Dries Buytaert

In this post, I want to focus on one of the most difficult questions for entrepreneurs raising money from investors: what is the right amount of capital to raise? We debated this question extensively in each of the three rounds of raising venture capital at Acquia. It's particularly a tricky question for people like me who are relatively new to venture capital. I spent plenty of time thinking about this and talked about it with numerous successful entrepreneurs that have raised money before.

Based on my own thoughts and my informal survey, my current best answer is the following: the right amount of money to raise is somewhere between the following two choices: (1) enough to build the business that you want to build and (2) as much as you can without being insane or irresponsible. Unless the company does incredibly well, the difference won't be that large.

Raising less money than you actually need can be really destructive. First, it could cause you to miss opportunities because you won't be able to expand fast enough. Second, the company might not survive unexpected setbacks. Last but not least, without sufficient capital you might not be able to attract or retain the right talent you'll need.

Conversely, raising too much money unnecessarily dilutes the ownership of both the founders and the employees. It also makes it difficult to raise more money later on. And it makes it harder to sell the company: the more money you raised, the bigger the price tag becomes as the investors will look to make a multiple on their investment. At a minimum (worst case), you will have to sell the company for at least the total liquidation preference — hopefully a 1x non-participating.

When in doubt, raise more money rather than less. Growing a start-up is hard as it is. You don't want to introduce more risk by not having enough capital. You want to be able to run a few experiments, make a few mistakes or be able to take advantage of unexpected opportunities.

Being able to project how much cash you'll need is an important discipline to master. Cash is the lifeblood of any company. Making financial projections and forecasts is obviously more difficult when the company is pre-revenue or just starting to take in revenue. You'll have to make many assumptions.

Trying to determine how much money you need feels like trying to solve an equation with too many unknowns. It's a balance between the size of the opportunity, increasing the likelihood of success, optimizing for the financial outcome of all employees, the business' situation relative to the market, and so forth.

At Acquia, we made assumptions about the number of customers, average sale price, customer acquisition cost, product mix, etc. We used these assumptions to estimate our costs and revenues. To help ensure that we weren't fooling ourselves, we tried to validate as many of our assumptions by talking to other entrepreneurs and comparable companies. So we talked to key people from other open source companies (e.g., MySQL and jBoss) that are in the commercial support business.

The better your assumptions, the better you can estimate how much capital it takes to build your company. In each of our funding rounds, we raised at least enough money to achieve our goals and some extra beyond our plans to handle bad surprises or unexpected opportunities. So far, that has been a good strategy for us.