Connie Loizos is one of the long-time tech industry writers who I respect. I don’t respond to many interview requests these days, but I’ll always talk to her.

She has a good article today in TechCrunch titled Embrace the down round (it’s going to be okay, maybe). I like the quote she pulled out of me in our conversation.

[Brad Feld] says his “strong belief” that “just doing a clean resetting — at whatever the valuation so that everybody is aligned and dealing with reality —  is much, much better for a company.”

Now, I’m not encouraging anyone to do a down round if unnecessary., especially when many existing investors are currently willing to add on additional dollars at the most recent valuation. If you can do this cleanly, take the money.

Rather, when you have a choice between a financing at a lower valuation and a financing with all kinds of crazy structure to try to maintain a previous valuation, negotiate the best price you can but do a clean financing with no structure.

If you don’t know what I mean by structure, they are terms like:

• Multiple liquidation preferences (you’ll start seeing lots of 2x and 3x on new money)
• Participating preferred on new money
• Weird ratchets (other than the typical weighted average), including full ratchets, on next round financings
• Annual preferred return, including PIK and cash pay on new money
• Blocks on all kinds of things that a new investor should not have blocking rights on

… and (Read more...)