Verified Investor Response:
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Thanks for the feedback, and taking the time to give your thoughts and let others know that you had a bad experience, I think it's good to try and help founders avoid bad investors and not waste their time. Having built anonymous social networks myself in 2005 when I was an undergrad, I know people often don't run to anonymous networks to post glowing positive reviews unless someone's gaming the system asking for positive reviews, and things can often get skewed quite negatively fast - in fact that's why we ultimately had to shut down our anonymous networks for colleges. But I think they can play a really important role to hold people accountable - I'm still a huge believer in anonymous social content and this is incredibly helpful to me to get better. I invite you and anyone to ping me any time aneel@somacap.com and give me a chance to work as hard as possible for you if I'm falling short, and we recently have built out a 7 person team to do everything we can getting the right resource to the right founder at the right time. I can also provide a bunch of alternative positive references from some of our most successful founders and specifics around how we've helped. I feel obligated to give some context from myself personally here, as I do think we've done a lot of good and I think a lot more good than bad, for anyone gracious enough to be interested to learn more about me and Soma Cap that's visiting here. Would want people to also be steered to some of the value we've added so they may be able to benefit from our process and connections, giving some quick context of my own personal journey, and then ways we try to help! I grew up in the SF Bay Area, went to undergrad on the east coast then moved back to SF where I spent 10 years building both consumer and enterprise startups. The first was an anonymous social network called BoredAt that I co-founded in 2005 with a college classmate from Columbia while still in school. We launched to libraries of schools: boredatbutler at columbia, boredatlamont at harvard, boredatgreen at stanford etc. We technically invented the status update, and "BoredAt" was growing at a similar rate as "thefacebook.com [1]" at the time. We set up shop in the Bay Area after graduating Columbia in 2006 and raised venture capital led by Redpoint, then proceeded to roll out across the country. We built out college ambassador programs and launched to hundreds of the biggest schools in the nation to millions of users. Even though there were some positive anonymous discussions around politics, religion, teachers, classes and sensitive important issues best suited for anonymous discussions, the sites all eventually took negative turns that really didn't reflect the overall student bodies at all the amazing campuses we launched to, and we ultimately had to shut the site down. There were many other similar products after BoredAt that faced similar fates: juicycampus, collegeacb, likealittle, secret, whisper, and more recently yikyak. If you've made it reading this far - the rest of the journey goes as follows: I spent the next 10 years iterating on other products: co-founded a video analytics startup we sold to nielsen, built a daily deal site called Pinchit focused on discounted local events, which we pivoted to local recommendations, location sharing apps called Marco Polo and Tag where we had influencers featured as "tastemakers," and then ultimately decided to try my hand on the investor side 6 years ago in 2014 to create more value in the world using learnings and connections to "pour fuel on the fire." My cofounder from Marco Polo and Tag kept iterating on products in the influencer space which has ultimately evolved in to the super successful influencer texting platform called community.com [2]. Here's a brief bio with links to some of the products I built (using portfolio company coda :)) https://coda.io/@aneel-ranadive/aneel-ranadive-bio [3] My vision with Soma Cap is to combine 10 yrs of blood, sweat and tears building startups, and family connections, to leave the biggest impact possible in the world by building the best early stage "help platform" possible for decades to come. On the founder side of the table I experienced all the early trials and tribulations many times over: building teams, hiring and firing, iterating relentlessly on product, going to market w/ both b2c and b2b models, building analytics dashboards, pivoting dozens of times, pitching hundreds of investors up and down sand hill road and even internationally, getting hundred's of no's in every way imaginable, running out of money and going bankrupt multiple times and liquidating possessions to plow in to startups I believed in, among other challenges known all to well to founders. One of the biggest "surprises" to me is that building Soma Cap feels a lot like any other startup. We're 24/7 hustling hard, every day is either the best day or most stressful day of your life, we're building software (an internal portal launching soon) to "get the right