Archive for February, 2008

Breaking through the Entrepreneur’s Blackbox – Credit Rating for VCs

Friday, February 29th, 2008

There is enormous complexity in deals between Entrepreneurs and the venture capital firms. The venture capital firms consistently take measures to avoid the adverse selection of entrepreneurs by different measures such as staged capital infusion, taking board seats on ventures supported by the VCs, having efficient and meticulous reporting managers within the supported firms and finally through syndicating capital with other VC firms. An entrepreneur takes extreme risks in driving execution of his vision. He knows his idea and mode of delivery the best, much better than the VCs in most cases. However, the entrepreneurs have historically been the low lying partners with the VCs. An entrepreneur places trust in pitching his idea to a VC, without ever imagining that the VC firms could use the idea of the entrepreneur within a different firm that they support. It has been observed that a few VC firms even go to the extent of putting in capital to show support for an idea of an entrepreneur, but do not use their complete potential in bringing up the idea. In turn, a few VCs sabotage the whole venture by providing confidential information to other ventures supported by them. An NDA or a Chinese wall arrangement would legally ensure that copyrighted/patented processes or products showcased to the VCs remain within the confines of the agreement between the two parties. But, it is not practical to state that every transaction that a VC makes is independent of the knowledge gained through an already defined portfolio of investments made by the VC firm in different ventures.With the growing dearth of new ideas and innovation within the market, a mechanism of Credit Rating of a VC firm could be a foreseeable rescue measure. A standard Credit Rating agency could register complaints from entrepreneurs, incase of a suspicion on broken NDAs by the VC firm and accordingly rate the VC firms. This would help entrepreneurs in choosing the right set of VCs for seed/expansion capital