TTV Capital

I can't say enough good things about TTV's team. Smart, warm, full of ideas, and advice. Helpful. And our many interactions with them bore fruit. They issued us a term sheet. But was it? TTV promised to fund only a small part of their own term sheet. Now that I understand what happened here, I can tell you that what they really issued to us a "hunting licenses," not a term sheet. I've since learned that this is common practice amount smaller VCs. The onus of syndicating falls on the company, not on them. This helps them confirm their funding decision through the decisions of institutional investor colleagues. Well, that might suit them but it was hell on us. It was hard enough to get one VC to say yes -- a six month process. Getting two or three more to join on to a syndication and say yes in the 60 day period TTV gave us was just impossible. And so as quickly as the term sheet materialized, TTV retracted it. TTV's decision to pull the rug out from under us almost destroyed our company. Our investors saw the TTV deal implosion as a bad sign. Internal investors who were about to write checks didn't. And it soured most of the current crop of prospective investors who were circling and watching the TTV deal. I hope my fellow entrepreneurs can learn from this lesson. If you are considering a smaller VC like TTV, make sure you are clear about your expectations from the start. If you are expecting them to handle syndication, don't. If I could start all over again, I would not have even approached TTV. It was a monumental waste of time for us. In the order of hundreds of hours and legal and travel expenses in the neighborhood of $20,000 or more.