Venture Hacks

… a founder, a VC, and his Associate negotiate a down round. Very NSFW.

Video: Old Face Andre talks economics with Omar
Another business lesson from The Wire — about intellectual property: “It ain’t about right, it’s about money.”

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Mark Suster, entrepreneur turned VC at GRP Partners:
“When I was at BuildOnline (my first company) and things went ‘pear shaped’ we called all of our customers and said, ‘I know that we signed contracts with you. The reality is that the market has changed and I need to change to the new realities. We committed [...]

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Thanks to Atlas Venture for supporting Venture Hacks this month. This post is by Fred Destin, one of Atlas’ general partners. If you like it, check out Fred’s blog and tweets @fdestin. And if you want an intro to Atlas, send me an email. I’ll put you in touch if there’s a fit. Thanks. [...]

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Last week, I spoke to a startup that was in discussions to license one of their products to a competitor. The competitor asked for historical sales data about the product, and the startup was wondering whether they should share that information with a competitor. Our conversation went like this:

The book I mentioned in the conversation [...]

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This is the first in an ongoing series called Books for Entrepreneurs. We’ll use these posts to recommend books that we’ve found useful as entrepreneurs (duh).
Our first book is Bargaining for Advantage by G. Richard Shell. Richard is a professor at Wharton and this is my favorite negotiation book period. It synthesizes the principled negotiation [...]

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“We took the approach of wanting to get to know the different partners and the different possibilities and to see where there was the best fit. Partnerships take a lot of work—you want to go out on a few dates before you get married. Yes, we dated a few people but didn’t get married… and [...]

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How many similarities can you find between hacking fund-raising and hacking a car purchase? Watch this video:
The best answer gets a coveted Venture Hacks mug.
(Via Lifehacker.)

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Dharmesh Shah recently wrote a very nice review of Venture Hacks. The article includes great meta-advice about fund raising:
“1. VC Negotiation Is An Art Form: As an entrepreneur, there are few things more “nuanced” that you’ll deal with than raising institutional capital. Even if you decide not to raise [...]

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“Having information that the other side doesn’t have gives [VCs] an advantage… they take advantage of entrepreneurs who haven’t been through this before… they were totally willing to take advantage of us.”
– Mitch Kapor, Founders at Work
“Knowledge is Power.”
– Sir Francis Bacon
In this series of articles, we’re going to explain how to negotiate a great [...]

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