Words of Wisdom from Fred Wilson

by Scott Edward Walker on April 13th, 2016

To Our Clients & Friends: Welcome to our weekly series “Helping Entrepreneurs Succeed.”  Each week, we post a short video of a successful entrepreneur, investor or business leader on a variety of topics.  This week, we present Fred Wilson, the co-founder and managing partner of Union Square Ventures, and a very successful investor.

In this solid, three-minute clip, Fred shares some words of wisdom for founders with respect to raising capital, including the following:

• “I’m a huge fan that less is more.” (at 0:28)
• “If you are forced to figure-out how to get from ‘here to here’ on a million bucks [and] if you’re good, you’ll figure-out how to do it.” (at 1:27)
•  “I’m generally not a fan of bigger seeds, bigger A’s [or] bigger B’s.” (at 1:34)
•  “I would generally say at the seed round, raise 12 months of capital; at the A and B round, raise 18 months of capital; and C and beyond, go for 24 months plus.” (at 2:18)
• “It’s a bad signal that an entrepreneur would be willing to take four years of dilution when — what they really should do is take a year of dilution and then in a year increase their value 3x.” (at 2:45)

I hope you enjoy it.  Cheers, Scott