Troy Henikoff and I had lunch a month or so ago in Chicago and the conversation turned to convertible debt. I’d recently made an offer to invest in a company Troy was an investor in and the entrepreneur and I got tangled up in the definition of pre and post money in the context of existing convertible debt. In this case there were multiple traunches of convertible debt at different valuation caps. My offer was above the highest cap, but I interpreted the way the convertible debt, and pro-rata rights associated with it, worked differently than the entrepreneur did. Given the magnitude of the convertible debt, the way the debt was handled had a significant impact on the post money valuation dynamics. Ultimately, the entrepreneur and I couldn’t narrow the gap and we didn’t end up working together.
There were no hard feelings on my side (I like the entrepreneurs a lot) but it made for an interesting and awkward discussion. Troy did a great job of processing it and wrote an important, and thoughtful blog post, titled Convertible Debt: really Bridge Loans and Equity Replacement Debt. If you are an entrepreneur who is raising, or has raised, convertible debt, I encourage you to read it carefully.
In our conversation, we talked about a nuance which Troy left out – namely that the magnitude of “equity replacement debt” matters a lot. If it’s a small amount (say – $300k or less) this issue isn’t that severe. But once it gets up to $1m or more, the problem often appears in a big way. My partner Seth covered this nicely in his post That convert you raised last year is a part of your cap table.
All of those convertible debt rounds that happened in 2010, 2011, and 2012 – including a bunch of uncapped ones – are now turning into either equity rounds or unhappy situations. The more everyone on both sides understands the dynamics, the more effective the future financings, including the future convertible debt rounds, will be.
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