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EXECUTIVE GEEK is a book written blog or a "blook."
Be a part of its creation by giving your own hints & tips in the comments. 
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Mon, Jul 2, 2012 12:50 AM UTC
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This is one that for some reason a lot of attorneys screw up. I don’t know why, but they do. If you are setting yourself up for an Angel, Venture, then IPO style company, it needs to be done this way. You need to be a Delaware C Corporation, with around 15M shares of common and 5M preferred authorized and then 4-6M shares (depending on the F/FF stock) issued to the Founders.
Probably 90% of the companies that Forward Innovations works with come to us with this done incorrectly. They will be set up as a California LLC with a 1,000 shares. If you want to have an option program and you want to sell preferred stock, you cannot be an LLC. I know – your attorney told you that California or Nevada or whatever state has adopted the Delaware statutes and they have the same laws as Delaware. Yes, but all of the case law is in Delaware and that is imperative in a lawsuit. All VCs and most smart Angels will want you set up this way.
Why all the stock? You want the company to be in a position that when you have completed Series A investment and you bring on the “big guns” of the executive team, you have about 10M shares issued. This is allows you to go out recruiting with about 200K-300K shares for these executive. I know that 20 shares of a company that has 1,000 shares issued is the same percentage as 200K is to a company with 10M issued, but it doesn’t sound the same. It won’t sound the same to the executive you are trying to recruit, and it won’t sound the same to their spouse.
Topics: Entrepreneurs |
Sun, Apr 15, 2012 5:03 PM UTC
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 For years, there was a gut feeling that having two Founders was the right mix. It was proven by Bill Gates and Paul Allen, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, Jerry Yang and Dave Filo, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. But in 2011, the Startup Genome (a comprehensive study done at Berkeley) came out and it showed that there was a 65% greater chance of success if there were two Founders.
The best mix is what is called the “Hustler and the Hacker”. The Hustler is the passionate business person that loves to go out and tell the story. He is a networker, and when he talks, he is captivating. He spends every waking moment thinking about the problem, and he wants to change the world. He is eloquent, confident, and mesmerizing. The Hacker is the guy who spends 18 hours a day building the product and delivering on that vision. He is thinking about scalability, availability, reliability, and how they can incorporate the next cool technology into the platform. There is great respect and great trust in this partnership.
This mix used to be a “nice to have”, but since the Genome report, it is nearly a “must have”. The best way to solve the problem is just make sure that you have this mix and make sure you push it in your pitch. Stress the role each of you play and stress your great connection. If you do not have this mix, you should be very prepared to defend why you don’t. Many Angels are now considering this mandatory and a business guy and a contract India team are no longer sufficient.
Topics: Venture Capital |
Mon, Dec 19, 2011 1:43 AM UTC
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Guy Kawasaki calls it the “Art of the Start” and founding a company is clearly an art. It is an art because you are playing a very significant game, with tightly defined rules, and the penalty for breaking the rules is death (of the company that is). The problem is, no one gives you the rules. You are expected to understand a game that is neither intuitive nor obvious. In fact the game is quite complex and often based on a set of traditions that were never written down. Founders must make extremely critical business decisions every day that could literally be worth 10s of millions of dollars in 2-3 years. Although it is unfair, it is the game and if you win the game you win a lot.
So why don’t your company advisors help you navigate this game. To a certain extent they do. Your Angel investors, attorney’s, accountants, and venture capital partners all help you navigate, but they do the navigation from a certain context and biased that is not always in alignment with you as the Founder. Your attorney probably provides the most advice in these situations, but it can often be very slanted. If you go to any of the top startup law firms, these guys very much understand both the game and the ramifications of the game. But there is also a biased at play here. If you are negotiating with a top VC, you are doing one deal with this law firm, but the firm is probably doing 50-100 deals a year with the VC on the other side of the table. I think that most of these attorneys do their best to be fair, but the dynamics are clearly rocky at best.
So who is in the best position to help you? They don’t teach this stuff at Harvard, you can’t learn it by being on a Board, and people that have not founded a company can simply not understand it. The only mentors that can help you play the game and understand it from your perspective is a serial entrepreneur. The serial entrepreneur knows where the tricks and traps are, not because they super smart, but because they probably have stepped on them and seen their critical ramifications. They may not be smart enough to not experience the pain once, but they quickly put in place a strategy to not experience it again. By looking back in time against a game that has already played out, they can see how the game can be played better.
Over a series of 10 blog articles, I hope to give you some insight and perspective on how you can play this game and not get burned. Although it does not layout all of the rules, all of the tricks, and all of the pain, it puts “bumpers on the bowling alley” and tries to keep the ball in the center.
I hope this information in interesting to you and that you find valuable. I would love to hear feedback and your experiences in the comments.
Topics: Venture Capital |
Mon, Aug 22, 2011 4:01 AM UTC
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I have to admit, I have had a bit of email-envy towards Gmail since they introduced the Priority Inbox. The concept is brilliant and the user acceptance has been tremendous. This is an area that is in very strong need of innovation and I was really glad to see Google step up and provide some value.
 SaneBox
But because I get so much email, 300-500 emails a day, I could never justify leaving my Outlook. I use a lot of tools to manage my inbox including QuickFile, Getting Things Done for Outlook, Xobni, Gist, and Producteev. I just cannot do all this within Gmail.
But SaneBox came to my rescue and not only provided the advantages of Gmail’s Priority Inbox, but far surpassed it. The installation was very easy and it allowed me to see how it was processing the email. I have a lot of email, so it took about 2 hours to complete the process. When it was done, only about 75 messages (out of 438) were left in my inbox. I said “Oh Shit” and scrambled to find where the rest had gone. But when I looked in the SaneLater folder, there they all were.
I went through the folder and sure enough SaneBox had done a wonderful job of determining what email was important and what was not important. Of the 75 left in my inbox, 100% of them were emails I would have selected to be priority. Of the 363 that it put in my SaneLater, all but 2 should have been gone into the folder. To train the system, all I had to do is drag the emails from the SaneLater Folder to the inbox and Voila it was done. From that point on all email from those two users are left in the inbox. If there had been something left in the inbox that should have been moved, training is just as simple. Drag the email from the inbox to the SaneLater folder and you are done. This is completely brilliant!
But SaneBox does not stop there. In addition to the obvious value, it has some cool tricks up its sleeve. It goes through your spam folder and finds email that was spammed and puts this into a folder called “SaneNotSpam”. It found over 100 important emails that my spam filter had miss-grabbed in only the last 30 days. I moved the email to the inbox and SaneBox will never let that happen again. If there is someone emailing you that you want to lose, just drag the email to SaneBlackHole and you will never see it again.
There is even a cool set of folders called SaneTomorrow and SaneNext week. If Monday morning you drag an email to SaneTomorrow, Tuesday morning it will re-appear in your inbox. If instead you dragged it to SaneNextWeek, next Monday it would re-appear. Very cool!
Finally, the customization is really well done. If you are not using one of the folders, you can make it disappear from the list. SaneBox lets you connect to Facebook, Linked-In, and Twitter to find more contacts and optimize the algorithm even more.
This is a real no brainer. If you use Outlook, you must go and install this product. The value is off the charts.
Topics: GTD, Organization, Outlook, Technology |
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