Low risk recommendations on managing $2-3M early investment to generate returns?

5 points by rmets 7 years ago | 5 comments

In the past we've used term deposits with banks. Keep a portion of your funding in a trading account and some in a business saver. Then the rest with staggered maturities (2 mth, 4 mth, 12 mth etc), spreading it across a number of banks. Each time you have one mature you can reinvest what you don’t need immediately into a new term deposit. Just keep in mind that it can be difficult to break a term deposit (get your money back before the maturity date), so I wouldn’t invest out too far and do your research. If done well you can get between 2 and 3%. We have found this is low risk and very accessible.

It would be great to learn if anyone has trialed other options and then learn how funding gets managed with more sophisticated rounds through Series B,C,D etc?

Are there managed funds for start ups? Could be an idea :)

Should we avoid wasting our energy on this?

Any advice or feedback would be appreciated. Ryan

rajacombinator 7 years ago |

If I were an investor in your company I would be very alarmed that you were wasting your time and mental energy on this. The goal of that 2-3M investment is presumably to be used in growing your business to produce a 10x+ return - that is 1000.00%+. Not running some bizarre risk free hedge fund where you are trying to squeak out an extra 0.10%. If you really think this is the highest ROI use of your time, effort, and energy, it would be better to liquidate the company and return remaining funds to investors.

jklein11 7 years ago | |

This sounds a lot like what I do with my personal finances and really doesn't take that much overhead and isn't all that complicated. Overall maybe it would take ~4-8 hours to set up all in?

If you are leaving 2M in cash in your checking account and could make an extra 2% on it annually that is 40k for that 4-8 hours. It seems like some pretty low hanging fruit to me.

I understand the point that you are making though. Unless what you pitched to your investors was some sort of investment vehicle it probably doesn't make sense to invest a lot of time trying to beat the market.

marketgod 7 years ago |

You can look into a ladder GIC. You can do this to stay on pace with inflation. It won't make your profits but at least your money won't be disappearing in a chequing account. Set it and forget it basically and just let it re-enroll as you most likely won't need all your money at once. Doing this for your personal accounts is good as well, for the emergency savings money. The other alternative for your own account is to use a high interest savings account as those have a decent rate.

See what Apple does [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braeburn_Capital

deanmoriarty 7 years ago |

I don't think you should be wasting your energy on this. I've seen multiple startups with $10M+ liquidity sitting in checking accounts.

At a growing startup there are so many insane cost-related inefficiencies that investors absolutely couldn't care less about you treating the funds like you would with your personal savings. I'd go as far as saying that they'd probably think "what the hell is this person doing instead of focusing on execution?"

Ian7 7 years ago |

pick any decent savings account - that's enough for now.