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Unfair advantage - Interview with Sergey Belousov

An IT startup without venture financing is almost doomed. To attract money, we need a valid idea, a clear vision of the present and future, a motivated team and a thoughtful mechanism for the investor to exit the project.



Sergey Belousov: “ We invest no more than $ 5 million in companies. This does not mean that a business that needs more money is bad. More than once people came to us with requests to invest 10 or 100 million dollars, but we refused. Sometimes in vain "
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For the Russian IT market, Sergey Belousov is a legendary person. His very brief biography looks like this: he started working in business as a student at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, after graduating with a partner, he organized the production of television sets, founded Rolsen. Then there was the collaboration with the American software company Solomon, the creation of SWsoft in Singapore, which later turned into the world-famous Parallels, Acronis and Acumatica.

- There are many different models of entrepreneurship, I am doing the most painful - I create a lot of medium-sized businesses, - Belousov admits. - In the film “Social Network” there was a thought: it is better to catch one marlin than a lot of trout. I, unfortunately, have to catch a lot of trout. During my career, I founded a couple of dozen companies, and the largest of them - Rolsen, Acronis and Parallels - are far from Facebook in terms of revenue.

In 2011, the company Parallels (developing software for providers of cloud services, hosters, data centers, and also produces the Desktop for Mac product that allows Windows to run on Apple computers) a landmark event happened: Sergey Belousov stepped aside from operational management the company, taking the position of chairman of the board of directors and chief architect of Parallels. Her CEO became Birger Sten, who previously headed the Microsoft office in Russia. Belousov was fascinated by another idea - venture financing. Together with partners, he created the fund Runa Capital to invest in IT projects.

“During my career, I made many standard mistakes for a startup,” says Sergey, “at the same time I was engaged in a large number of projects, tried to break into the market without a competitive advantage, and thoughtlessly approached planning. I had to pay for all this. And I want to help new startups so that they do not repeat my mistakes.

The power of technology



- What investments does Runa Capital specialize in?

- We invest in startups at the seed and early stages. They must be ready to grow more than $ 100 million in less than 10 years. We are not interested in small technology businesses: they do not live for a long time, because they quickly exhaust opportunities. The size of our investments is no more than 5 million dollars.

Instead, we enter into the share capital of a startup. Minority package, usually from 10 to 40%. The share is determined by how much a company needs money, what its estimated cost is and how much the founders and the management team need to leave so that they have enough motivation to work further. That is, it is a combination between investment, capitalization and motivation.

A prerequisite for financing a startup is a strong technological component.

- How is the power of technology determined?

- There are four indicators of the power of technology. The first is that it can be patented. The second is to repeat it, you need to find a unique specialist. We have a project in the portfolio NGINX (open source web server). It was written during the year by one person - Igor Sysoev.

The third indicator - to repeat the technology, you need a long time to work a large team. An example of such a project - Acumatica, developing online ERP for small and medium businesses. A team of 20 people is working on it for five years.

The last indicator is stickiness: technology is strong if it is difficult for the client to “jump off”.

- Which areas would you call the most promising for the global IT industry and, accordingly, for startups?

“Everything is quite predictable here.” The first direction is mobile apps. I think that in five years the entire solvent part of the population of the Earth will have a powerful smartphone.

The second is social networks. A simple example: Mark Zuckerberg wants to create a company with a capitalization of $ 1 trillion. This means that once Facebook's revenue will reach 100 billion, and around only one social network will create a huge number of businesses based on the correct, adequate personal data of users.

The third trend is cloud computing. I am sure that in five years this market will grow from 50 to 300 billion dollars.

The greatest prospects for the "clouds" are in the small business segment. By it, I mean companies with fewer than a thousand employees. These account for 65% of the global gross domestic product. In absolute terms, their investments in IT are high - about 510 billion dollars, but in terms of one employee they spend 14 to 50 times less than a big business. This is both regrettable and justified. A small business does not have expertise in IT, it cannot hire system administrators, integrators, organize the relevant department, buy technologies and adapt them for themselves. Plus, a small business is extremely diverse: the needs of plumbers in Shanghai are very different from the requests of lawyers or restaurateurs in Munich.

A small business is able to consume only ready-made IT services. And the "clouds" allow them to provide. I am sure that the demand for IT from small businesses will increase dramatically. In 2010, we estimated the market for the consumption of IT from the clouds at $ 26 billion, by 2015 it will grow to 100 billion.

