Tag: askthevc
We are starting to work on the teaching materials for the 3rd edition of Venture Deals, which is coming out in the fall of 2016.
If you have either taught or taken a class using Venture Deals and are willing to talk to our publisher at Wiley about what kind of teaching materials would make the book even more useful, please send me an email.
As part of this, we are doing a refresh of the Ask the VC website so if you have suggestions for that, just toss them in the comments.
Jason Mendelson and I are doing office hours at the Boulder Bookstore on Monday 9/26. We will be hanging out from 2pm – 5pm and chatting with whomever comes by. It’ll also be a chance to buy a copy of Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist from your local bookstore and get a copy of it signed by both of us while you wait.
We’ve been asked by a lot of folks how to get a copy of the book signed by us. This is one way; the other is to buy a signed copy directly from us off of the AsktheVC site. Either way, we’d be happy to see you on Monday if you want to swing by. I think Jason will be wearing his wig from I’m a VC.
Before we invested in MakerBot, we bought and assembled a Thing-O-Matic. When I say we, I mean me, Jason, and Ross. It took us about 20 hours (Jason and I did the first half; Jason and Ross did the second half) and was a blast – think of it as an adult lego project. Our Thing-O-Matic has been steadily printing stuff – you can play a game of chess with our Thing-O-Matic pieces. the next time you are in my office.
As part of the endless series of Amazing Deals I bring you from my deal site, today’s offer is a fully assembled Thing-O-Matic. If you want your own 3D printer, but you don’t want to assemble it, you can buy it fully assembled for $2,500. But, through the magic of daily deals, there are 20 available for a 20% discount ($2,000). This is a one time offer from my friends at MakerBot so grab ’em while they are available.
In additional TechStars Cloud launched today along with the first episode of TechStars on Bloomberg TV.
And finally, for all of you that have written asking for a “Convertible Debt Series” like our term sheet series, we’ve just started one on AsktheVC.com. The first post is up and introduces the series – we’ll be working through all of the terms in a convertible debt deal over the next few weeks.
When Jason and I set out to write Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist, we both agreed that we wanted to try to create as useful and durable a reference guide for entrepreneurs interested in raising a round of venture capital as we could. As a result, we created a Resources page on Ask the VC and decided to load it up with legal documents that are part of a venture capital financing.
Now, while I’d like to be able to simply do all of my financings with a handshake, or possibly on a napkin written in crayon, I also wish I had a herd of unicorns, surrounded by rainbows, a balanced US government budget, and agreement on how to address the debt ceiling issue.
As a step in the right direction, Jason and I decided to open source our Foundry Group form legal documents. You can find them on the Ask the VC Resources page. Included are our standard forms for the following:
- Series A Term Sheet
- Series A Preferred Stock Purchase Agreement
- Investor Rights Agreement
- Co-Sale Agreement
- Voting Agreement
- Series A Restated Certificate of Incorporation
- ByLaws
If you do a deal with us, simply feel free to mark them up. Or use them for other deals. Or study them, in conjunction with Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist, to know what we do and don’t care about (yes – there are some hidden extra-bonus tips in the forms for you to enjoy if you want.) Of course – all of the traditional legal disclaimers apply (e.g. “You take full responsibility for using these documents. We aren’t your lawyers and we give no warranties (express or implied) that they documents are any good or legally enforceable.”) So make sure you have a good lawyer advising you, even if you are smarter than him.
We’ve included plenty of other bonus material on this page, including LOI / merger docs and seed deal docs. We’ve got more coming, including a thorough dissection of a convertible note (and all the various permutations), but we thought this would be plenty to digest for now.
And if you find some unicorns, or typos in the documents, send them my way.
When Jason and I started AsktheVC, one of our goals was to have a place where entrepreneurs could ask us questions and get direct answers. We did this for a while, getting to most of the questions which has created a very nice corpus of answers to several hundred questions easily searchable by Lijit.
