Should public investors have easy access to invest in startups?

A great Insight from Niki  Skevak from Blackbird Ventures 

Afterpay, Xero and Pushpay all went public super early at super silly valuations and created awesome business worth billions of dollars each

In 2016, Afterpay went public on a $500k annualised revenue run rate and raised $25M on a $165M post-money valuation. It's now a $7B company 3 years later with a $214M annualised revenue run rate.

 (oops $6b now) 

Maybe make it easy for startups in Australia to list on the asx and enable public investors to get in at a stage that’s often reserved for VC/private capital markets? 

They can have a strategy to invest in startups where 1 in 10 will work! 

David Shein Shares his recipe of turning a startup into a business he sold in 2001 for over $600m

We were grateful to have David Shein share his story, some of his learnings and strategies  with us at the BBG BSI Innovation Forum last week.

David shared his vision, KPIs and thoughts and strategies  on customer service, culture, building relationships and scaling globally.

This was followed by a robust Thinktank of  “3 Pods of 6” and a sharing of insights and learnings on how these learnings and strategies can be implemented into our own businesses and organisations! 

1987 - 1991 - Comtech  founded - grew from startup to 85 employees - winning NABs ethnic awards. (His speech then would be the same as his speech now)

1991  to 2001 - grew from  85 to 1400  employees - and $1b in revenue - making a tradesale to Di Data - for +$500m (in height of boom - a year before crash!!

2001 to 2002 - wallowing

2002 - now - investing in startups and innovators with passion, purpose and peraerverence (in no particular order)

Here  is a taste of the start of a sensational BBG Forum

Enjoy!!

(Let me know if you want to see the rest!) 

Part 1 

Think Tank part 2 and 3 

ICANsee cannabis Ocular Therapy -

The medical cannabis market will reach at least $19B in the next 26 months making it an attractive and important sector.  

Combating inflammation and pain are among the most impactful applications of medical cannabis.

A medical market primarily driven by inflammation and pain is the ocular therapeutics  market of eye drops. iCAN believes that the medicinal use of cannabinoids in eyes drops is inevitable and the time to stake a claim in that market is now. 

iCAN is pleased to announce that iCANsee is offering an investment opportunity in their seed round right now.

iCANsee are first movers in the cannabis ocular therapy market, with clinical applications and for both over-the-counter and prescription markets utilizing nanotechnology-based delivery system, developed here in Israel, and iCANsee was awarded a Government  grant from the Israel Innovation Authority for the R&D.

If you’d like to find out more about iCANsee, please download the brief here:

 you’d like to find out more about iCANsee, please download the brief here:

Want to know more?

Send us an email, along with a signed copy of our standard NDA, and we will get back to you as soon as possible.

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD! For more info 

Want to know more?

Send Saul Kaye an email  incubate@israel-cannabis.com (no relation :) , and no vested interests 

along with a signed copy of their standard NDA, and he will get back to you as soon as possible.

Enboarder raises $12m

Enboarder has to date raised $12m from VCs who love the founder and team.

What Enboarder Does 

Enboarders onboarding software relieves HR of operational processes, delivers personalized experiences and drives human connection well before new hires begin their roles.

It delivers intelligent nudges and personalized communications for managers and employees alike.

Enboarders customers

Global companies — including McDonald’s, Hugo Boss, EA Games, Eventbrite, Gap, Verizon, Wyndham and, most recently, Compass, the 10,000-employee real estate brokerage firm - have used its service to deliver onboarding experiences aimed at boosting employee happiness, productivity, and retention.

Who has invested 

Enboarder today announced it has raised $8 million to give employers better ways to bring new employees onboard.

Greycroft, which participated in Enboarder’s previous funding round of $4 million, is the lead investor in the new round, which brings the company’s total funding to $12 million. New investors Next Coast Ventures and Stage 2 Capital also participated in the round.

