🎅A Wave of Filings Crash the Holidays🎅

🤖Are There More #BustedTech Bankruptcies Coming?🤖

The recent bankruptcies of Fusion Connect (which just confirmed a plan swapping ~$270mm of debt for equity), Clover TechnologiesuBiome (which just sold for a small fraction of its valuation), Loot Crate Inc.Juno Inc.Munchery, and Vector Launch Inc. â€” combined with the recent negative news surrounding WeWork (of course), Faraday Future (founder already in BK), Proteus Digital Health and Wag â€” signal that restructuring professionals shouldn’t sleep on “tech.” The sector has been surprisingly active in 2019 and there’s likely more to come in 2020 (e.g., RentPath?).

In the wake of the WeWork debacle, there has been a lot of talk about the end of “growth at all costs” thinking and a newfound emphasis on business fundamentals, i.e., unit economics. Indeed, post-WeWork, funding in startups immediately slowed down … for like a second … and people took measure; likewise, in the public markets, many recently IPO’d companies with questionable fundamentals have performed poorly. Time will tell, then, whether WeWork was just a blip on the radar screen or the canary in the coal mine. There are more signs of the former — this week it seems like 8,292,029 companies announced new raises — but might Vector Launch be validation of the latter? Who knows.

As we’ve argued in the past — obviously VERY prematurely — tech “startups” are more mature at earlier stages now than they used to be which very well may require them to sidestep the assignment for the benefit of creditors and launch headfirst into a bankruptcy court — if and when folks again get scared. With the private markets having become the new public markets over the last decade, there are a ton of private tech companies that are well-developed (read: “unicorns”); that have intellectual property (e.g., actual patents as well as brands); that have valuable contracts/leases; that have investors that seek releases. What they don’t appear to have are viable business models. When the tide goes out (read: the money scares), we’ll see who is wearing clothes.

The question is: what would be the catalyst? With interest rates steady or declining, there’s no reason to suspect the end is near for “yield baby yield” psychology and, therefore, the deployment of endless quantities of capital in alternative asset classes. That should bode well for tech.

And, yet, people are fearful. First Round Capital recently released its “State of Startups 2019” and if some of the fears come true, indeed, there will be more action as noted above:

Founders fear the bubble — concerns are at a 4-year high.

This year, over two-thirds of founders who ventured a guess think we are in a bubble for technology companies. It’s the highest number we’ve seen since 2015 — up 12% from 2018 and 25% from 2017.

Spoiler alert:


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🥑#BustedTech: Munchery Filed for Bankruptcy.🥑

Short VC-Backed Hyper-Growth

We've previously discussed the process of an assignment for the benefit of creditors and posited that, as the private markets increasingly become the public markets, (later stage) "startups" will be more likely to file for chapter 11 than go the ABC route. Our conclusion was based primarily on three factors: (a) a number of these startups would have highly-developed and potentially valuable intellectual property and data, (b) more venture-backed companies have "venture debt" than the market generally recognizes, and (iii) parties involved, whether that's the lenders or the VCs, would want releases with respect to any failure and subsequent chapter 11 bankruptcy filing. Given continuing low — and as of this week, lower — yields and a system awash in capital looking for alternative sources of yield (read: venture capital), there's been a dearth of high profile startup failures of late. And, so, technically, we've been wrong. 

Yet, on February 28th, Munchery Inc. filed for bankruptcy in the Northern District of California (we previously noted the failure here and again here in a broader discussion of what we dubbed, “The Toys R Us Effect”). Munchery was a once-high-flying "tech" company founded in 2011 with the intent of providing freshly prepared meals to consumers. It made and fulfilled orders placed on its own app and also had a meal kit subcription business where customers received weekly kits with recipes and ingredients. Its greatest creation, however, might be its shockingly self-aware first day declaration — a piece of work that functions as a crash course for entrepreneurs on the evolution and subsequent trials and tribulations of a failing startup. 

Interestingly, the meal kit business wasn't part of the original business model. This represented the quintessential startup pivot: originally, the company's model was predicated upon co-cooking (another trend we've previously discussed) where professional chefs would leverage Munchery's kitchens (and, presumably, larger scale) to sell their products directly through Munchery's website and mobile apps. Of late, the co-cooking concept — despite some recent notable failures — has continued to gain traction. Apparently, former Uber CEO, Travis Kalanick, is very active in this space (see CloudKitchens). 

At the time, "food delivery was in its early stages." But local restaurant delivery has exploded ever since: Grub HubSeamlessDoor DashPostmatesCaviar, and Uber Eats are all over this space now. Similarly, in the meal kit space, Blue Apron inc. ($APRN)PlatedHello Fresh and SunBasket are just four of seemingly gazillions of meal kit services that time-compressed workaholics or parents can order to save time. 

As you can probably imagine, any company worth anything — especially after nearly a decade of operation and tens of millions of venture funding — will have some interesting proprietary technology. Here's the company's description of its tech (apologies in advance for length but it marks the crux of the bankruptcy filing): 

"The team’s early focus was to develop a proprietary technology platform to operate and optimize the entire process of making and delivering fresh food to customers. The technology developed and deployed by the company included: a front-end ecommerce platform, which allowed the company to post items daily and consumers to select, purchase and pay for meals through the company’s website and native apps; the production enterprise resource management (“ERP”) system, which enabled the company to develop and launch new recipes, manage the supply chain for fresh ingredients and supplies, produce the meals through batch cooking, and plate individual meals; the logistics and last-mile platform, which enabled the company to accurately and quickly pack-and-pack individual items and assemble orders using modified hand scanners, distribute orders via a hub-and-spoke system where refrigerated trucks would transport orders to specific zones and hand-off the orders to the assigned drivers; and, a driver app that assisted in managing and routing orders to arrive in the windows specified by customers. All of this was managed through a set of proprietary tracking and administrative tools used by the teams to monitor and mitigate operational issues—and connected to a customer relationship management platform. The team later developed algorithms to optimize the various aspects of the service to scale operations, increase efficiency, and improve the quality of the service. In addition, the company developed over three thousand meal recipes, including descriptions, nutritional information, and photographs. Over the life of the business, the company invested significantly in its technology capabilities, believing that the company’s ability to efficiently scale its operations leveraging technology would be a competitive advantage in the food delivery market."

All of that tech obviously required capital to develop. The company raised $120.7mm in three preferred equity financing rounds between 2013 and 2015. Investors included Menlo VenturesSherpa Capital, and E-Ventures. The company also had $11.8mm in venture debt ($8.4mm Comerica Bank and $3.4mm from TriplePoint Venture Growth BDC Corp.). 

The bankruptcy filing illustrates what happens when investors (the board) lose faith in founders and insist upon rejiggering the business to be operationally focused. First, they bring in a new operator and relegate the founders to other positions. With new management as cover, they then cut costs. Here, the new CEO's "first action" was to RIF 30 people from company HQ. Founders generally don't like to lose control and then see friends blown out, and so here, both founders resigned shortly after the RIF. This, in turn, gives the investors more latitude to bring in skilled operators which is precisely what they did.

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