In addition, there are three more specific areas that in the near future, rapid automation is waiting for - education, health care and the public sector.

Expertise is better than money



- Is it necessary for a startup to attract venture investments? Is it not possible to develop with your own money or loans, without giving anyone a share in the business?

- We must understand that the technology business is very different from others: it is global and consolidated. In almost all segments of the global IT market, player number one earns 75–80% of the profits. The remaining 20% ​​are in most cases divided by players number two and three. And less than 5% is left to everyone else.

There is a window of opportunity in the IT market - a period of time when a segment is rapidly developing. As a rule, it is not more than ten years. Accordingly, during this period a startup needs to grow to player number one, which is very difficult to do without external investments. Of course, there are examples in history when companies grew by their money, but they are extremely few.

In the past 10–15 years, the venture capital infrastructure in the world has been working very efficiently, so all the largest companies and startups in recent years have been created with the help of venture funds. This is Apple, and Oracle, and Facebook, and Twitter, and Google.

A good venture investor increases the value of your business, confirms its quality. You have to understand that by developing a product, you enter into a global competition with another team, which elsewhere is trying to seize the market with a similar solution. To grow to a significant size, you have to hire expensive professionals, attract well-known partners and win the best customers. They can spend five to ten hours studying your business.

The investor spends on a startup, conditionally, 300 hours and votes in cash. Therefore, it is much easier for partners and clients to work with those technology companies into which well-known, large ventures have invested. If you have attracted, for example, Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins or Draper Fisher Jurvetson, this is a quality stamp.

And most importantly: the venture invested in the business at the initial stage is a strategic resource. He can help not only with money, but also with connections, expertise, knowledge.

So does our foundation: we assume active participation in the startup business. I am sure that expertise is primary in relation to money or a share in a business. In the end, it is much more important how much your company will cost in five years than what share you will give to venture capital funds: 75% of $ 10 million is less than 35% of 100 million. Look at Facebook: Zuckerberg today owns only 25% of the social network shares.

I understand that in such a model there are downsides - an investor can force the founder or the management team to do what they want. But Russian startups do not have enough experience to create a product that can be sold for $ 100 million a year to millions of users around the world. They do not have enough expertise to enter the markets of the United States, Asia and Europe, they have no connections to attract investors to the next level.

It is easy to find good programmers on the domestic market, things are worse with testers and project managers, even worse with architects, very bad with requirements management, product and program management specialists.

Startups in Silicon Valley work in other conditions: there you can quickly hire someone who has been working for IBM for 20 years or ten for Microsoft.

- Should a startup start choose a foundation? Or should you grab the first one who offered the financing?

- I think that the venture should be chosen. It is necessary to compare the funds with each other, choose the appropriate conditions and expertise. Of course, there are a lot of funds in the world: created by entrepreneurs or financiers specializing in early or late investment. In any case, the foundation is the people. It is necessary to study their experience in creating companies, investment experience, review biography.

Planning is priceless



- Under what conditions can a venture investor consider a startup as a potential object of financing?

- Of course, the first condition is a valid mission, a problem that a startup can solve. For example, from the very beginning, Facebook wanted to give an opportunity to communicate, make friends, and share impressions with them. A good startup has little or no change in mission.

The second is a reasonable level of risk. Venture investors will not invest in projects that can not guarantee the solution of the problem or problem. Thus, scientific developments are cut off from funding, for example. Technological risks of a startup should be low.

Third, the startup business model must be scalable. When I tried to raise venture financing in Silicon Valley in 2001, I went to the largest funds (since the topic of the application service provider was fashionable). They asked me: what size do you want to do business? I answered: 30 million dollars in revenue, 15 million profit. And I received the answer: we are not interested in this, we are considering a business with the possibility of growth to 1 billion dollars. Of course, there are smaller funds, but even $ 100 million in many segments of the IT industry are cutting off regional and national projects.

The fourth condition is synergistic expertise. Ventures are cynical and skeptical people. They would not give money to a startup if it works in a segment in which the partners of the foundation do not understand.