For example:
- How Did We Get Our Idea For Our Startup?
- How Much Equity Should an Early Stage COO/CFO Get?
- How Do You Negotiate a Carve Out With Investors?
Of course, these are our answers and opinions, and many of the questions are subjective, but they form a starting point for any entrepreneur looking for answers to a bunch of random questions from a VC.
Now that we have relaunched AsktheVC with the publication of Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist, we’ve started answering questions again at AsktheVC. You’ll notice a “Have A Question” link just above the Do More Faster image on the right sidebar. We’ll try to answer them within a few days of them coming in. And, if you have a different opinion to any of our answers, please weigh in on the comments.
As a VC who has been blogging for a long time I’ve been fascinated by the VC Blogger phenomenon. I’ve been subscribing to, reading, forwarding, occasionally commenting, and setting up networks of feeds for a while.
With the relaunch of AsktheVC we’ve resurrected something we used to do periodically which is highlight a great VC post. However, we are taking a different tact this time around with our new motto.
“We read all the VC Bloggers so you don’t have to.”
It’s not quite the gray lady, but hey, we are just VCs and bloggers, not real journalists. Jason and I already have some great posts up from guys like Jeff Bussgang (Flybridge), Mark Suster (GRP), Fred Wilson (Union Square Ventures), Roger Ehrenberg (IA Ventures), Charlie O’Donnell (First Round Capital) and 500 Startups. We’ll provide a little additional insight, or at least a pithy comment.
We’ve also got a full list of known VC bloggers (at least to us) on the sidebar of AsktheVC. If we are missing anyone (I’m sure we are), please email me and I’ll add them.
My partner Jason Mendelson and I are psyched to announce that our book – Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist – has been published and is now available. We are also relaunching AskTheVC – the companion website to the book that we maintained for several years, went dormant for a while, but is alive with content once again.
The book originated in 2005 when Jason and I wrote a long series of posts on this blog about a typical Venture Capital term sheet. It took us a year or so to get all the way through it, but it was fun and generated an enormous amount of positive feedback from entrepreneurs (and would be entrepreneurs) who told us how helpful it was for them to understand how a VC term sheet actually worked.
People regularly suggested that we turn the blog series into an actual book. Until about a year ago we’d simply encourage people to PDF up the posts and do whatever they wanted with them. We got great feedback from students and entrepreneurs all over the world who said they were on the receiving end of the posts, that the posts had been used as the curriculum for a class, or that they had simply referred to them during a negotiation and they were “more helpful than their lawyer.”
After I wrote Do More Faster: TechStars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup with David Cohen (the CEO of TechStars), Jason and I decided to write Venture Deals. We knew the term sheet series would only be a small part of the book and would have to be re-written, so we just got to work. Once again, it feels amazingly good to “ship the book” – it’s remarkably hard work to get from “an idea for a book” to an actual book.
For those who think this is just a reprint of the blog posts, they make up less than 20% of the book and have been completely rewritten. The table of contents gives you a feel for this.
- The Players
- How to Raise Money
- Overview of the Term Sheet
- Economic Terms of the Term Sheet
- Control Terms of the Term Sheet
- Other Terms of the Term Sheet
- The Capitalization Table
- How Venture Capital Funds Work
- Negotiation Tactics
- Raising Money the Right Way
- Issues at Different Financing States
- Letters of Intent – The Other Term Sheet
- Legal Things Every Entrepreneur Should Know
While it’s a chewy topic, we’ve tried to keep it light, fun, and enjoyable. But we’ve also tried to make it a must read for any entrepreneur, or would be entrepreneur, or student interested in entrepreneurship, or junior lawyer that is working on deals, and our parents. We’ve created a dynamic companion site at AskTheVC, are working on a teaching guide, and have a few entertaining surprises up our sleeve that will be launched in early September.
Since I’m a shameless book salesman, you’ll be hearing plenty more from me on this blog. But for now, go take a look at Fred Wilson’s wonderful review titled Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist.