Sergey Belousov knows how to get investment
Dmitry Falaleev decided to open a new media project Terafirrma about the Russian start-up industry, where materials will be published first-hand, only from direct participants and only in the case. One of the first participants was our Sergey Belousov who spoke about some of the intricacies of his approach to the selection of startups and the mistakes of startups.
So, here are the key issues:
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- There is no clear leader. Or, alternatively, there are several leaders and responsibilities between them are not distributed. The first time I focused my attention on this three years ago and now I can definitely say that this error is almost 100% fatal for the project. We saw a variety of situations: starting with teams, where leaders fought for power to the detriment of business, and ending with startups, which each time delegated to us to meet a new person - a sort of “collective farm”. Anyway, we want to communicate with the same character, who will become for us an interface to the team and will be able to answer the questions we have and solve the problems of our company. If there is no such leader, this is a reason to think - first of all, by the way, to the startup itself. For us, as investors, the likelihood of success of such investments is very low. So draw conclusions.
Any project must have its own Bruce Lee. by Aled Lewis
- Lack of mission. I believe in initiatives that solve some real problem. Well, for example, girls and boys can not meet - this is a very specific problem. And the one who offers her an interesting solution has a chance to make a successful project. But in reality, we often have to deal with startups who are busy doing what they do "cool stuff." And then (sometimes) they try to adjust a task for it. These are such Lefties who shoe their fleas. I have nothing against it, but why? At least, this is far from business. My experience shows that startups that do not solve specific problems have almost no chance of becoming a successful business. Even if they have a very cool thing. Of course, this does not mean that the project is doomed - at one time people came up with a practically useless laser at first, and what happened next - we all know. But such stories are not related to business or venture investments - this is more of a science, and such innovators should have a completely different path to success and recognition.
- Business does not scale. This, as a rule, refers to teams that did not sit well in their time and did not think about where and how their company would develop. And in the end, it did not occur to them that the business they are doing cannot, by definition, grow more than, say, up to 10 million. It may not be bad, but then, again, we are not talking about venture capital investments. Runa does not invest in projects that have no chance of achieving a turnover of 100 million within ten years. In the Valley, by the way, this figure is one billion. This does not mean at all that the project will necessarily achieve such a goal - the question is whether he has such a prospect in principle.
Every startup wants to fly high.
- The problem of "narrow" project. To some extent this is also a problem with the mission. Often people come and offer a do-it-yourself thing that solves the problem not entirely, but rather, some part of it, and not the most important one. Well, a sort of "bauble", "feature". This, conditionally, may be a service that analyzes the activity of the buyers of an online store and, on the basis of its “predictions,” offers them some kind of “special” product. For us as investors, it’s small - it happens that “features” grow into large businesses, but this happens rarely. It is unlikely that we will invest in such a company.
9 billion and only pushing hadrons? Thanks, no.
Perhaps these are all typical problems that we have to face at the stage of acquaintance with a startup. But entrepreneurs, in turn, need to be aware that we also have an understanding of our own strategy and this is not always the case. We will say that we will not invest in a project that we cannot help because we do not consider our competence in its field to be unique. We also do not take start-ups, which by definition cannot reach other markets (here we are talking about purely technological risks - let's not forget that Russia still makes up only 2% of the world market).
In general, I can say that quite a lot of good teams come to us (well, only if we are not talking about their presentation skills). In recent years, we saw about a thousand projects, and at least one hundred of them were quite decent. Why we did not invest in everything then? As a rule, there are three reasons for such cases: we cannot agree on the conditions; there is already a shareholder who is not eager to see us; low personal compatibility with the founders. But in general, the quantity and quality of projects is growing, which is good news.
PS In the following posts I would like to continue the topic of errors - I think that so far not enough attention is paid to it.
So, here are the key issues:
')
- There is no clear leader. Or, alternatively, there are several leaders and responsibilities between them are not distributed. The first time I focused my attention on this three years ago and now I can definitely say that this error is almost 100% fatal for the project. We saw a variety of situations: starting with teams, where leaders fought for power to the detriment of business, and ending with startups, which each time delegated to us to meet a new person - a sort of “collective farm”. Anyway, we want to communicate with the same character, who will become for us an interface to the team and will be able to answer the questions we have and solve the problems of our company. If there is no such leader, this is a reason to think - first of all, by the way, to the startup itself. For us, as investors, the likelihood of success of such investments is very low. So draw conclusions.
Any project must have its own Bruce Lee. by Aled Lewis
- Lack of mission. I believe in initiatives that solve some real problem. Well, for example, girls and boys can not meet - this is a very specific problem. And the one who offers her an interesting solution has a chance to make a successful project. But in reality, we often have to deal with startups who are busy doing what they do "cool stuff." And then (sometimes) they try to adjust a task for it. These are such Lefties who shoe their fleas. I have nothing against it, but why? At least, this is far from business. My experience shows that startups that do not solve specific problems have almost no chance of becoming a successful business. Even if they have a very cool thing. Of course, this does not mean that the project is doomed - at one time people came up with a practically useless laser at first, and what happened next - we all know. But such stories are not related to business or venture investments - this is more of a science, and such innovators should have a completely different path to success and recognition.
- Business does not scale. This, as a rule, refers to teams that did not sit well in their time and did not think about where and how their company would develop. And in the end, it did not occur to them that the business they are doing cannot, by definition, grow more than, say, up to 10 million. It may not be bad, but then, again, we are not talking about venture capital investments. Runa does not invest in projects that have no chance of achieving a turnover of 100 million within ten years. In the Valley, by the way, this figure is one billion. This does not mean at all that the project will necessarily achieve such a goal - the question is whether he has such a prospect in principle.
Every startup wants to fly high.
- The problem of "narrow" project. To some extent this is also a problem with the mission. Often people come and offer a do-it-yourself thing that solves the problem not entirely, but rather, some part of it, and not the most important one. Well, a sort of "bauble", "feature". This, conditionally, may be a service that analyzes the activity of the buyers of an online store and, on the basis of its “predictions,” offers them some kind of “special” product. For us as investors, it’s small - it happens that “features” grow into large businesses, but this happens rarely. It is unlikely that we will invest in such a company.
9 billion and only pushing hadrons? Thanks, no.
Perhaps these are all typical problems that we have to face at the stage of acquaintance with a startup. But entrepreneurs, in turn, need to be aware that we also have an understanding of our own strategy and this is not always the case. We will say that we will not invest in a project that we cannot help because we do not consider our competence in its field to be unique. We also do not take start-ups, which by definition cannot reach other markets (here we are talking about purely technological risks - let's not forget that Russia still makes up only 2% of the world market).
In general, I can say that quite a lot of good teams come to us (well, only if we are not talking about their presentation skills). In recent years, we saw about a thousand projects, and at least one hundred of them were quite decent. Why we did not invest in everything then? As a rule, there are three reasons for such cases: we cannot agree on the conditions; there is already a shareholder who is not eager to see us; low personal compatibility with the founders. But in general, the quantity and quality of projects is growing, which is good news.
PS In the following posts I would like to continue the topic of errors - I think that so far not enough attention is paid to it.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/147726/
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