rmorrison

Blue Apron's been good, but takes way too long for us to cook. I highly recommend you look into Gobble (http://www.gobble.com) which is as healthy, much quicker to make, and the recipes are delicious.

Garry, Alexis, and Initialized have been extremely helpful and hard-working investors in my company for ~5 years. I love that they're founders themselves, which means they know what it takes and they work really hard to help their portfolio companies. These are the investors you want on your side, particularly when you run into road bumps. I highly recommend them as investors, and I'm happy to answer any questions (my email is in my profile).

I had the privilege of meeting Andy Grove a few years ago after he expressed interest in learning what our startup was doing to advance medicine. At the time, he was already clearly suffering the physical effects of Parkinsons, but mentally he was completely with it.

He listened without saying a word for ~15 minutes while I explained what our startup does. Then, he began "If I were you, I'd..." and proceeded to tell us specific ways he thought we could better focus our business. His advice was relevant and demonstrated a crisp understanding of our business and many of the challenges we'd face over the next several years.

My natural inclination was to jump in and start pushing back, but I just stop and decided to listen and learn from this business legend. I left extremely impressed. Even today, several years later, we're still executing on many things he foresaw after a brief interaction.

By far David Lee and SV Angel have been one of our best angel investors at Comprehend! Sorry to see him go, wish him the best!

Congrats Matin and team!

There is no written rule that says "each round is meant to take roughly 20% of your company", and a company is never guaranteed another round. I know several entrepreneurs who have been given term sheets for over 50% of their company. Or no term sheets at all.

There is no "rule" about implied valuation either. Entrepreneurs can raise $3m in notes $100k at a time, usually from investors that are much less price-sensitive than VCs leading a priced round. It's a lot harder to raise a priced Series A at a $10m+ valuation than raising piecemeal notes at the same valuation cap (or uncapped notes, even).

Again, this is all manageable by the entrepreneur, but there are no "rules" like it often appears from the outside.

My point is that entrepreneurs can get into jams inadvertently.

If you raise $2m or $3m on uncapped, no-discount notes, you basically need to turn that into a $10m+ pre-money company upon raising your Series A. If you raise $4m or 5m+ seed, it gets even harder. And this is assuming no cap or discount, which is unlikely.

You are correct that Series A rounds are usually not smaller, in which case if you raise several million seed on uncapped notes and cannot leverage that into a much more valuable company, you'll be unable to raise a Series A.

This is all manageable by the entrepreneur, but it's important to make sure you understand what's happening and where the risks are. It seems a lot of entrepreneurs don't.

The other major issue with convertible notes are that entrepreneurs can end up giving away a lot more of the company than they realize. For example, if the company does a priced round with a pre-money valuation less than the cap (or with uncapped notes, less than expected.)

The median pre-money Series A valuation for all WSGR startups is ~$8.0m [1], which is likely on the higher end.

Also, uncapped notes do not get diluted when raising your Series A, which is additional dilution for the entrepreneur.

For example, let's say you raise $5m uncapped notes with no discount. If you then raise a $3m Series A at a $8m pre-money valuation, you'll end up giving away more than 50% of your company, not counting interest or option pool. At a $15m pre-money valuation, you'll be giving away over 40% of your company.

Entrepreneurs should be equally careful with SAFEs.

[1] http://www.wsgr.com/publications/PDFSearch/EntrepreneursRepo...

We use ZeroCater and I can't recommend them highly enough!

We use ZeroCater at our office and absolutely love it! Each day we get different food delivered that is catered to our company's preferences. I highly recommend them to any startups!

If the deal doesn't renew in 2015, then there is a five year wind down period where Veeva can sell a limited number new licenses but still use the platform. Presumably if this happens, they'll have to rebuild it. It's addressed in the S1.

Instead we should try thinking of them as pairs of what you're going to build, plus the unscalable thing(s) you're going to do initially to get the company going.

This is probably the most important thing a new entrepreneur needs to realize. Envisioning a world where everybody is using your product isn't enough. You need to figure out how to get to that world from this one, and that is where many entrepreneurs don't have a strategy, and subsequently fail.

Most companies do something internally, but it's typically slow, expensive, out-of-date, breaks frequently, and is prone to errors.

