Tag: venture deals
If you have purchased the hardcopy edition of Venture Deals 3rd Edition, you can now buy the Kindle version also for $2.99 via the Amazon Kindle Matchbook program.
Jason and I have been asking our publisher (Wiley) for this for a while and we are psyched they’ve agreed to it. It came about after a number of you asked us if we were going to do this, so thanks to y’all for pushing us on it.
Venture Deals v3 (the third edition) is now shipping in both hardcover and Kindle.
If you are looking for a last minute holiday gift for your favorite entrepreneur (or lawyer, VC, or angel investor), we’ve got you covered.
Jason and I wrote the first edition of Venture Deals in 2011. When we were updating it for v3, I read every single word several times. It’s pretty cool how much it has held up over the last five years and we are delighted that it continues to be at the top of the Amazon bestseller list for Venture Capital books.
We added some new things in v3 and fixed a few things that were either unclear or wrong. This includes:
- A new foreword from Fred Wilson of USV.
- A second new foreword from James Park (Fitbit CEO).
- Updates to Chapter 1: The Players
- Additions to Chapter 8: Convertible Debt
- A new chapter (now 9) on Crowdfunding
- A section on Corporate Venture Capital and Strategic Investors
- A new chapter (now 15) on Why Do Term Sheets Even Exist?
- A new and very improved Glossary
- Lots of little edits everywhere
- New back cover blurbs from Mark Suster (Upfront), Bill Aulet (MIT), Heidi Roizen (DFJ), Brad Bernthal (CU Boulder), Jeff Harbach (Kauffman Fellows), and Jeff Clavier (SoftTech VC) to go along with the new cover design
Jason and I finally sprung for the VentureDeals.com domain and moved all the old AskTheVC posts over. We’ve got a lot of cleanup and updating to do on the site – that’ll happen over the next month. Then, around the end of January we’ll start rolling out the teaching guide to Venture Deals on the site along with a bunch of ancillary materials for this.
For everyone who has supported us along the way, either by purchasing a book, giving us feedback, or just helping us get smarter about doing deals, thank you.
The third edition of Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist is going to print and pre-orders are up on Amazon. For everyone who has purchased, read, or reviewed our previous editions, thank you! While it’s difficult to know exactly how many copies have been sold (the joy of publisher metrics), it’s around 100,000 to date, which blows our mind since we had no expectations around this when we wrote the book in 2011.
We’ve added a lot to the third edition. In addition to fixing some lingering errors, lousy grammar, and poor word choices, we found a few more places to insert Oxford commas so Amy and Ryan would be happy.
There are two new forewords – one from Fred Wilson at USV (the VC perspective) and one from James Park, CEO and co-founder of Fitbit (the entrepreneur perspective). Dick Costolo’s foreword from the previous editions is preserved – it’s now an endword.
We addressed our gender problem. In the previous editions, we used only the male gender and explained our rationalization in the introduction. This rationalization felt silly and more like an excuse this time around, so we did the work to vary the use of female and male pronouns throughout the book.
We added more information on convertible debt including a section on new financial instruments like the safe.
There are two entirely new chapters. The first, on crowdfunding, covers both product and equity crowdfunding, and has an analysis on the good, bad, and scary around crowdfunding. The second, on why term sheets even exist, came out of our realization that many of the investments we’ve made in the past few years were done with handshakes and email outline of terms, rather than term sheets.
We added a section on Corporate Venture Capital, as there has been a Cambrian explosion of CVCs over the past few years, even though the concept of a CVC is not a new one.
We freshened up some of the examples. For example, the reference to FarmVille now is a reference to Pokémon GO. It is 2016 after all.
We have new back cover blurbs and a new dedication to some special people in our lives. We like to spread the love around.
Finally, the old website AskTheVC.com is now VentureDeals.com. As part of this, we’ll be releasing a teaching guide, lots of ancillaries, and other fun stuff that adds to the book. Yeah – we’ve got some work to do to freshen up the site and get all of this stuff out, but that’s what November is for. And yes, we’ll start blogging on it again.
Thanks to everyone for all their help, support, and interest in Venture Deals over the years. Most of all, thank you Jason for being an awesome collaborator and partner.
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.
