Venture Hacker Naval Ravikant recently presented our top 10 term sheet hacks at Startup2Startup:
(Slides: Top 10 Term Sheet Hacks (pdf))
Naval’s slides are a must-read—and a great summary of our detailed hacks.
Slideshare has a transcript of the slides on a single page if you don’t want to flip through the presentation (scroll to the bottom of the page). Mike Speiser has put up his notes from the presentation. And finally, here’s a video of Naval describing his investment criteria:
(Video: Interview with Naval Ravikant.)







# Randall Howard · Sep 23, 2008
Having been on both side of term sheets (ie. as founding entrepreneur and as activist investor) this is a great summary that all startup founders should read.
It packs a lot of wisdom into a very dense form, and I’m sure many keynotes could be written from this material.
But the sad fact is that the simple term sheets of the 1990’s, which evolved terms to protect professional investors from errant and/or naive founders, have morphed into Darth-Vader-esque term books which can be toxic to everyone in sight.
Great work!
Randall
# Shafqat · Sep 24, 2008
Wow. I didn’t realize that a 3 minute clip can actually show how intelligent somone is. I’m impressed – makes me want to work with Naval, now.
Loved the analogy with Hollywood. Guess he’s not into the long tail…