Laurence Schwartz at “our Innovation fund LP” supported by Jerry Stesel , Geoff Levy and Dave Shein was a 2016 investor 

So what is  Enboarder’s Unique Selling Proposition?

Enboarder CEO and founder Brent Pearson in a statement. “We’re living in an experience era, and yet we welcome new hires with a process. Employees have all the power today and place a premium on experience.  We provide that experience for the Organisation.” 

“Companies that do not adopt solutions to power an exceptional employee experience will lose the war for talent,” said Greycroft principal Will Szczerbiak. 

“Customers absolutely love it, the team is terrific and has executed flawlessly since we joined the seed in 2018, and we feel strongly that Enboarder will become the category leader of this emerging part of the HR tech stack.”

“We work hard each and every day to partner with exceptional founders and to add material value to help them realise their dreams and take on the world, and we are super proud to  announce our 2016 Investee Enboarder’s US Series A round, raising approx $12 million from US VCs Greycroft, Next Coast Ventures and Stage 2 Capital.” Laurence Schwartz at “our Innovation fund LP” supported by Jerry Stesel , Geoff Levy and Dave Shein

The Next Stage 

Austin-based Enboarder is planning to double its 40-person team in the next 12 months, with the new investment also helping build out the company’s sales, marketing, customer success, and product functions.

How Do the Gurus Build Great Networks?

This article has really resonated! Thanks to Noirin Mosley from Race Party for pointing this out 

A: You go out of your way to provide exceptional value for other people.

It really is that simple.

The only thing I would add, is to continue to work hard at both; delivering value and protecting that relationship.

So let me unpack that a little.

Delivering Value

How do you deliver exceptional value for someone? It starts with your first encounter. Do you try and jam a business card in someones hand? Maybe pitch them your product or service straight away? or do you act like a normal human being and just ask how they are going and what brings them here? Basically, listen.

At a networking event, It may seem counter-intuitive to what we think about business networking, but I assure you this is how you build meaningful relationships over time, and that may mean leaving out 'what you do' altogether. I have personally found that 9/10 if you don't mention it straight away the intrigue will get the best of them anyway and the ask will be natural! Perfectly set up for you to shine!:)

Your job is to see how you can help, or to quickly understand how you could add value. Could you help this person? Do you know someone that could help this person? That is it - no pre-tense. If the opportunity does arise, you develop a relationship based on giving value first, and ideally it will lead to all the other steps if you think it could lead to business (a meeting, proposal, etc etc). But it may just lead to you making an introduction for them, great - this is also super powerful. I assure you, they will remember that and remember you, and in time do their best to repay the favour. They will introduce people to you and your network will grow.

If they turn into a customer, always deliver the value you promised, and if you cannot, which from time to time also happens (despite best efforts), it is your responsibility to make up the difference. It should not stop with we tried our best. It should continue with we managed to increase sales by x% and I know we promised y%. What we plan to do is A, B, C, to make up the difference at our own expense. This signals two things, you care and that you will bend over backwards to deliver the results you promised regardless of circumstance.

Protecting the Relationship

Relationships are fragile, particularly those in business, so protect the relationships you create by thinking about the other person, it is not hard to ask yourself whether what you are offering or the intro you are suggesting is aligned with their brand or objectives. If it is not, you have your answer.

I love the VC style 'double opt-in'. As you start to deal with high-powered people or whenever you are in doubt as to whether the connection is truly beneficial to the other person. Email them first with the proposed introduction. Ie. I met this person, they have a great product or proposition would you mind if I connected you both? Your connection will appreciate you putting their interests first.

So that is it for today. Deliver value, keep delivering value, and protect the relationship.

Feel free to follow Chris Joannou if you like the post, and say hello to him if you need any help with your  product or growth.

Prospa ends it’s first day listed at a $750m valuation

Greg and Beau’s Prospa listed on the ASX closing the day ending up at a valuation of $750m.

