Crunchbase has a story up today explaining that Series A and Series B rounds make up between 25% and 35% of all $100mm+ “supergiant” rounds every year.
That’s interesting but what would be more interesting is to compare the cohort of companies raising Series A and Series B supergiant rounds to the rest of the companies in a given year that raised Series A and Series B rounds.
What would interest me are success rates between the two cohorts. One could measure how many of each cohort are alive five years later. Or one could compare the stock price appreciation over the five year period between the two cohorts.
I have found, and written here, that performance of VC backed companies is inversely correlated to how much money they raise.
There are all sorts of reasons for that, but mostly it is that money is a burden, and anchor, it weighs you down and slows you down.
So I’d like to see the data on these supergiant A and B rounds. I suspect it will be pretty poor.