Small Ball is a style of play in basketball when a team sacrifices size/height for speed and shooting. The Golden State Warriors, the best team in the NBA this regular season, are a good example of a team that often uses this strategy.
As the venture capital business and entrepreneurs are increasingly bulking up in terms of fund sizes (VCs) and round sizes (entrepreneurs), I am decidedly a fan of small ball.
Many of our best investments at USV have been in companies that never needed to raise VC or only needed to raise one round. In these situations, the founders own/owned large stakes in their companies, often north of 50% for the founding team at exit. These companies focused on a revenue/business model at launch, they kept their headcounts low until they had scale/traction in their usage, and they reinvested the profits back into scaling the business instead of external capital. My favorite example of this is Indeed where USV had to beg the founders to let us invest, only did one round of venture capital, and exited for $1.4bn and is likely worth 2-3x that number as the business has scaled massively post exit. Kickstarter, DuckDuckGo, and Zynga are other good examples of small ball in action. Zynga did raise a lot of money but it went to the balance sheet and secondaries and never was used to fund losses.
Small ball also works well in VC. It is hard to return capital to your investors in the VC business. Exits are a long time in coming and you get diluted over time and even in the biggest exits (billion dollar plus valuations), you might only have proceeds of $100mm to $200mm. If you have a fund size in the $500mm to $1bn range (or larger!), you need many of these big exits to return the fund once. But your LPs want you to return the fund three times, or more. I could never sleep at night if USV were managing a billion dollar fund. I don’t know how we would ever get our LPs back their money plus a return. I know it can be done and has been done. But I don’t really know how it happens. Getting big exits is just so damn hard.
So in an era when VCs and entrepreneurs are going for bulk, I really like the opposite approach which favors speed and agility over pounding it inside. It allows me to sleep at night, which is not that easy in our business.