It was just the other day that I was on the bus with Greg, who was on the way to work at his start up, where he was developing algorithms to work out the risk of lending money to SMEs .

Prospa  was being backed by their investors  when they had a  team of 30 writing around $26m of loans per year. 

Their mission - to help small business grow by making it easy for them to access money.

7 years later Prospa is now largest online lender to small businesses, lending circa $1b pa (circa. 5pc of the SMe market - employing over 200 people.

The business has a great culture with awesome people who seem to love what they do, and they do it well, and are proud to do it as a team with their core values being teamwork, speed, customer obsession, simplicity and boldness. 

Prospa raised $110 million from investors ahead of the IPO, valuing the company at $610 million. It listed at $3.78 and closed at $4.46, valuing the company at $720m

Airtree Ventures invested circa $30m in the various rounds and today , together with the other shareholders including AustralianSuper and Entree Capital , is their payday! 

This is a big day for Venture Capital in Australia !

Venture Capital in Australia - finding its straps

Since 2013 , 796 deals in Australian Venture Capital - equating to $4.5b of investment.

Justin Liberman and Paul Bassat’s Square Peg we’re involved in some of the biggest deals in 2018 - 

Deputy’s $111m raise and Airwallex $108m raise 

Some standout success stories in Oz -

Canva

Atlassian 

Afterpay

Zipmoney

Some of my favourites 

• Referron and BBG 
• my Recruitment Plus 
• Solvexia
• Credi 
• Redbubble 
• Retriever

Who are yours? 

AFR - Friday 31 May

8 billionaires have come from the cloud

Inspired by “Meet the billionaires of the new cloud boom - Jordan Novet” | @jordannovet -  - CNBC.com

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/01/meet-the-billionaires-of-the-new-cloud-boom.html

Robyns’ walking towards the cloud 

The Ozzie Tech  Princes - The co-CEOs of Atlassian are each worth about $8 billion, more than Salesforce's Marc Benioff. These dudes have been joine by Dropbox's Drew Houston, Zoom CEO Eric Yuanto, Toby Lutke from Spotify and Chad Richison from Paycom in Oklahoma,  

The growth in cloud software has created  a number of billionaires writes Jordan Novet of CNBC and this trend is rising.

20 years ago, it was Salesforce leading the charge with its CRM and the cloud software market and Marc Benioff its standout billionaire evangelist. 

Since then, scores of tech companies that make their money selling subscription services have grown quickly, gone public and made at least 8 of their founders billionaires, and these numbers are trending up! 

SAAS is now the way we work - it’s become ubiquitous.

Recurring revenue from collaboration and communication tools (such as REFERRON - watch this space!!) , to accounting software (XERO and MYOB ) to Recruitment  software (My Recruitment Plus ) to security and software for the medical industry, SAAS software is taking over enterprise and legacy systems. 

This is how they do it.... small teams get hooked on their products and then watch them spread more broadly throughout the organization, leading to bigger monthly payments.

Microsoft’s Azure is competing with Amazon’s AWS offering, providing cloud infrastructure so other companies can offload their critical infrastructure.

So, here are the big 8 from the cloud

Scott Farquhar and Mike Cannon-Brookes, Atlassian

They each own about 63 million shares of Atlassian, which sells software for collaboration, project tracking and code storage. Their holdings were worth almost $8 billion each at market close on Friday, topping Benioff's net worth of about $6.6 billion. Farquhar and Cannon-Brookes were recently crowned by the New York Times as Australia's first tech billionaires.

The pair first met at the University of New South Wales in 1998, started Atlassian in 2002 with $10,000 and took it public in the U.S. in 2015. Along the way, they opened a large office in San Francisco, home to several top executives. 

Atlassian's revenue rose 38% from the prior year, and the share is up 41% in 2019, giving the company a market value of over $30 billion.

Farquhar has said that he and Cannon-Brookes want to provide education for 10 million children over the next decade, focusing on the developing world.

