A new stat out from Dow Jones has me puzzled:
The median share of companies sold to investors in first rounds has declined to 38%, down from 50% two years ago. Company-unfriendly provisions that gained notoriety after the tech bubble burst remained relatively rare, affecting mostly companies whose business had faltered.
Really? The median was 50% and has fallen to 38%? In deals in which I’m involved, we almost never take 38% in a Series A, let alone 50%. This must be a mean/median/mode problem, n’est-ce pas?
Related posts:
Any word on the average $ amount per rounds of funding, or particular industry? Might give the information a little more context.
Well maybe there’s a sample-size problem, but I’m not at all surprised by the trend.
Maybe you have a perception bias too, though. Your deals probably skew to the clean ones, and not-so-capital-intensive. But if you were raising funding for a network equipment company or a chip firm in the 2003-2004 time, you were giving up huge chunks just to get going. Ah how times have changed.