Venture Hacks

Brad Feld recently proposed good criteria to distinguish true followers from tire-kickers when you’re raising money:
“While you can’t contractually commit the supporting investors [followers], you can usually separate the real ones from the tire-kickers (or—more generously—the call option people). Committed supporting investors are going to let you use their names with potential lead [...]

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Go read Mike Speiser’s new blog: Laserlike. Its theme is, “Free ideas. Just add execution.”
Mike recently joined Sutter Hill Ventures as a Managing Director. Before that, he founded Epinions with fellow Venture Hacker Naval Ravikant and founded Bix (acquired by Yahoo).
Ideas
In his second post, Mike writes,
“The theme of Laserlike is that ideas are overvalued. [...]

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In 4 Things to Do After You Get Your First Term Sheet, Bill Burnham, a former partner at Mobius and Softbank Capital, writes,
“I’ve recently been involved in helping a couple companies with their first major round of VC financing. It’s actually been pretty interesting for me because I have historically been on the [...]

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Summary: Raise as much money as possible. With these caveats: (1) maintain control at any cost, (2) monitor your liquidation preference, and (3) act like you don’t have a lot of money. Also understand that if you do raise a lot of money, you will have to (1) “go big or go home” and (2) [...]

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The latest great quotes from the VH Twitter feed: twitter.com/venturehacks (RSS):
Kleiner Perkins
“Entrepreneurs do more than anyone thinks possible, with less than anyone thinks possible.” – John Doerr
“If the reason you’re taking on a mission is for the money you’ll make, I believe you’ll fail.” – John Doerr
“Where most entrepreneurs fail is on the things they [...]

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This is a great slide from John Doerr’s talk at Stanford:

It’s a little hard to read but it’s worth a squint. Or just watch this 4 minute video where he lays it out:

Video: John Doerr on Mercenaries and Missionaries.

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In The Psychology of Entrepreneurial Misjudgment, part 1: Biases 1-6, Marc Andreessen kindly interprets an essay from Charlie Munger’s book, Poor Charlie’s Almanack:
“Mr. Munger’s magnum opus speech, included in the book, is The Psychology of Human Misjudgment — an exposition of 25 key forms of human behavior that lead to misjudgment and error, derived from [...]

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There is lots of wisdom in John Doerr’s (Kleiner Perkins) introduction to Inside Intuit (emphasis added):
“Inside Intuit is a tale of missionaries, not mercenaries. It’s about a founding team that prevails through tenacity, frugality, and an obsession with the customer experience…
“Kleiner Perkins first learned about Intuit in 1985… But when it came to large numbers [...]

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[Ed: I enjoyed Tony Wright's contrarian article, Half-Assed Startup, when I first read it on his excellent blog. Tony, a founder of RescueTime (Y Combinator), argues that you can start a company while you're otherwise employed. And he explains how to do it. Tony kindly agreed to re-publish his article on Venture Hacks. Take it [...]

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Here are the latest great comments from our readers—please keep ‘em coming!
Rob Lord, founder of Songbird (Sequoia Capital), has some ideas for VC Wear t-shirts:
“Mo’ money, mo’ board seats.
“409a a-okay!
“Some of my best friends are EIRs.
“Venture debt is a non-starter.”
Jonathan Boutelle, founder of SlideShare, suggests using SlideShare to share decks privately:
“One safe way to [...]

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