Joining the Customer Value Fund
After spending time with hundreds of businesses as a venture investor and building one at Callin, it became clear that great entrepreneurs are really underserved by the financing options available to them. Traditional venture capital is a wonderful product and the foundational layer of risk capital that underpins our entire ecosystem, but treating it like the only option is holding us back.
Expanding the scope of the private capital markets will solve many of the challenges that companies and investors face, like unnecessarily high levels of dilution and the pervasive lack of DPI. More importantly, it will enable the most ambitious entrepreneurs to build even bigger and more creative businesses.
I’ve often had people tell me that thinking deeply about how to capitalize your business is a waste of time – or even worse, outright unhelpful. This is backwards. Your operating profile is inextricably linked to your financial one, because all operating decisions are ultimately an exercise in thoughtful capital allocation. And when you match your sources of capital with your uses of it – on both cost/risk and duration axes – the universe of investable opportunities dramatically increases. Fixing your balance sheet allows you to become more ambitious, not less: spend more on sales and marketing, build better products faster, accelerate your growth or roadmap via M&A, and even buy back stock to give liquidity to shareholders… all while owning a bigger chunk of your company.
Entrepreneurs building amazing companies deserve better capital markets that serve them. That’s why I’m excited to join Pranav, KV, Harry, and the rest of the Customer Value Fund. They’ve quietly built a multi-billion dollar machine helping 50+ companies optimize their balance sheets with novel financing solutions, allowing many to grow more quickly all while burning less cash and giving away less to VCs.
If you’re a talented entrepreneur building a great business that you want to own even more of over time, or a VC who wants your companies to grow faster but burn less, please reach out. We’d be delighted to help.
If you have questions, comments, or feedback, please reach out: andrewziperski [at] gmail [dot] com.
The views expressed herein are the author’s own and are not the views of General Catalyst Group Management, LLC or its affiliates.