Our friends Dick and Jane have decided to disband their company. The last two months had been tough for Dick and Jane – each of them felt the other wasn’t living up to their commitments. Praveena was working hard on the product, but as she observed the tension mounting between Dick and Jane, she started answering calls and emails from the recruiters who had been hounding her since she left her previous job. ...
While Jane was building SayAhh’s revenue projections , Dick focused his attention on building the expense side of the projections. He procrastinated for a few weeks because he was deep in product development, but surfaced a few days ago when he realized they had an investor meeting coming up and really should have at least a basic financial model ready in case the investor asked about it. Before building his projections, Dick needs to make three main decisions: ...
Since last checking in with the SayAhh team, they have spent a few months consumed with building an early version of the product and speaking to potential customers, all the while watching their cash balance steadily diminish. They realize the clock is ticking and have decided that it is time to create a robust set of financial projections in order to provide themselves with a better sense of when they will need to raise more money. ...
Now that Dick and Jane have added a CTO to SayAhh’s founding team, they’ve turned their full attention to working on their product. Today, we’ll look at the impact of the expenses to date on the P&L, Balance Sheet, and Cash Flow Statement. Since SayAhh is in the pre-launch development stage, the company doesn’t have any revenue yet. They also haven’t launched a product, so there is no corresponding “cost of goods sold” – the direct cost of delivering their product. This results in a gross margin of $0, where gross margin is revenue – cost of goods sold. ...
As Finance Fridays continues, we are introducing the concept of the Cap Table. We recognize that we are still at the very early basics stage, but as we are taking a case study approach to this we feel like we have to set up all of the pieces before we get into the messy guts. Hopefully you are staying with us and finding this useful – feedback welcome! Jane and Dick, our fearless cofounders of SayAhh, have set up an accounting system and created their first set of financial statements . This week they set out to create their cap table and hire a CTO. ...
When we were last with our SayAhh cofounders, they had implemented an accounting system and Jane had contributed $50,000 for a 55/45% equity split. This week we introduce two of SayAhh’s key accounting documents: the Balance Sheet (BS) and Statement of Cash Flows (SCF) showing how this investment is accounted for. The investments by the founders created two transactions. Since SayAhh is a C corporation that is incorporated in Delaware, they decided to have a very low non-zero par value for their shares, set at $0.00001, to prevent higher franchise stock taxes . Thus for the 10M shares issued to the them, Jane invests $55 and Dick invests $45. Jane also invests $50,000 as previously agreed. These deposits increase the checking account balance and also the equity accounts, and results in a solvent company and a decent starting bank balance. ...
When we were last with Dick and Jane on Finance Fridays, our fearless entrepreneurs were figuring out how to split up their founders equity and account for an investment from Jane . While they’ve been hard at work on their product, they’ve also incorporated the company, now named SayAhh (thanks Mac!) as a C-Corp in Delaware . They’ve done a bunch of other mundane things, such as establishing a business checking account and depositing Jane’s $50k in seed capital, but like all good early stage entrepreneurs, they’ve spent most of their time obsessing about their product, talking to a few potential early customers about what they needed, and coding away on their MVP. ...
Finance Friday’s gets off the ground with today’s post by introducing you to an imaginary startup, the entrepreneurs that we’ll being following throughout the series, and their first challenges: splitting up the founders’ equity and addressing the case where one of the founders provides the initial seed capital for the business. We felt like we needed to put some groundwork in place using a case-study like approach, rather than just jumping into looking at balance sheets, income statements, and cash flow statements. Hopefully, by the time we are done, we’ll all have some new friends and a lot of knowledge. Let’s get started. ...
Last week I expressed my frustration with the current lack of financial literacy that I see all around me. In the spirit of Fred Wilson’s awesome blog series MBA Mondays , I’ve decided to write a series of posts about this and asked for suggestions. I got a bunch, but one that stood out was from a group of incoming MBA students at the University of Chicago Booth. Their suggestion was to write a series of posts that follows the development of an imaginary startup as the company navigates various events, focusing on how each event will impact not only the P&L, but also the Balance Sheet and Cash Flow Statement. ...