I can’t wait till she opens the “Air Farms”. Rachel Sequoia, the Onion is calling on line 1.
via rickyv:
Must-see VC pitch.
Update! Fred Wilson / Union Square Ventures is leading an eight figure Series A investment round for ShareTheAir108.com (the site will be up once they cash the check).
(Source: jarodreyes)
(via hiten)
Interesting thoughts on term sheets from Bijan Sabet. I had lunch with a friend this week who recently had a bad VC experience. This anecdote seems like an example of the traditional attitudes around VCs that still prevails in some cases. Of course the good news is there also seems to be an exciting movement of openness, collaboration and mentoring among a lot of great investment firms like Founder Collective, Y Combinator, First Round, Union Square and others…and that attitude seems to be percolating throughout the industry.
via bijan:
Last week, i was at an event chatting with a few VCs.
One of the VCs who is from silicon valley, asked if we ask for “East coast terms”.
Before I could reply, another Boston-based VC said that he uses an east coast term sheet for local investments and but uses his west coast term sheet for bay area investments.
There were too many things going on for me to interject but I’m not sure what they are talking about.
I invest in startups on the east coast and west coast. I don’t have do anything strange or unusual in our term sheets and closing documents. I use the same terms regardless of the location. The only exceptions is if there are co-investors or note holders that need to convert or something else that existed before my investment
The only thing I can think of between east and west coast term sheets is that some east coast VCs lock up startup employees with non-compete agreements and they can’t do that with California employees.
I’m against employee non-compete agreements so I don’t ask for them in either case (unless I’m working with a co-investor that requires it and I convince them otherwise). I don’t get the double standard and probably never will.
Otherwise, I use highly competent law firms that understand what’s important in startups like Gunderson Dettmer and Fenwick & West. There are a few important terms (valuation, option pool, protective provisions) and then everything else is just boilerplate at this point.
But I don’t understand the idea of different terms for different coasts. Doesn’t seem fair or right to me.
An interesting POV from Mark Suster on the value of MBAs today and what VC or Start-ups are looking for in their recruitment process.
Are MBAs Necessary for Start-ups or VC?
via mikehudack:
“I’m not against MBA’s (I have one myself from University of Chicago and my lovely wife was graduated from Wharton – she loves to remind me that they usually score higher in the rankings than we do). Many of my best friends have MBAs. But as someone who is in charge of recruiting, I feel like it adds a ton to the expectations of compensation without adding any additional value to me as an employer. I say this as somebody who recruited several Harvard, Wharton and similar MBAs at my first company (the one where I acknowledge that I made every mistake in the book). I paid up for the diploma but can’t say that I saw better results.”
Earlier this month Tesla Motors announced it had shown a $1 million profit and biking between cars in stand still traffic today in Soho, one of the greatest walking neighborhoods in the world, I was reminded of our car culture and a post I had started but never published.
In the Business Week article “Can Tesla Become A Real Automaker” that came out in late June after Tesla had received their bailout money, writer David Welch argued that Tesla Motors had a rough road ahead if they ever planned on being a profitable car company competing against the big automakers.
Well its certainly a bright note that at least they got themselves to profitability a few months later, but it wasn’t the pouty ‘glass is half empty’ outlook of the author that caught my attention. Instead it was the storyline of the government supporting an upstart entrepreneurial company instead of the traditional market leaders.
“Tesla plans to use $365 million of its loans to develop the Model S, a five-passenger, $50,000 sedan that is scheduled to go on sale in late 2011. The rest of the money will be used to build an electric-battery plant to sell Tesla’s electric-drive technology to other carmakers.
I could be a bit ignorant on this one and would love to have more facts if someone out there has them, but historically it doesn’t seem that the government funding unproven startups has been a common practice. While Obama’s healthcare battle is not going according to plan, I think we can look to efforts like this that alleviate our doubts that we made the correct choice. I’m interested in this notion that the government, and the American people, are acting as a Series C financiers for Tesla. As a shareholder (taxpayer) of that investment firm I support that funding decision.
For their parts, Nissan says it will build an electric car in Tennessee and Ford will use the money to help fund a $14 billion push into advanced-technology vehicles
The financing fits the Obama Administration’s goal of creating green jobs. “We have an historic opportunity to help ensure that the next generation of fuel-efficient cars and trucks are made in America,” said President Barack Obama in a statement. You mean the promise of putting money into green business and forcing the hands of the big automakers to concentrate on these areas were not just empty rhetoric, but policies that are actually being fulfilled? Why isn’t anyone using this example in the healthcare debate is perplexing.
“If Tesla does come up with hit technology, a big player like Toyota could use its financial strength and technological prowess to develop a competing car very quickly, Hall points out.” Great. I hope they do. Isn’t that the POINT. Regardless of whether or not Tesla succeeds and “beats” the other big automotive makers is just whip cream on top. At the end of the day if Musk ends up revolutionizing cars and gets the other big automakers to push mass produced innovation around better and faster electric cars, I think he’ll walk away with a big fat smile on his face knowing that he essentially accomplished his mission…which, as far as I can tell, is to make millions of electric cars on the road a reality.
Saw this from Guy Kawasaki’s America Express Open Blog roll. Its from law firm Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. From their site…
“WSGT Term Sheet Generator: This tool will generate a venture financing term sheet based on your responses to an online questionnaire. It also has an informational component, with basic tutorials and annotations on financing terms. This term sheet generator is a modified version of a tool that we use internally, which comprises one part of a suite of document automation tools that we use to generate start-up and venture financing-related documents.”
This is an amazing tool and a must review for any entrepreneur interested in potentially raising money for a company in the future. From my test drive, its good to have access to wikipedia and other online research tools to help answer some questions you might have as you go through it, but its a really interesting way to become more familiar with this process.
As a side note, I’m sure it will serve WGST well as a new business tool.