Veeva? You should stop by next time you're in Palo Alto, would love to meet. Email is in my profile.

The industry has been drastically changing over the past decade. 15 years ago, all data collection was paper based. Then came Electronic Data Collection systems. Now, there are cloud systems likes Medidata Rave and Veeva which are doing exceptionally well. This change has created tremendous opportunity for new startups.

This is happening across all enterprise verticals, and this is why there is such an opportunity for enterprise startups. As Warren Hogarth says in the original article "There’s about a trillion dollars of enterprise software", much of which will "transition to [specialized] enterprise software... and create multi-billion dollar companies".

We both do. I've actually been involved in writing clinical analytics software since 2000, including having been one of the lead developers on software used by the FDA and top pharma. Jud previously had a consulting company in the space performing data integrations.

Medidata is a data collection system, and Comprehend works out of the box with them. If you're one of their customers you can start looking at your data in Comprehend simply by providing us with your API credentials.

The problem is, many companies use Medidata, Oracle, MERGE, and other vendors. Inside of a single study, let alone across several. That's where Comprehend comes in. We simply help customers get the actionable insights they need, and then help them take those actions.

No, we actually work on top of CTMS or EDC systems. Basically, there are just so many of these types of systems, that without Comprehend companies have no way to answer questions across them. The abundance of these systems, which you allude to, is a big part of the problem that we solve.

There are a lot of companies doing this, but it's still a huge problem and I agree w/ chintan that there is a lot of opportunity for innovation.

Yes we do = )

We actually spend a lot of time thinking and dealing with security concerns, both from a software development perspective and from a devops perspective. You're correct that the data is very valuable, so a large percentage of our architecture and design decisions are dictated by security and privacy concerns.

This actually becomes even more complicated when you think about maintaining blinding, aggregate-only blinding, and some of the other features we need to support.

Rick from Comprehend here, we're also hiring. Definitely reach out if you're interested in transforming the medical industry! http://www.comprehend.com/careers

Congrats!

Rick from Comprehend here:

Comprehend isn't a BI tool. If all of a company's data is well-structured in a single database, with a non-changing data structure and without missing or null data, then it's easy to use BI tools like Tableau, Spotfire, Excel, etc.

But this is not the case in the modern day enterprise. Instead, there are dozens of different data collection systems, with different and changing data structures. This is what Comprehend's core technology was built to handle, in real-time.

In order to get similar functionality, companies are typically relying on teams of programmers to manually write and run scripts over and over again. Or, they're trying to put in place data warehouses, which rarely contain everything required and are often out of date.

I agree that the lack of data standards and interconnectivity is on of several big problems that have traditionally crippled health IT innovation. But, advanced technology is becoming so cheap, and the pain points have become so large, that companies are changing.

Technologies that can compensate for inconsistencies between existing systems (like my company's product, http://comprehend.com) are enabling health IT to do things previously unthinkable.

I would recommend trying, especially if you have medical training and know the space. While it is difficult, with the appropriate go-to-market strategy and determination you can get a foothold and grow from there.

Comprehend Systems - Palo Alto, CA - Developers

We make next-generation visualization and analytics software that works across multiple, disparate databases in real time. We tackle hard technical problems, are hiring smart entrepreneurial people, and are attacking a huge market opportunity!

Perks: Market salary, generous equity, lunch and dinner, laundry and wash-and-fold twice a week, gym membership, any computer setup you want, relocation to the bay area, health, vision, dental, and more!

http://comprehend.com/careers

or email your resume to

careers@comprehend.com

Our startup, http://www.comprehend.com, makes software to help get new drugs on the market quicker and cheaper. One of the most appealing things about starting an enterprise startup are the size of the problems: the fine GSK is paying ($3bn) is almost as large as all AppStore revenue last year ($3.4bn). Another datapoint: Oracle's 2011 revenue was over $35bn.

If you're going to devote several years of your life to a startup, you owe it to yourself to make sure you are attacking a huge problem.

We've been using Acunote for almost a year, and love it. I highly recommend checking it out if you haven't done so already. Congrats!

Sencha was an easy choice to get our MVP in the hand of users. We have more critical features to work on that are orders of magnitude more important to our users.