The Bulletin #22: Lots of Layoffs, The Post-IC Diligence Process, & VWV Interview Tips

To all the seniors that are still looking for jobs right now, wishing you the best of luck 🌟 The market downturn and massive tech layoffs are not making it easy for you all.

Nov 11, 2022

🤳 Lots and Lots of Layoffs

This week’s bulletin is all about the layoffs, how the VWV team conduct diligence post Investment Committee pitch, + some tips on interviewing with VWV.

If you submitted an application, congratulations! That’s amazing— wait to hear back in the next week for a possible interview.

Douglas A. Boneparth @dougboneparth

Meta employees to be offered real estate in the Metaverse as part of severance package.

📚 What We’re Reading

Tech layoffs are only expected to worsen before it gets better 😭

The Kobeissi Letter @KobeissiLetter

Tech companies this month: 1. Twitter - Laying off 75% of employees 2. Apple - Hiring freeze 3. Amazon: Hiring freeze 4. Snapchat: Laying off 20% of employees 5. Meta: Laying off “thousands” this week 6. Microsoft: Layoffs have begun 7. Intel: Laying off 20% of employees

Nolan Church, CEO and co-founder of Continuum gives his thoughts on the current tech layoffs— having also helped execute Carta’s layoffs 2 years ago in 2020. In this podcast, there’s a few main topics Church dives into:

Jack’s silent on Twitter’s recent layoffs after Musk’s takeover
Stripe’s recent layoffs
How to conduct a layoff

And much more— read more and listen to the podcast here

What’s happening with all the fintech layoffs? 🥴

Daniel C. Liem @dcliem

The age of small teams: • @linear has 28 • @NotionHQ had < 40 at $2B • @figma had < 80 at $440M You do not need a large team in pure software businesses to succeed

Bobby Goodlatte @rsg

I worked at Facebook when we had 200 employees I’ve never understood why FB needs 20,000 employees. And less so the 70,000 employees Meta has now @elonmusk’s Twitter layoffs are appropriate Unfortunate, but appropriate These businesses just don’t require that many people

As mentioned above, Stripe’s being laying off their workers— cutting 14% of their workforce— following by Chime at 12% and Brex at 11%. Spiros Margaris, fintech VC and founder of Margaris Ventures, explained that these layoffs are cause by “caused by the challenging geopolitical market environment and inflationary pressures.” Not much of a surprise there.

Read more perspectives from various VC investors here.

Sweden’s EQT Ventures Closes €1.1B Fund 🦄

Despite the market downturn and all layoffs in the states, Sweden’s massive fund EQT Ventures closes their third fund to double down on European early-stage startups just this past week. Their total raise since their launch in 2016 is €2.3 billion and have since backed 100 companies, which includes 18 exits, and 9 unicorns. Their growth arm, EQT Growth, also raised $2.4B earlier this year.

🎧 What We’re Listening To

Managing Director @ Insight Partners, Deven Parekh, talks about fintech investing

The Manager Director at Insight Partners, Anirudh Singh, discusses what makes the firm so successful, how fintech investing has changed over the past 10 years, and more.

Rashad Moore tells the story about his transition from engineer to founder of software consulting company

Listen to it here with a transcript, too

💥 Post-IC Diligence Process

If you’ve been keeping up with our newsletters, you know that we’ve wrapped up our first phase of the diligence process and just pitched to our Investment Committee.

Our IC is composed of 5 incredible members:

Bob Place ‘75, Managing Direction @ Clean Energy Venture Group
Troy Henikoff ‘86, prev Managing Director @ MATH Venture Partners
Deborah Mills-Scofield ‘82, Mentoring Maven & Partner @ VC firm Glengary
Zachary Aarons ‘05, Co-founder & General Partner @ MetaProp
Aneesha Mehta ‘13, Partner @ Bain Capital Ventures

After pitching, the committee votes on whether or not our pitched investments go through. However, there are cases (like this time around) where we need to continue the diligence process just a little bit more before we come to a decision.

And the wonderful thing is, at the end of the day, the IC members are there to guide us and really listen to our own convictions— even if it doesn’t necessarily align with theirs.

Roshan Patel @roshanpateI

when the VC sends you a calendly link but makes you pay $99 to book the meeting 🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩

So what does some Post-IC Diligence look like?

Well for one, Troy is sitting down with the entire VWV team to really understand what a good valuation means. ‘Good’ is incredibly arbitrary here, because it can mean good for the founder or good for the investor. And the two look very different (read Venture Deals by Brad Feld for more!)

When a founder gives us a valuation and cap, we want to understand how much our own capital in the pool will look like 7 years down the road. When a dozen more investors join in on the rounds, dilution is something to heavily consider. Surely, a 150x growth sounds amazing but what do the actual returns look like for us?

More to come on this in next week’s newsletter after meeting with Troy!

Another post-IC diligence task is to speak to more investors or industry experts to get some answers. As we talked about how to back up gaming start-ups last week, we need more guidance and information on how to precisely evaluate the company at hand.

Thus, we’re hoping on more calls to get our answers!

Roshan Patel @roshanpateI

You don’t need VC funding to launch your startup. Hospitals will pay you to donate organs: - Kidney: $10,000 - Lung: $25,000 - Pancreas: $12,000 - Liver lobe: $6,000 - Intestines: $18,000 - Eye: $50,000 That's $120k with zero equity given up. Why don't more founders do this?

✌️ VWV Interview Tips

As mentioned in our info sessions, you don’t need to know anything about VC to join VWV. Here is what we look for:

Do you operate like a founder? Do you go out of your way to get things down not because it’s necessarily expected of you but you want to see something happen?
We’re more interested in how you think through problems and challenging questions— how well can you communicate your thought through to others?
What gets you excited? What are some of your passions? We want to get to know you as a person and how that fits into the startup and VC ecosystem.

Some little tips:

We don’t bite! We love chatting with other students and we want to set you up for success. Come in being yourself and having fun with the process— we’ll definitely have more fun ourselves if you do.
If you receive an interview offer, be prompt to your interview and make you're in a well-lit, noiseless area. We don't expect a full business formal outfit but do make sure your background isn’t distracting.

Here are some resources, if you’re fresh to interviewing:

We recommend you take a read through the basics of VWV’s operations and become familiar with our portfolio company. Try thinking like an investor— which ones get you excited and which ones would you not have invested in?

Here is a method in crafting good answers: The Star Method (US News)
How to stand out in an interview (Harvard Business Review)
Some advice on good questions to ask your interviewer (HBR)

neha @neharedy

one day you’re young and cool and the next you’re thinking about b2b SaaS

Best of luck during the interview process! We’re all incredibly excited to meet you.

That’s it for this week, feel free to email me at jules_qian@brown.edu for any inquiries

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