Alan's Exciting Update!

The Next Chapter Begins.

March 31, 2023

Good Morning!

I hope everyone's spring is off to a great start and not as rough as my friends' and family's in Cleveland who got hit by snow a couple days ago!

Before jumping into today's edition, I wanted to take a moment and share an exciting professional update with you all.

Three weeks ago, I started an internship as a Content Associate with Volition Capital. Volition is a Boston based growth equity firm with $1.8B AUM focused on investing in high growth, capital efficient businesses in the software, internet, and consumer space. Volition has several notable exists including Chewy where Volition was the first institutional investor.

My responsibilities with Volition include re-launching Volition's newsletter, assisting partners and principals with thought leadership content, creating additional sourcing resources for analysts, and more. The internship is off to a great start!

During the internship, I will be pausing The Crossover in order to give Volition and this opportunity 110%. I will make sure to keep you all updated and check in periodically over the next few months.

Whether it has been with Cruising Altitude, Just Raised or The Crossover (which is now officially over 4,000 subs!), I wanted to thank you all for supporting me on my journey. None of this could happen without your dedicated readership, positive feedback, and consistent support.

Thank You,

Alan

Below, I included the first edition to The Volition View, Volition's newsletter that I helped put together last week! If you want to subscribe to the newsletter, you can use this link here or the "Subscribe Here" button below:

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Want to subscribe to The Volition View?

SVB: Reporting Requirements Must Change

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This piece is authored by Roger Hurwitz, Founding Partner at Volition Capital. Roger has decades in venture experience including stints at GE Capital and Fidelity Ventures prior to Volition. Roger’s primary areas of focus include investing in software and technology-enabled business services.

At this point, the recent events at Silicon Valley Bank have led to more questions than answers: Who is to blame? Management? The Fed? Should depositors’ uninsured funds be made whole? Over the coming weeks, there will be time to answer these questions. However, I want to share some thoughts on the venture debt market and a simple step we can take to ensure that something like this does not happen again.

I want to start off by clearly stating that the venture industry is extraordinarily appreciative to banks like SVB for all that they have done for the venture ecosystem. They understand the risk of supporting tech and life sciences companies as well as why such emerging companies are critical for ongoing innovation and job creation. Simply put, such banks have been phenomenal partners and are a key component to our industry’s success.

The core issue comes to light when you take a closer look at the deposits of SVB and how they were invested. Deposits were invested into two key buckets of investment securities – securities held for sale and securities held to maturity. Fair value can be determined for both buckets based on observable price adjustments and measuring the impact of changes in benchmark interest rates. Yet, securities held to maturity are accounted for at cost with no adjustments for changes in fair values, as compared to securities available for sale which are held at fair value with such changes reflected on a company’s financial statements. So even though each bucket may contain the exact security, the accounting treatment for fluctuations in market prices are not the same. The reporting depends on the intention to liquidate such investment securities prior to maturity, not the economic value of the securities. At the end of 2022, SVB held $26B of securities available for sale that needed to be marked-to-market with such loss shown in the P/L, but owned a whopping $91B of securities designated as held to maturity where no hit for unrealized losses needed to be made.

It makes no sense that management can change its intent on how to classify the company’s investment securities, such as from intent to hold to intent to sell, and the P/L can suddenly look dramatically different without any underlying change in the securities owned. Bottom line is regardless of the intent to sell or not, the stated value of investment securities on a balance sheet should be what they are worth on such date, not some maturity date many years down the road. While the fair value of held to maturity securities was disclosed in the financial statements, seeing such unrealized losses on the P/L may very well have changed management’s asset allocation strategy and behavior to execute against its business plan.

SVB’s announcement earlier this month that it took a loss of $1.8B on securities sold caused a shock to the system. This contributed not only to a run on the bank but contagion to other banks that serve an invaluable role in the venture industry. Financial statements need to talk to people about the risks within the business. SVB ended 2022 with $16.3B of stockholders’ equity, not considering the change in fair value of about $15B on securities held to maturity. If required to reflect this adjustment on the income statement, it would have wiped out 90% of stockholders’ equity. It is hard to imagine the decision-making of the leadership team would not have been vastly different if this fair value adjustment was captured in the income statement, not just in notes of a 193 page 10-K. It is time for the accounting treatment to change to provide better transparency on the value of such securities at any point in time. There is much debate on what went wrong and how SVB collapsed, but there should not be any debate on changing the reporting requirements. We need SVB and other regional banks to survive and thrive, and this simple change can go a long way in helping investors understand a business.

-Roger

MARKET PERSPECTIVE

The Rule of 40

Key Takeaway: There is a strong negative correlation between interest rates and the Median RO40 Index Revenue Multiple.

Three Key Points:

  • The 5-Year US Treasury yield began 2022 around 1.3% and closed the year at 4.0% representing the highest level in nearly 15 years.

  • Companies growing < 30% are generally profitable experienced a lower decline revenue multiples in 2022 versus businesses that generally have prioritized growth over profitability

  • Higher interest rates impact a company’s cost of issuing debt or equity, which can lead to unnecessary dilution or an inability to raise capital for business that have historically relied on outside capital to fund growth.

Link: This graph was created by our very own Peter Keenan who recently released a “Year in Review” piece on the Rule of 40 for 2022 which you can read in its entirety by clicking here

THREADS, MUST-READS, AND KEY STATS

GTM Mistakes, Rippling, Amazon Layoffs

Key Tweets:

Must Reads:

Key Stats:

VOLITION NEWS

Larry Cheng on StrictlyVC Podcast

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The Rundown: Volition Founding Partner Larry Cheng was a guest on the StrictlyVC podcast where he discussed Volition’s $675M Fund V, his current contrarian bets, and so much more.

Sound Byte: On investing in a contrarian sector like AdTech:

“We really love contrarian sectors, and adtech is a great example of that…You’re playing in a sea of giants with Facebook and Google and others. But we’ve had some great success and if I had to call out two subsegments in particular, I’d point to the proliferation of online video, and adjacent to that is the proliferation around social media and the implications of that for both content and commerce businesses.”

-Larry Cheng

Links: Audio: Click here | Transcript: Click here

PORTFOLIO NEWS

Creatio, Burst, Black Kite, Duffl

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Portfolio Fun

Super73 is Officially Thor Approved!

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Thanks for the read! We would love to hear what you think, so feel free to send us an email if you would like to chat.

-The Volition Team

Talk soon,

Alan

Disclaimer: The Crossover is not a professional financial service. All materials released from The Crossover are for educational and entertainment purposes. The Crossover is not a replacement for a professional's opinion. Contributors to the Crossover might have positions in the equities in the The Crossover Portfolio or mentioned in the newsletter.