The Kauffman Fellows Academy is offering another session of the Venture Deals course on the NovoEd platform. This time it is free and runs from April 24, 2016 – June 13, 2016.
We’ve done this course several times in the past with classes of around 100 people and have gotten great feedback. Last year, we started talking to the Kauffman Fellows Academy and NovoEd about doing it for free to reach a wider audience, and in the context of #GiveFirst offer it for free, as the primary motivation for Jason and I had nothing to do with money. The original few sessions has recouped the cost to NovoEd of producing the course so they, and the team at Kauffman Fellows Academy were willing to give free a try.
Sign up is trivial (one click using your Facebook, Google, or O365 id).
The course is based on the second edition of the book Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist. Jason and I are working on the third edition which we be out later this year so this is a chance for anyone interested to engage with us now, ask us questions that we’ve missed in the second edition, or address nuances and larger trends that have changed since the second edition came out in December 2012.
Take a look at the overview for the Venture Deals Course for Spring 2016 and sign up and join us if you are interested.
Jason and I are once again doing the Venture Deals online class as part of the Kauffman Fellows Academy. The course begins on Monday (9/29/14) so sign up now if you are interested.
This will be the third time we are doing this course. We are having a lot of fun with it and love the dynamics of working with the Kauffman Fellows Academy. The feedback has been generally excellent and we’ve tried to take into consideration all the suggestions we’ve heard about what we can do better.
We’ll be actively involved with hangouts during the course as well as on the message boards. If you are interested in really understanding how venture deals and startup financings work, please join us for the course.
This spring Jason Mendelson and I taught a class called Venture Deals with the Kauffman Fellows Academy. It was a blast so we’ve decided to do it again.
KFA uses NovoEd as their platform. Jason and I spent two days recording videos around our Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist explaining each section and going deeper with Q&A. The course is a MOOC that includes significant Q&A that I participated in throughout the course, along with a weekly Google Hangout covering different topics.
Some of the reviews from the course kind of say it all:
- “It’s one thing to read a book, blog, article, etc about venture deals but the process of assignments with a team is like doing a virtual reality journey – you feel as if you are actually pitching a VC. Can’t compare this to reading an article.”
- “Team based, good chance to interact with other students”
- “The quality of the video content, as it complemented the book, was fantastic.”
- “Straight forward approach to learning about VC deals “
- “A course at a university would have charged $2,000 to $3,000 and likely not have the caliber of instructors.”
- “These Google Hangouts are priceless and Brad Feld has been outstanding on this course.”
- “The Venture Deals class is awesome because it bridges the trust deficit between Founders and VC’s”
Sign up for the course now – it’ll be running from June 16th to August 2nd. Use the discount code 2VD20 to get 20% off the price of the course.
My partner Jason and our dear friend Professor Brad Bernthal are attempting to teach everything there is to know about the venture ecosystem in 90 minutes on January 28th. The link to the event is here.
Now realistically, you won’t learn everything, but they have been teaching a class on the subject for the past five years and it is not only excellent, but was one of the reason Jason and I wrote our book Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist.
This should be a great event.
I’m spending the new two days filming the content for a MOOC on raising venture capital. The content is based on my book with Jason titled Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist. After exploring a few different MOOCs for this, I think NovoED is the most interesting platform.
I’ve been impressed with the quality of the courses that currently exist. Several of my friends have done courses, including Chuck Eesley, a professor in Stanford University’s Management Science & Engineering group. Among other things, he’s got a great NovoEd course starting in a month titled Technology Entrepreneurship as well as a superb reading list for anyone interested in entrepreneurship.
Matt Blumberg finished filming the course around his book – Startup CEO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business – a few weeks ago. I got a preview of a few segments – it’s excellent and exceeded my expectations for what NovoED was planning to do.
I’m looking forward to yet another experiment in content creation, this time around a MOOC. In addition to creating the content, I’ll be an active participant / teacher in the course when it comes out.
I’ve often talked about how I learn things by doing them. As I wrote a few weeks ago, I’m fascinated with what I perceive will be a radical transformation over the next decade in how education works. I’ve been participating in it already through experiments like Techstars, which has completely changed how I think about entrepreneurial education. Creating – and participating – in MOOCs in another step in my learning process as I form a view about what is really interesting here.