devashish_paul:
What is interesting me is how they are got corporate investors (Warner Bros etc) in the last Series B round given that they have to grow the property by selling “viewing units” that are 3+ hrs long and then now they get more investors in Series C somehow with a promise to monetize said 3 hrs viewer blocks.
Normally Series B is an enterprise Scale out round. At that point you have product market fit, some major differenentiation, traction in the market relative to the competitors and the money is to spin up the flywheel to drive up the top line. Series C should be a pre IPO or pre M&A step just building things out from Series B.
But it seems there is still a giant experiment going on relative to product market fit and viable biz model, so the long story here is it helps to be plugged into the finance community if you’re going to build a giant pyramid where the current round of investors bail out the management for blowing thru the investment of the last round of investors. Usually that’s a pre Seed to Series A thing, not a B to C round thing.
It just feels that there is an unclear path to getting to cashflow positive here and staying in biz without investors subsidizing the hypothesis for a long time.
It’s great for the sport that we have VC money playing around and to a degree it keeps Ironman on their toes at least relative to the pro side of the sport. IM has age group racing all locked in given the number of age grouper only races that sell out to 3000 entires.
I think that’s been my major observation, these funding rounds aren’t like a traditional company at all. Essentially these are purely to raise operating capital because the current shareholders aside from Moritz don’t want to throw more money in. Otherwise you would have capital calls based on the % of shares each shareholder has. So I wouldn’t look at them as funding rounds through a traditional business.