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All Money Is Not Created Equal
book

All Money Is Not Created Equal

by David Spreng
July 2023
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
240 pages
5h 18m
English
Wiley
Content preview from All Money Is Not Created Equal

Chapter 2All About Growth: My Journey from Venture Capital to Venture Debt

For most of my adult life I have been obsessed with providing companies with the capital they need to grow. For much of that time, I did it in very traditional ways: first as an investment banker, then as a venture capitalist. In 2010, after more than 20 years of investing in companies in exchange for equity, I came to see the light about the vital – and underappreciated – role of debt in funding growth at pre-profit companies.

While I've always been focused on helping companies grow, my route to venture debt was unintentional – and somewhat tumultuous – but has proven highly rewarding.

In 1989, I left investment banking to join the asset-management subsidiary of the British bank Lloyds Bank plc, where I was responsible for strategy and venture capital (VC) investing. In October 1989 and January 1990, I made my first two venture investments. The first one failed; the second one worked out spectacularly well – a 1,470.4% internal rate of return (IRR) and 464.8× multiple on invested capital (MOIC) in a span of 26 months.

When I moved from investment banking to the money-management world to focus on venture-capital investing, the executive who ran the investment-banking business tried to convince me not to go. “All you're going to be doing is dealing with problems,” he warned me.

That isn't how I saw it. To me, investment banking was a transactional business, and venture capital represented a chance to ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781119887805Purchase Link