Eric Yuan, Zoom

Eric Yuan, founder and chief executive officer of Zoom Video Communications IPO, on the Nasdaq on April 18, 2019. The stock has more than doubled from its IPO price, valuing the company — which is profitable — at over $20 billion.

Eric Yuan - A Chinese programmer who emigrated to Silicon Valley during the dot-com boom, holds close to 47 million shares in Zoom for a stake worth over $3.7 billion.

Before starting Zoom in 2011, Yuan helped build the WebEx video conferencing technology and then joined Cisco through an acquisition. Now Zoom competes with WebEx, and Yuan is more likely to meet with customers over Zoom than in person.

Zoom has a great freemium product, that makes business feel comfortable to upgrade into a paid SAAS

Tobi Lütke, Shopify

Shopify is based  in the Canadian capital city of Ottawa. 

In 2004, Lütke's task was to write code to sell snowboards online. The store, Snowdevil, opened for business, but Lütke and the team figured it would be a better idea to use what they learned to help the rest of the retail world sell their stuff online.

Shopify went public in 2015. Shares have since climbed more than 1,500%. In the most recent quarter Shopify's revenue nearly doubled, and the company says its software is now used by 800,000 businesses in about 175 countries.

Lütke controls almost 8 million shares worth close to $2.2 billion.

In November, someone on Twitter predicted that Amazon would acquire Shopify in 2019. In response Lütke wrote that he would prefer to buy Amazon in 2029.

Drew Houston, Dropbox

Drew Houston, chief executive officer and co-founder of Dropbox Inc, was  inspired to develop a service for storing files online after realizing he left a USB stick with critical information on it at home. 

Dropbox has racked up half a billion registered users of its cloud syncing and sharing service, and it's become popular with both consumers and business users.

Founded in 2007, Dropbox experienced such a rapid growth spurt in its early years that by 2011 venture investors were already valuing the company at $4 billion. That number hit $10 billion three years later. But the company has had to grow into that valuation and is still struggling to get there.

Dropbox went public in March 2018, with a market cap of $9.3 billion at Friday's close. 

Houston's 94 million shares are worth $2.1 billion.

"We're a little biased, but we think we have one of the most talented teams ever assembled, and we grow stronger every year," he and co-founder Arash Ferdowsi wrote in a letter published just before shares started trading. Ferdowsi didn't quite make the list yet!  — his stake is currently worth less than $850 million.

Peter Gassner, Veeva

Gassner, co-founded Veeva Systems in 2007, is a veteran of IBM and Salesforce. Veeva focussed on a specific vertical - life sciences and pharma, but has since expanded its offering to a comprehensive suite of tools to the health-care industry.

Veeva was profitable at the time of its IPO in 2013, and its SharePrice  has gone  from $20 to $154.29.

Gassner, who also sits on Zoom's board, holds 13 million Veeva shares, worth just over $2 billion.

Jay Chaudhry, Zscaler

Jay Chaudhry, CEO of Zscaler grew up in a Himalayan village. Today, people in 185 countries use technology from Zscaler, whose cloud-based software helps companies provide secure access to cloud applications.

It's the fifth company he's started and funded.

"My success so far has mainly been because I have very little attachment for money," he told Bloomberg in an interview earlier this year.

Nevertheless, Zscaler has jumped 356% since its IPO in March 2018, giving it a market cap of over $9 billion. 

The 26.8 million shares Chaudhry owns are worth more than $1.8 billion.

Chad Richison, Paycom

Richison founded Paycom in 1998, and runs the cloud-based human capital management software company from Oklahoma City, near where he was born. With more than 2,000 people on staff in Oklahoma, Paycom is one of the largest employers in the state. The company competes with ADP, where Richison previously worked.

Paycom went public in 2014 at $15 a share.

 It closed Thursday at $212.10. Richison's 8 million Paycom shares have a value of about $1.7 billion.