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Another Angle On The Shifting Pro-Rata Debate

Over the past few days, you may have seen a larger number of people (mostly investors) tweeting about a bizarre term: “pro-rata.” This term is a venture investing inside baseball term, but it is actually quite important for (future) founders to think about. To simplify the term, a pro-rata right is essentially a provision in a venture investment that gives an investor the option to invest more money, on a prorated basis, to maintain their ownership percentage as the valuation of a good company increases over time. This protects the earlier investors from dilution as the valuation of the company rises, and it also is a critical instrument for those earlier investors to “double-down” and put their money to work into the companies that have the best chance to return their fund.

I am writing this as someone who is learning about all this stuff as I write it — not an expert. So take the following with a grain of salt:

Larger institutions in the business of venture usually don’t invest unless they have pro-rata rights. It’s a condition of the deal, and those funds have business models which depend on at least one or two companies within a vintage which end up being the “winners” and end up carrying the fund. The larger players have been in business for a while, so they’ve had enough time to understand it; the newer entrants in the seed ecosystem mostly have not, and it seems like only now that people are understanding that, no matter at what stage, pro-rata rights are critical for investors.

Ah, but there are few assumptions around these that we must reexamine, and this is where it gets interesting given the climate:

  1. Many angels, early-stage, and smaller check-sized investors do not get pro-rata rights. In my limited experience, I never ask for them, and if I did, I probably wouldn’t get them at all.
  2. Now, some investors who have a big enough checkbook, a big enough fund, or a big enough brand name or expertise can lay down that having pro-rata rights is a condition of their involvement in a deal. In those cases, the founder has to chose whether or not that condition is worth it. For example, I was involved in a great seed deal where a well-known investor wanted to come (and he has very relevant experience in the space). His condition was to only participate with pro-rata, as an edict from the fund he works for. No one else got pro-rata. This is a critical point — a founder does not, in no way, have to allow these investors to have pro-rata.
  3. Ok, well, so now that there’s an excess supply of angel and microVC capital in the system, and because many of the people writing these checks do have a business model (i.e. returning a fund based on fund economics), people are asking for their pro-rata rights and realizing just how critical they are for their fund’s performance metrics and, in some cases, survival.
  4. Yet, what’s also interesting is that founders are now in the driver’s seat with respect to pro-rata. Consider a great seed team which raises a bit of funding, and as a condition, they do not give out pro-rata. Assuming they aren’t targeting someone specific, they could just use their leverage to set the ground rules that no pro-rata rights are given. Why not, right?

And, this is where it gets interesting for founders, especially for the ones who survive and their companies mature — they may be in a position in the future to dictate whether or not pro-rata rights are even dished out to begin with. This is the cold view interpretation, as I’m sure many founders will want to investors they’re close to and like to have them, but founders also can use them as a stick to fend off bad behavior. In the future, I believe things will trend this way. The people who actually get pro-rata rights will be the ones that either have close relationships with founders, those that bring extremely deep, relevant experience to the venture, or those who have a brand and patina that send a signal to the market. If I’m right that founders will hold back on this moving forward, this then alters the model of the early-stage funds and puts more pressure on them to have one or more of the characteristics I cited earlier. Otherwise, the money is just money.

As a frame of reference, I set out in my investing activity to assume I won’t have pro-rata because I believe that it has to be earned, over time. It’s less of a pro-rata right, but more of a pro-rata privilege. This is just my point of view, informed only by a few years…I’d love to hear what you think in the comments below.