resource to the right founder at the right time" and make connections more self serve, raising money, and selling to customers. Our customers are our founders and our investors, and we're mtg "customers" all day every day finding ways to share insights cross pollinating from one founder to another, or making intros for customer acquisition or help with hiring. In 5.5 yrs now we've invested seed + followed on in startups worth close to $40b combined - cruise, rappi, alto, rippling, ironclad, razorpay, lambda school, among others across many sectors. We've helped startups with customer acquisition onboarding companies in the portfolio, and going to larger enterprises outside the portfolio as well. We have both unique enterprise connections and influencer connections: my father Vivek Ranadive built Tibco in to a multi billion dollar enterprise company that powers many Fortune 500 companies and government services and he's also seeded / mentored google, yahoo, salesforce, ebay, among others. We've brought on top execs / CEO's of some of the biggest companies in the world to invest and partner with portfolio companies - happy to give specific examples privately and references any time. We also own the Sacramento Kings NBA team and many of the biggest artists in the world play at our arena - we've brought many top athletes and artists to also invest and partner with products, which we're happy to push as much as possible and give references of successful execution too. With Soma Cap, we're a small lean operation - the capital is mostly family offices of super successful founders who share similar goals of making the biggest impact possible and want to be really hands on helping founders go from seed to late stage. Our brand and investors in the fund are everything - what I want to emphasize is we really care, I have no plan in life other than building Soma Cap and I'm 24/7 obsessed (I'm not just a cog in a much bigger wheel, where i'll go hop to another job, Soma is everything and all our closest family and friends have skin in the game). Here's a few ways we work with founders to provide more context: - Customer intros: over 200 portfolio co's, combined value close to $40b we will hustle as hard as possible w/ a few intros at a time to other founders in the portfolio for customer acquisition. We focus on ycombinator.com [4] where most teams we invest in come out of given relationships at YC for 15 yrs with founders and partners, and excitement over the platform they're building. Similar to YC, our vision is using the size of the portfolio to our advantage not disadvantage - having more data points to be insightful, get the right resource to the right founder at the right time, and make a lot of introductions to help scale out. We invest in software to automate the world opportunistically across any sector or geography and have strung together deep expertise across many categories, for example partially through our advisory board made up of many "breakout" founders turned advisors somacap.com/team [5]. Breakout founders have advisory in Soma and skin in the game in our success and love to help earlier stage founders "short cut" their paths and cross pollinate learnings. This strategy, however, exposes us to criticism in a variety of ways I realize - for example if a team is struggling to get product market fit and wants many intros, we have to also balance being mindful of other portfolio founders' time. We encourage ppl to start small, 3-5 intros at a time, prove engagement, and then we can move on from there. Also, ironically the fastest growing B2B / SaaS products often spread fast on their own from founders sharing to one another, without needing a lot of hammering from us directly but we can definitely help pour fuel on the fire with intros to 10x "have to have" products. A few that we seeded that every startup should use for example would be Ramp, Rippling, Deel, Coda, Razorpay (stripe of india), Ironclad, Alto - we don't have to hammer very hard to "convince" other portfolio founders to try the products, these all spread pretty easily / organically, but we then can also come over the top with top exec / CEO intros for example we introduced Ramp and Razorpay to the CEO of Mastercard, and Ironclad to the CEO of Salesforce, and Alto to the gov of California to help secure board of pharmacy approval. - Top exec / CEO intros: to the point above, we can't bring influencers in media, sports and entertainment from our NBA connections like a Drake or Michael Jordan to invest and help every single consumer company, or heads of Salesforce or Mastercard to look at every B2B / SaaS startup, but after starting small with earlier stage companies in the portfolio and working our way upwards we promise to hustle relentlessly to open every door possible, as well as anyone else in the world could. I know we expose ourselves by conveying that we have these really unique connections because we can't deliver on them for every single company, but in a fiercely competitive VC community where everyone has to be differentiated, we do have these