风投基金首次募资实战宝典

    如果你从来没有当过风投公司的合伙人，那么，你第一次为种子基金融资时有三条途径可选：

    1. 自己手握数百万美元。

    2. 为持有数百万美元资金、同时又希望自己酷劲十足、锐意创新的公司工作。

    3. 四处转转（就我来说，是骑自行车），接触投资者和初创型企业，同时向他们兜售你的策略，付诸执行，把一只手筹到的钱放到另一只手中，因为你既筹集资金，又要运用资金来印证你的策略……同时要在至少一年的时间内忘掉赚钱这回事。

    如果我必须从头再来一次，我想我会选择让自己的口袋里有数百万美元资金。但我同样可以说，通过困难的方式也能获得回报，对此我很高兴。我刚刚宣布了我的基金Brooklyn Bridge Ventures Fund I完成募集的消息。它的总规模为830万美元，专门投资于纽约市处于种子阶段的初创型企业，而且已经投资了12家公司。

    尽管我在2001年就进入了风投行业，但在这次融资过程中，我仍然学到了很多新的东西。我曾经是机构有限合伙人——通用汽车（General Motors）退休基金的一名分析师。我还为风投公司合广风投（Union Square Ventures）和First Round Capital工作过。我曾经是一名得到资金支持的企业家，也曾在风投注资的公司里当过产品经理。

    但筹集资金完全是另外一回事——特别是就我的规模来说。相对于传统的机构投资者而言，Brooklyn Bridge Ventures的规模太小，而完全依靠天使投资又显得有点儿大。

    所有涉及资产类型的问题中，这是最让人沮丧的一点，也是为什么长期回报不能达到应有水平的原因之一。人们都很愿意建立一只规模较大的基金，就算这样做意味着你将偏离自己的专业领域。要建立一只大得多的基金应该会容易得多，原因是那样的话你会非常清楚去找谁，而且知道自己能拿到金额要大得多的支票。而保持较小规模的话，我就得精挑细选，从家庭办公室和高净值个人那里找到一些比较大但又不能太大的资金。这些家庭办公室和高净值个人不会让自己劳神，甚至未必会有足够的人手来大量接听电话。

    不过，保持较小的规模是我的核心策略——如果我对自己在通用汽车工作的日子还有任何印象的话，那就是，风格的偏移对经理人来说就是灭顶之灾。偏离了自己的重点，往往就会一败涂地。我在First Round Capital工作时的特长就是能先人一步发现投资对象并，据为己有。在这家公司的头两年中，我负责了七项投资，其中两项实现了转让——GroupMe以大约7000万美元的价格转让给了Skype，SinglePlatform转让给了Constant Contact，据说转让价格为1亿美元。虽然我负责的其他投资同样表现良好，但我无法想象成为长期投资者的情形，比如说在公司担任董事长达八年，直到它首发上市。我撰写本文的目的不是告诉你怎样把公司规模扩大到300人。以往的经历表明，我把目光投向这些公司的时候，它们还都看起来什么也不是。我甚至出现在了Twitter孵化记》（Hatching Twitter）这本书里，内容是我在电子邮件里提醒合广风投联合创始人弗雷德·威尔森注意这项新兴业务，它在2007年3月的西南偏南大会（SXSW）上表现火爆。

    小贴士：培养和富人的关系。我还是一名年轻分析师的时候，在私募基金行业遇到了许多合伙人。现在想来，我本应该和他们保持联系。这些人都来自黑石（Blackstone）、Apollo这样的公司。这一点听上去显而易见，对吧？然而，在24岁的时候，你会把自己期望的谋生手段作为评估潜在人际关系的基准，而不怎么去考虑结识这些人能让你在以后做一些自己想做的事。当时我并不想涉足并购领域，因此确实没怎么用心去经营这些关系。和他们保持联系的价值绝不仅仅在于他们手里有钱，还在于他们中的许多人确实很有意思，而且见多识广。除了以后可以把他们作为兜售对象以外，我本来还能学到其他的东西。

    There are three ways to raise a first-time seed fund when you've never even been a VC firm partner before. You can:

    1. Have millions of dollars.

    2. Work for a company that has millions of dollars and wants to be cool, innovate, etc.

   3. Go running (or in my case, biking) around town chasing down investors and startups all at the same time, simultaneously pitching your strategy and executing it, taking money from one hand and putting in the other as you both fundraise and prove out your strategy by deploying capital… and forget having an income for at least a year.

    If I had to do it all over again, I think I would have started with having millions of dollars. But, happily, I can say that doing it the hard way still paid off. I just announced the close of Brooklyn Bridge Ventures Fund I, with a total of $8.3 million dedicated to investing in seed-stage startups here in New York City. The fund has already invested in 12 companies.

    Along the way, I learned a lot of new lessons, even though I had been in venture since 2001. I had been an analyst at an institutional LP--working for the General Motors pension fund. I had worked for Union Square Ventures and First Round Capital. I had been a funded entrepreneur and had also worked at a venture-backed company as a product manager.

    Raising for a fund, however, is a very different animal--especially at my size. Brooklyn Bridge Ventures was too small for the traditional institutional investors, and would have been a bit large to do entirely with angels.

    That's the most disheartening thing about the asset class--and one of the reasons why long term returns aren't where they should be. You're highly incentivized to raise a bigger fund, even if it means drifting from your expertise. It would have been much easier to raise a significantly larger fund, because then you know exactly who to go to and you can get much bigger checks. By staying small, I had to thread the needle of finding some bigger, but not too big, checks from family offices and high net worth individuals--all people who don't put themselves out there and who aren't necessarily staffed to take a lot of inbound.

    Staying small, however, was core to the strategy--and if I remembered anything from my GM days, style drift kills a manager. Stray from your focus and you tend to get crushed. What I had been good at while at First Round Capital was finding deals early and planting my flag. Within the first two years of my job, two of the seven investments that I led were sold--GroupMe to Skype for about $70 million and SinglePlatform to Constant Contact (CTCT) for a reported $100 million. While my other investments were doing well, I couldn't tell a story about being a long-term investor who sits on boards eight years until an IPO. I'm not here to tell you how to scale to 300 people. My track record said that I pointed to things when they hardly looked like things. I'm even in the Hatching Twitter book, nudging Fred Wilson by email on this new hot service coming out of SXSW in March of 2007.

    Pro Tip:Cultivate your relationships with rich people. There were a lot of partners at private equity firms that I met as a young analyst that I wish I had stayed in touch with--people from places like Blackstone (BX), Apollo (APO), etc. Sounds obvious, right? Well, when you're 24, you're evaluating potential networking contacts based on what you want to do for a living--and less how knowing that person might enable you to do what you want to do later on. I didn't want to go into buyouts, so I didn't really put much stock into these relationships. It wouldn't have been worth staying in touch with these people simply because of their money, but many of them were really interesting, knowledgeable people that I could have learned from in addition to being able to pitch them later.