And the last thing - the possibility of exit from the project. Any investor wants to make money on your startup, and you should perfectly understand how you can give him that opportunity. This is not a tough agreement, written in the contract. But if you don’t think over the mechanism, in three years the venture will begin to hypnotize you actively: sell the company, go to an IPO. And they can achieve what they want. Many times, investors urged me to do what I do not want.

- It is well known that neither Bill Gates, nor Steve Jobs, nor Mark Zuckerberg ever received a higher education. Is it important for people creating technology startups?

- Higher education should be obtained. If only because in a good university you can find a competent, motivated team. And Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg got into good universities, met there the right people, who later became their employees and partners. Most of the SWsoft team were graduates of the MIPT.

- More specifically, what does a startup have to provide to an investor?

- A business plan with an accurate forecast for the year, a neat one for three to five years and an approximate one for ten. Now it does not seem difficult for me, but when I started a business, this requirement seemed to me idiotic: how do I know how much I will sell in five years, at what price, in what markets.

In planning, it’s not even the end result that is important, but the process itself. As Dwight Eisenhower said, “before the battle, I always thought the plans were useless, but planning was invaluable.” The investor must understand that you have gone through the business planning process, that your plan is more or less reasonable, that you have thought out, to whom, what price you will sell, what you are going to spend on his money and how you intend to capture the market. Very rarely, investors consider companies that do not plan to start selling in a year or two.

Next is the command description. Investing in a company at an early stage is primarily an investment in a team. For a year and a half, I saw a huge number of startups, and it is surprising how rarely the founders tell about the team. At best, it is presented on the last slide with photos and phones. No background. And the investor should know why these people want to do this startup, what are their motivation, moral, abilities, intellectual capabilities, professional experience. The team must be a leader. Maximum - two. But the responsibility should be clearly divided between them. Startups in which three or more leaders do not live long.

The next point is the competition plan. The mistake of most startups, especially local ones, is that they do not see their rivals. I often hear: we have no competitors in a city or region. Technological business at least is conducted within the country. If there are no competitors in Russia, then there are global companies that are able to enter the territory.

In addition, there are indirect rivals who can become direct. All this needs to be carefully calculated. There is an opinion that big companies have stupid programmers or they have bad engineering processes. Understand the myth: most often, large corporations employ specialists of a significantly higher class than you can afford, and the engineering processes there are better than any team in Russia. So if they want to develop your competitor, they will.

They can be defeated only by choosing a narrow protected niche where the enormous resources and competencies of large companies will not matter. In my opinion, the right strategy is to capture one niche, get all the possible profit from it, then go to the neighboring ones, and then to a wide market. A startup that does not know a niche, does not have a focus, will definitely lose.

- And how to choose this niche?

- You can win only where you have an unfair advantage. This is one of the postulates of the "Book of the Five Rings" by Miyamoto Musashi, the famous samurai who lived in the 17th century. You see a man more than himself - run away, you see two - run away, you see a samurai with two swords - run away.

There are many stories about Miyamoto Musashi. One of them confirms this postulate. Once the famous samurai Sasaki Kojiro called Musashi to a duel. The fight was appointed on the river bank. Kojiro came at the appointed time, but did not find the enemy. As time went on, the sun began to set, Kojiro thought that Miyamoto would come from land, but he suddenly sailed on a boat, and when Sasaki, not drawing a sword, approached him to figure out what was happening, Musashi whacked him twice with an oar, broke it head and swam away. Bottom line: Kojiro was nervous, the sun shone in his eyes, he did not expect the fight to begin that way. And Musashi won.

- What should a startup have to do if he got a refusal from a venture?

- Startup is a very hard activity. To develop it, we need stubbornness and activity. I always have an example of Starbucks before my eyes. Its founder, before attracting funding, received 223 refusals. I experienced a couple of dozen failures in the early 2000s.



- And if the startup is dead, what consequences await the founder?

- It will cause serious damage to his health. I do not threaten, just emotionally, psychologically and physically, the death of a business is difficult to survive. In my biography there were a couple of completely unsuccessful projects.

On the part of the venture, there are usually no consequences. The investor does not enter into an agreement with a startup with the prescribed liability, fines, penalties. We cannot impose sanctions on the team for non-compliance with the business plan, but we will start thinking badly about it. I am sure that Runa Capital will have a bad experience. Shoots usually no more than 10% of projects. But we are not a bank. Venture is a startup partner who shares risks with it.

Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/139827/


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