extremely unique relationships, we have in fact delivered on them many times, and when your product is in great shape and has strong product market fit we can open these doors as well as anyone and happy to share many examples and references. But the way to optimize odds of success is starting w/ earlier stage portfolio companies and moving upstream after proof of traction / engagement. - Fundraising help - we've been longtime family friends for decades with founding partners of all the usual suspect VC's from my own 10 yrs of startup hustle, and my father's +40 years building companies. There's been over $11 billion in follow on investments in to Soma Cap portfolio companies in the last 5.5 yrs alone where we were one of the very first checks and we've helped close many leads, including helping with 6 unicorns our portfolio, 13 valued $300m and up and 20 startups valued $100m and up (all are seed when we meet and invest). When founders have struggled to raise from Tier 1 VC's, we've also helped bring in family offices closing hundreds of millions in co-investments from family office connections. To date we've taken zero fees on any of this so there's no sneaky alterior motive or self interest here other than trying to help our founders as much as possible with sustained capital to realize all their ambitions. In final closing words, I understand that by trying to make the biggest impact possible and leave a huge mark, and being opportunistic to look across multiple sectors some of which we'll have limited experience, and back the most hungry, talented and diverse teams in the world (mostly software focus) that we expose ourselves to some potentially unhappy people. We have made, and will continue to make a lot of mistakes, and because we see a lot and talk to thousands of founders we will be exposed to many unhappy people. Sometimes on meetings we'll be tired or have an off day, sometimes we'll think we wrote a pass email but forgot or each person on our team thought the other wrote the pass email already, sometimes we'll genuinely be leaning in learning more about a space building conviction and don't want to say "no" quickly so we'll say we're still doing some work internally which is the honest truth, because we may still want to say "yes," and some founders will be upset that they think we're leading them on. I know many great investors who say it's better to just say no immediately if you're not sure, to not expose yourself, but some of the most phenomenal, impactful teams in the world that we ended up investing in it took multiple weeks of "not sure" before converting to "yes" and i'm afraid of missing out on chances to work w/ great teams by just shooting fast "no's" when we're genuinely not sure and building conviction. We typically move fast and I believe are well known for that, but sometimes when we do take more time occasionally we're really not sure and trying to get a feel for both the market - size and competitive landscape, and then the following team attributes, which I think is a constantly iterating art in terms of how it can be sussed out: - Technical brilliance - strong technical skills to build great product and lead by example at founder level - Excellence in execution - speed of execution, can ship fast and iterate as many times as needed - Communication - ability to tell a really compelling story - Relentlessness / determination - indelible will and optimism - High integrity / good people What I do promise is to always be as transparent as possible on our thinking and process, and to work relentlessly to keep improving. I invite anyone unhappy (or happy?? :)) to always email me directly aneel@somacap.com and I'll share my cell too if you don't have it already and txt and jump on a call / facetime any time and please give me a shot to help. Having been on the founder side for 10 yrs I recognize it's a huge privilege to get to be on the cap table, you're paying us with your blood, sweat and tear equity and we work for you and you owe us nothing other than giving us homework to execute on, and we'll go all in working as hard as possible for you to leverge learnings from the portfolio and open every door we can over the longrun. We think of everyone in the portfolio as a family and we've already backed repeat founders multiple times who would give the strongest references - always happy to show more privately. And if you're still unhappy after hashing things out directly with me and aligning on "asks" and how we can be more helpful, please come back here and crush me on vcguide.co [6]. At the end of the day we commit to listen, be super transparent, work our butts off, and use all the incredible connections we've built from decades of entrepreneurship to help push civilization forward together. Nothing else is more important to me than building Soma Cap - I'm committed / all in for multiple decades to come, hope to be able to do this the rest of my life, and hope to get the chance to get more direct feedback and keep improving every day to change the world together! With lots of love to everyone, aneel