I had recently left Microsoft after five years of slaving away as a program manager on various facets of Windows. I’d departed to take a job at Wildseed, a company producing an over-the-top funky handset running Linux, targeted at the teenage market. Yeah, that’s it on the ...
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Vesting in general (and founder vesting in particular) is an oft-misunderstood tool that has a tendency to really screw up young companies. There are some deep misconceptions at work here that often cause founders all sorts of grief. Most of it comes from the simple fact that stock grants ...
I just got a very nice email from Danielle Fong, the 25 year old middle school-dropout, cofounder and chief scientist of Lightsail Energy. That’s not the amazing part. Lightsail makes regenerative brakes for the power grid. You know how your* Prius takes the power from the brakes when ...
Last week I was speaking on what would have otherwise been a terrific panel. It was Frank Artale from Ignition, Tom Duterme from Groupon M&A, Andy Sack from Lighter Capital & Founder’s Co-op, and me talking about funding & exiting.  The only thing that spoiled it was yet ...
I crashed my first demo day today at 500 Startups. Â As with all good things, it came about via a stupid coincidence. Â I’m an investor in 500 Startups, but hadn’t yet managed to get myself on the official LP mailing list so I had no idea an investor day was coming up. Â I plopped ...
I just got the following email. Subject: Small taxi company looking to expand Hello, I run a small taxi company outside of Boston Massachusetts. My community has been targeted for casino development and I am looking to expand my business. Could you possibly provide some advice on how to find ...
I was just creating an account on Sprouter today and started poking around a bit. It’s a nice site, in the vein of Quora or OnStartups Answers. But something about it seemed just a tad… off. Amateurish. And then I realized what it was. These are the fateful words my mother would ...
Raising money is hard, and there’s no way to screw it up faster than going around asking, “Hey, could you introduce me to some investors?” It’s sort of like when, on the second day of school, a goofy freshman asked me if I could introduce him to any girls. Reason 1: ...
I’m continuing to enjoy Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson’s outstanding book, “Venture Deals”. On page 106 (of the Kindle edition, at least) they address an issue that’s very minor unless you’re dealing with it: board members who like to live large on the company ...
I’m digging in to Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson’s outstanding new book, “Venture Deals”. It’s full of both thoughtful analysis and commonsense wisdom about how to make a financing successful. In one section, they discuss the “business plan”: “We ...