How Startups Can Avoid The Series A Crunch: Profile of Speek

Worried about the Series A crunch? Choose not to participate in it and go raise a bigger seed round. You can never predict what crunch, cliff, crisis or collapse will make investors pucker, so take as much money as you can, and take it now. Startups are often too worried about dilution, instead of whether they are capitalized enough to dominate their space.

At Speek, which provides super-simple conference calling solutions with a visual interface, we originally went to market with a convertible note for $750,000. We decided to take a more prudent course of action--one that would allow us to both aggressively play offense and sustain us through a potentially prolonged Series A capital raise--and raise a larger seed round. Let’s call it a seed+ round. We determined that $1.2 million would be the appropriate amount, which we closed and announced in December.

Read More