Tuesday, September 18, Day 2

5:15 pm - 6:00 pm

Exit Strategies. Hosted by Heather Hardy - with a 6 strong panel of all-star people

Raj Kapoor says you may want to not raise a lot of VC because it makes your valuation too high. And then creates a misalignment between you and the VC.

misalignment in what way ?

Rak Kapoor from Mayfield?

@alex: yep

Misaligned in that the entrepreneur wants an exit (lower value) and the VC wants a bigger hit.

Which in a Web 2.0 world is usually unlikely - so cheap to build and deploy

Yeah, the web 2.0 market lowers cost so that somewhat creates that environment.

A new model is needed

I think the market will heat up to the extent that more money is required.

True - but also the level of noise and redundant development is wasteful

Raj Kapoor said that a banker is good if you can create competition.

I think web technology and application sophistication will increase dramatically over the next few years. A little like the game industry. The market will support companies spending 10m on app development - making really amazing slick cool products.

So that will create more opportunities for VC backed exits.

but won't there also be a whole marketplace of small, disposable, viral apps that cost nothing to deploy and could organically grow into full-fledged things in their own right - and then teeter of and die as well

mashup/widget world

yep, sure. I'm not saying they're going anywhere, I'm saying that bigger budget web apps (which are a better fit for VC) will emerge.

True - gotta keep the VCs happy

Evan Williams talking about how he valued Blogger when he sold it to Google. Best advice for finding a valuation was: how much you want + let them make the first offer. Sound advice.

Does that work for fundraising too? 

Sounds good to me

Live notes from TechCrunch