Friday, May 10, 2013

Scale's Kate Mitchell



May 10, 2013, 8:02am PDT

Scale's Kate Mitchell: Raising $300M fund much easier this time around


Scale Venture Partners co-founder Kate Mitchell said that there is no comparison between raising the firm's just-closed $300 million fund and when it raised its first independent fund in 2008 and 2009 after breaking away from Bank of America.
Senior Technology Reporter- Silicon Valley Business Journal
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Scale Venture Partners just finished raising $300 million and co-founder and partner Kate Mitchell said the difference from raising money for her firm’s last fund was “like night and day.”
“It was wildly different,” the former chairman of the National Venture Capital Association told me this week.
“We were in the middle of the financial crisis of ’08 and ’09, which was just a horrible time to be fundraising,” Mitchell said of the $255 million fund Scale out together back then. “People weren’t thinking about putting money into venture capital, they were thinking about cash and liquidity.”
That was also Scale’s first standalone institutional fund after breaking away from Bank of America, where it was known as known as BA Venture Partners. In the BofA days, the fund started with $500 million in 2000 and raised another $400 million in 2004.
“We were also going from one investor, BofA, to a number of investors who had secondary interests,” she said. “Getting a fresh group of long-term primary investors back then took a very long time. But we got it accomplished.”
The new fund came together in a little more than one quarter, instead of the six to 12 months that was scheduled, and came in at the top of the projected target range.
Mitchell credits a nice set of exits, including last year’s $161.5 million IPO by ExactTarget and $300 million sale of Vitrue to Oracle.
“If you don’t have that it is hard to even have a conversation with investors,” she told me.
About 85 percent of the money came from returning investors, Mitchell told me, adding that keeping the size of the fund around the same level appealed to them, as well.
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Cromwell Schubarth is the Senior Technology Reporter at the Business Journal. His phone

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