Ilya Lipovich

Scaling your VC-backed startup? You may be missing critical financial expertise. While you focus on growth, the complexities of venture capital funding - cap table management, investor due diligence, financial forecasting - can derail promising startups. Most founders lack the deep financial knowledge needed to manage these challenges. The solution? Strategic fractional CFO support. Learn when and why to bring in fractional CFO expertise for sustainable scaling: https://lnkd.in/g8mXyMRH #VentureCapital #Startups #FractionalCFO

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#TheTenYearFixedTerm. It drives the entire startup ecosystem. Here’s how. Week 4 of “Venture Capital” at the Santa Clara University School of Law. LPs don’t want to be trapped in an illiquid venture capital fund forever, paying annual management fees. How can they get out? There is a secondary market for those interests, but it’s primarily opportunistic, and targets desperate sellers. So without a structural endpoint, they could be trapped forever. And there is: the 10 year fixed term. On that anniversary, subject to possible but limited extensions, the fund must terminate and wind-up, distributing its final assets to its investors. Seems benign, but the impact is massive! 1️⃣ Our #VC and #startup culture is defined by SPEED. Startup-to-growth-to-liquidity, as quickly as possible. Market dynamics are most certainly relevant, and prevalent. But there’s a structural driver as well: yes, the 10 year fixed term. If you are going to fully harvest your fund in 10 years, you need to front-load your investment activity (to ensure that your portfolio companies have at least some time to grow and ripen). So VCs race to deploy their capital within the first 5 years. But that’s not all - they then apply pressure on founders to drive toward exit. Which in virtually all cases, is M&A (sale of the company). The need for LP liquidity within 10 years drives the need for startup speed. 2️⃣ #AgencyCosts refer to the inevitable conflicts-of-interest that arise when one party (the agent) is tasked with acting on behalf of another party (the principal). In the #VC context, the ultimate principal is the #LimitedPartner, and their agent is the #VentureCapitalist. Limited partners want big returns, and liquidity. But what’s to stop the VC from diverting focus (and capital) toward an unending lifestyle instead? In other words, people have their own agendas and motivations. Always. So how does this principal, here, ensure that incentives are aligned and agency costs minimized? Yep. The 10 year fixed term. By dramatically limiting the space for self-dealing by creating a brief window of active existence, the VC is forced to focus on getting to liquidity. They simply do not have the opportunity to selfishly create an endless, self-perpetuating empire underwritten by the limited partners. Bracketed with their carried interest, the VCs are incented to focus on big returns in a concentrated period of time. Exactly what the LPs want! I was on the road this week, and so I recorded the lecture for the students. I normally can’t provide access to my lecture recordings, because they live behind university firewalls, but this week I bootlegged it and uploaded them to my YouTube channel. If you are interested, this lecture (broken into 3 segments) is available there for free - no agency costs in sight! #DWProf

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From 12 months to 1 quarter. That’s how fast Cedar condensed their audit timeline after switching to Vanta. 🤯 👏 Operating in one of the most heavily regulated industries, Cedar needed a platform that could actually keep up with their growth... AND their frameworks. With Vanta, they: ✅ Closed compliance gaps across HIPAA, HITRUST & more ✅ Replaced spreadsheets with a centralized source of truth ✅ Secured more headcount with clearer reporting ✅ Earned a clean SOC 2 Type 2, fast This is what scaling trust actually looks like. 👉 Read the full story: https://lnkd.in/g2HgBU9Y

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One of the best GTM health checks? Your win rate. Data from the Early-Stage GTM Report revealed that the average win rate for early-stage B2B SaaS companies is 29%. The wild card? SDRs/BDRs. Teams with them: 30.4% win rate. Teams without them: 23.5%. That’s a 29% improvement 💥 Get your free copy of the report  👉 https://lnkd.in/gj7g68JD

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Corporate venture teams face a volume problem and a conviction problem, and both reduce your ability to win strategic deals. You can fix this with unified workflows that cut weeks of diligence down to hours and keep every stakeholder aligned from Day 1️⃣. Read the full breakdown to see how teams use AI-driven tools to accelerate screening, tighten teardowns, validate diligence, and boost adoption across business units. ⬇️ https://lnkd.in/eYkZF7xR

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For Independent Software Vendors, embedded payments aren’t just a feature, they’re a growth engine. Platforms that embed financial tools like payments, FX, and compliance are turning everyday transactions into revenue opportunities. Here are 6 ways ISVs monetize with VoPay: 1️⃣ Transaction-based revenue 2️⃣ White-label & premium payment tiers 3️⃣ Cross-border disbursements and FX 4️⃣ Value-added services (wallets, virtual accounts) 5️⃣ Compliance-as-a-Service (KYC, KYB, AML) 6️⃣ Automated bulk payouts and billing Explore what this could look like inside your platform : https://hubs.li/Q03tBCW20 #paymentAPI #embeddedfinance #payments #fintech

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Big news out from NATILUS as they explore where to put their manufacturing headquarters. We break down the details on the latest episode of This Week in San Diego Tech with co-host Fred Grier. 🎧 Tune in for insights on what this could mean for the region’s aerospace and advanced manufacturing sectors.

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A new wave of founders is changing how companies are built—and how growth equity will evolve with them. As Steve Achatz, Principal at Volition Capital highlights in Fast Company, today’s breakout startups share common DNA: discipline, velocity, and a mindset geared toward automating themselves out of a job. Solo founders and lean teams are reaching traditional Series A and B milestones with a fraction of the headcount and spend. With AI, no-code tools, and stronger founder communities, meaningful scale is now possible without the playbook of the past decade. This shift has major implications for investors and operators alike—and we believe it will accelerate exit timelines within #GrowthEquity. Smart, focused, #CapitalEfficient founders are the new norm. And we’re excited for what that means for the next generation of breakout companies. Read the full article here: https://lnkd.in/eRakGFXZ

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Small businesses need fast, transparent financing. Fundwell is delivering. By integrating Plaid, Fundwell removed manual uploads, strengthened security, and cut application time in half. As a result, mobile completion jumped from 53% to 83%, and Android conversions rose from 19% to 82%. Behind the scenes, instant verified data has unlocked faster decisions and lower back-office costs, freeing up Fundwell’s team to scale growth campaigns with confidence. Read the full Q&A to learn how Fundwell is redefining small business financing ➡️ https://lnkd.in/euGHMkk4

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New data on spending benchmarks for private B2B SaaS companies. Based on the total median spend, 85% of bootstrapped companies are operating within two percentage points of breakeven or are profitable while only 46% of equity-backed are breakeven or profitable. https://lnkd.in/eC_UP-H

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