (Neighbordoor)
Subject: Re: followup
Brett, wanted to let you know that this morning we got a term sheet from Softbank at a $300M val. We’ll be taking it and rebranding to The Ne Company.
I’m going to be stepping down as CEO in a few months; let’s grab coffee next week to discuss me joining as a Partner at Greyloft.
Co-authored with Tina Zheng. Thanks to Joshua Lee for his inspirational tweet.
