Listen and subscribe to Stocks In Translation on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you find your favorite podcasts. In this episode of Stocks In...
, sit down with Melissa Pegus , serial entrepreneur, early-stage investor, and non-profit board member, to discuss her experiences as an early-stage investor.
Pegus speaks about the importance of being able to pivot as a startup."Pivoting is just a fact of life... for most startups. And the ability to pivot quickly can mean the difference between growth and sort of the end of a journey for a startup," Pegus says. And that means that I am often the earliest institutional investor in a company that might not have a ton of traction and barely has a product.I chose to do that after almost two decades as a start up operator.
These were venture capital backed firms and uh you're also in the game, but you're an early stage investor, not necessarily venture capital.So I'm typically looking to invest in companies at their seed and precede stages, set as the earliest stages at which they're accepting outside capital.
So that's a little bit of the types of start ups that I'm looking for and partnering with them at the earliest stages to really help them with two, how they effectively sell their products to services and to markets at scale and how they prepare to go on to tell their story and raise subsequent funding from other investors.We talk about series funding, you get a series, you get B SERIES C can go all the way up to D and further.
So when you said you had nine start ups and you exited with all of them is the word exit referring to each stage of funding, you exit each one or is it something at the very end business?So when I talk about all of the nine early stage companies that I worked with exiting, meaning that they sold their business.And very often when companies think of exits, the most common that we talk about in the world of venture capital is when you go public, you access the public markets.
There is a lot of fundamentals around how you think about growing your go to market, how you think about hiring and building great teams, always listening to your customer and keeping an eye to the market.But as your business grows in size and scale and complexity, your priorities are often competing.
Typically, when we're looking at wonderful deals, we want to see, does the company have the opportunity to grow to around $100 million in sales in 5 to 6 years?So around that traction and the momentum and traction, but also market, is it a really big market and growing market?But at the stage where I invest, there's often not much more to the start up than the team.
And so do I think that we're going to see a lot more of that ease and liquidity coming back into the market?But I also think um investors are going to be um asking a lot more questions around sort of the fundamentals of the business that would be good.
And so this is something I talk to founders about all the time when they think about fundraising in general.And I said, well, the right question is actually what can you do with different levels of funding?Then they need to look and say, ok, growth was the initial goal, but default to live is pretty good.
And one of the most interesting promises of A I is I think the reduced sort of barrier to entrepreneurship and to launch your start up that it's going to provide for people who reduces barriers to entry for everything. So maybe some will opt to not raise venture, maybe some will opt raise only one round and not have to raise anymore.So what happens if you don't raise money?
One of the really exciting things about our music programming as well is that we have been operating since around 2010. I find one of the best ways to find board opportunities is just to let people know that you're open to them.And I think starting with organizations that you're really passionate about.
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