Ep. 312 How I Raised It with Rando Rannus of Siena Secondary Fund
episode
How I Raised It - The podcast where we interview startup founders who raised capital.
44 min
1 speaker
5 chapters
transcribed 16 days ago
Transcript
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Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
I think in fund one, we approached more than 600 investors and we got 80 or 90 of them on board. So roughly, let's say 15% hit rate, which is not too bad, I would say. Not too bad.
yeah no that's great that's great i love stories like this where you know you went after 600 investors that just to give people some understanding of what it really takes yeah
true well i i wasn't thinking when i started out that i would go for 600 uh yeah and then but then at the end i was looking
at the numbers as well yeah that's a lot like you said 15 hit rate that's actually pretty decent Welcome to How I Raised
It, the podcast that goes behind the scenes with entrepreneurs who've raised capital. We uncover the tips, tricks, and techniques they use to get investors to write a check, strap in, and turn it up.
Hi, welcome to another episode of How I Raised It, produced by Foundersuite.com and FundingStack.com. Today I have Rando Rennes of Sienna Secondary Fund coming to us from Tallinn, Estonia. How's your day going in Estonia?
Hi there. Greetings from Northern European country to all around the world.
Very good, very good. Good summers. I imagine summer in Estonia is pretty lovely. I can't complain. Much better
than the dark winter here. So now the daylight is much longer than in the wintertime when you have like six hours of daylight. Now we can enjoy all
of that. Good, good. It's on my bucket list to go to Tallinn. I haven't been there. I might take my kid this next summer. So we'll see. I might hit you up for some ideas. But let's just jump into this. What is Siena's secondary fund?
CNS Secondary Fund is a VC direct secondary fund. So we focus on doing direct secondary transactions with the founders, employees or early investors in late stage scale ups from the Nordics or Central Eastern European countries. So the companies that we are focusing in needs to be originated from the region we are based and they need to be really large enough. So we're looking at the companies at least 10 million annual revenue, probably 50% or faster. Usually these are like intensive millions or hundreds of millions. Our smallest company revenue wise in the portfolio is exactly 10 million. The biggest one is 2 billion. So you can see it's quite wide range. valuation wise we're looking at 100 million plus companies and we want to see that there's a kind of an exit horizon already somewhere there.
So the whole value prop is basically we want to provide liquidity for those who are ones who have been there for some time already. So I think everybody already knows that it's a common knowledge that the exit horizon is getting longer and longer and I mean, 20 years ago, Google, I think, went public in four or five years after launching it. Nowadays, we're hearing Klarna coming to do an IPO. I think they are 17 years old or so. So you need to be really patient to wait for it until the final end. So we're basically solving the problem that in the halfway, we can provide liquidity for those ones who have done kind of back the company from the beginning. And if the company is doing well, we're happy to take the risk and to kind of wait till the final end.
Yeah, really interesting. For anyone who's not familiar with it, let's define what a secondary is and how are you different than just a late stage investor. Let's kind of get some basic definitions out here.
Yeah, sure. So we don't provide the primary capital to the company. So the money that the We provide, it doesn't go to the company, it goes to the existing shareholder. So like I said, it can be a founder, it can be an employee, ex-employee, it can be an early investor. So we kind of recycle things. the the capitals or recycle the shares so no new shares are issued and then that that's the whole logic there and the from the other writing perspective we are a bit similar to the late stage but we need to take into account kind of other risk as well like pref stack and as especially as we were typically buying the lower ranking shares than the late stage investors And what else is different is that as our kind of
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–9:22
2
What is Siena’s secondary fund and how does it work?
9:22–21:48
3
Why is the secondary market exploding and what problem does it solve for founders and employees?
21:48–30:37
4
How does Siena pitch liquidity to early shareholders versus traditional late‑stage investors?
30:37–43:35
5
What are the key reasons investors (family offices, angels, sovereign funds) commit to a secondary fund?
43:35–44:01
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from How I Raised It - The podcast where we interview startup founders who raised capital.
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