Tag: venture deals
Jason Mendelson and I recently published the 4th Edition of Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist.
The book now has three forewords – one by each of Fred Wilson (USV), James Park (Fitbit), and Dick Costolo (now 01 Advisors, then Twitter).
The 1st edition had 13 chapters. We are now up to 19.
- The Players
- Preparing for Fundraising
- How to Raise Money
- Overview of the Term Sheet
- Economic Terms of the Term Sheet
- Control Terms
- Other Terms of the Term Sheet
- Convertible Debt
- The Capitalization Table
- Crowdfunding
- Venture Debt
- How Venture Capital Funds Work
- Negotiation Tactics
- Raising Money the Right Way
- Issues at Different Financing Stages
- Letters of Intent: The Other Term Sheet
- How to Engage an Investment Banker
- Why Do Term Sheets Even Exist?
- Legal Things Every Entrepreneur Should Know
The new chapters in this edition are 11. Venture Debt (with help from SVB), and 17. How to Engage an Investment Banker (with help from Golding Partners).
We also significantly updated Chapter 2: Preparing for Fundraising and Chapter 19: Legal Things Every Entrepreneur Should Know (with help from Cooley).
As with each edition, we cleaned up stuff throughout the book.
Finally, we updated the website which is now at VentureDeals.com.
For everyone who has read the book, given us feedback, used it in a course, or recommended it to someone, thank you!
Techstars and Kauffman Fellows are once again running the Venture Deals online course that Jason Mendelson and I put together several years ago.
If you’re an entrepreneur who wants to raise capital and grow your business, this online course teaches you the basics you need to know for working with VCs. And, if you are starting off as a VC or a lawyer for venture capital deals and you want a refresher on the core issues in a term sheet, this online course is for you.
Venture Deals is a seven-week, collaborative, “learn-by-doing” online course where you will watch videos from us along with doing project work as virtual teams. The workload for the course is about four to six hours per week, includes several live video AMAs with me and Jason, and covers the following topics.
- Week 1 – Introduction of key players/Form or join a team
- Week 2 – Fundraising/Finding the Right VC
- Week 3 – Capitalization Tables/Convertible Debt
- Week 4 – Term Sheets: Economics & Control
- Week 5 – Term Sheets Part Two
- Week 6 – Negotiations
- Week 7 – Letter of Intent/Getting Acquired
The course is a great accompaniment to our book, Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist, which is about to come out in a new and improved 4th Edition that will be available by the time the course starts on September 8, 2019.
It’s free, and you’ll be joining over 23,000 people have taken the course in the past. Sign up for the course here!
We are running the Venture Deals Online Course again. Registration is now open and it runs from April 7, 2019 – May 31, 2019. It’s produced by Kauffman Fellows Academy and Techstars.
We’ve run the course four times now and have had over 15,000 people take it. Both Jason and I make several guest appearances (online) and I always get lots of email (and try to respond to all of them) with questions during the course.
It’s free, although it’s recommended that you have a copy of our book Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist.
The course runs for seven weeks with the following syllabus.
- Week 1 – Introduction of key players/Form or join a
team Week 2 – Fundraising/Finding the Right VC- Week 3 – Capitalization Tables/Convertible Debt
- Week 4 – Term Sheets: Economics & Control
- Week 5 – Term Sheets Part Two
- Week 6 – Negotiations
- Week 7 – Letter of Intent/Getting Acquired
If you are interested, sign up now and tell your friends who are interested in venture deals.
Kauffman Fellows and Techstars are once again running the Venture Deals online course.
https://youtu.be/RWUx5qm-xrg
This time it runs from May 6th to June 26th. We’ve now had over 10,000 people take the online course and have been delighted to meet or email with a bunch of them over the past few years.
If you want to learn how to be smarter than your lawyer and your venture capitalist, sign up for Venture Deals now. Yup – it’s free!
Raising money is hard.
Entrepreneurs need to understand what’s involved – from what to consider when picking the right venture partner and how to think about the economic and control rights at stake, to what life will be like after the deal closes. This assumes that the company is ready to raise venture money in the first place – an important consideration that not enough entrepreneurs really stop to consider.
At Foundry Group, we believe in a level playing field when it comes to knowledge. We want entrepreneurs to understand all the issues and to make the most informed decisions they can. That not only benefits them, but it benefits us as their partners and investors. That was one of the motivations for Jason and I to write Venture Deals. It’s also why Jason co-teaches the venture capital course at CU Boulder.
We believe that access to information is a good thing.
So when the founders of Hotshot, a startup that provides digital learning for lawyers, asked if they could come to Boulder and interview Jason and me for a video on raising venture capital, we happily obliged.
The video they created is called “Advice on Raising Venture Capital.” Anyone can access it for free, and we encourage you to check it out. While Hotshot’s content is aimed at lawyers and law students, this course is for entrepreneurs. In it, Jason and I discuss the different things that founders should consider when raising venture money for the first time.
We don’t have a stake in Hotshot – we just like what they’re up to and wanted to share the content.
The third edition of Venture Deals is now available on Audible. It’s the unabridged version read by me and my partner/co-author Jason Mendelson with guest appearances by Matt Blumberg.
We’ve been getting requests for an unabridged audio version of Venture Deals since we first came out with the book in 2012. We like to think that it has now aged like a good wine.
If you are an audiobook person, you can know hear the dulcet tones of Jason’s voice alongside the scratchy whine (which has aged) of mine while learning how to be smarter than your VC and your lawyer.
Last Chance to Sign Up For The Fall 2017 Venture Deals Course
Kauffman Fellows and Techstars are running another cycle of the Venture Deals course with me and Jason Mendelson. Signups close tomorrow as the course runs from 9/24/17 – 11/13/17. The course is free to everyone.
The seven-week course, which is about five hours of work each week, has the following agenda.
Week 1 – Introduction of key players/Form or join a team
Week 2 – Fundraising/Finding the Right VC
Week 3 – Capitalization Tables/Convertible Debt
Week 4 – Term Sheets: Economics & Control
Week 5 – Term Sheets Part Two
Week 6 – Negotiations
Week 7 – Letter of Intent/Getting Acquired
Over 10,000 people have taken the course at this point. We’ve gotten universally strong positive reviews and have made plenty of new friends from people who have gone through the course and connected with us.
If you are interested in raising venture capital, I encourage you to sign up and take the course. I hope to see you online.
The Audible version of Startup Opportunities: Know When to Quit Your Day Job, 2nd Edition is available for pre-order and will be on out on 9/19. My co-author, Sean Wise, read it using his deliciously dulcet voice.
Jason and I also finished the Audible recording of Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist, 3rd Edition and expect to see it up on Audible in 60 days. More when it’s out.
It’s a lot of fun to read your own audio book like I did for Startup Life: Surviving and Thriving in a Relationship with and Entrepreneur, the book I wrote with Amy.
The Venture Deals Online Course for this spring starts this Sunday May 14, 2017 and runs through July 3, 2017. The Kauffman Fellows Academy and Techstars are co-hosting the course. It’s free – all you need to do is sign up.
This is the fifth time we are running the course. So far more than 5,000 people around the globe have done it and we’ve gotten to meet and collaborate with entrepreneurs from six continents.
While our book Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist is the basis for the course, we have extensive exercises, additional content, and a highly engaged community to answer questions. Jason and I make regular visits, both in the online discussion sections as well as periodic AMAs. In addition, the team from Techstars is also engaging throughout the program.
If you are interested in entrepreneurship and how startup deals work, here’s a great chance to go deep on this with me, Jason, Kauffman Fellows, and Techstars.