Like many of his generation, he sees traditional business attire as a form of cover-up. In his workplace, he says, "we're not trying to hide anything with our clothes."
I saw the below exchange on the Seattle Tech Startups email list after one of my buddies, Nathan Kaiser re-posted it on his blog a few days back. By the way, if you are interested in a great blog, be sure to check his out, definitely one of my daily reads. You can find it here http://www.npost.com
The person answering the questions from Jeremy Irish at Groundspeak is Bill Bryant a venture partner from Draper Fisher Jurvetson, who not only has a wealth of knowledge but has been a great help to many entrepreneurs in the Northwest.
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Jeremy Irish: At the point where you received outside investment, a clock started ticking. You have no control over that clock other to ensure that you hit milestones so that, in 3-5 years, you will have an exit.
Bill Bryant: Absolutely true. When an investor (friend, family, angel, a bank, the Mafia, a loan shark, a VC - doesn’t matter) puts money into a company, they want their money back at some point in the future. As it turns out VCs have the LONGEST time horizon of any of the above classes of investor - the statistical average for exit is now 8 years, so they go into a new deal now with the expectation that this is going to be a long term investment in an effort to build a company that makes the investment, today, all worthwhile 6-10 years from now. An entrepreneur crosses the Rubicon when they take in an investor - it is a deliberate tradeoff, that they can use the capital to grow their company to a point where the value of their remaining ownership exceeds what it would be in the absence of that capital. Read More →
Right now if you are in the first couple years of your own startup, you need to watch this video for inspiration. Trust me, at the beginning it’s lonely, but if you believe in yourself and keep going, you can create something massive. Good luck everyone!
Hey everyone, be sure to check out the 3 part video interview I did with the very hot, Ingrid Vanderveldt. To see the interviews, click here to be taken to her site. While you’re there, be sure to check out her other interviews with Gary Vaynerchuk, Loic Le Meur and a host of other really cool people.
When I started Tatango, I didn’t know much about raising capital from investors and had never heard of the Securities Act of 1933. Without this knowledge, I made a lot of mistakes when we started raising capital for the company. That being said, I’ve listed a couple tips below that should help you avoid some of the same mistakes I made as you’re raising your round.
1) Only raise capital from accredited investors - The definition of an accredited investor is found in Regulation D’s Rule 501 of the federal securities laws. An accredited investor is:
A bank, insurance company, registered investment company, business development company, or small business investment company;
An employee benefit plan, within the meaning of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, if a bank, insurance company, or registered investment adviser makes the investment decisions, or if the plan has total assets in excess of $5 million;
A charitable organization, corporation, or partnership with assets exceeding $5 million;
A director, executive officer, or general partner of the company selling the securities;
A business in which all the equity owners are accredited investors;
A natural person who has individual net worth, or joint net worth with the person’s spouse, that exceeds $1 million at the time of the purchase;
A natural person with income exceeding $200,000 in each of the two most recent years or joint income with a spouse exceeding $300,000 for those years and a reasonable expectation of the same income level in the current year; or
A trust with assets in excess of $5 million, not formed to acquire the securities offered, whose purchases a sophisticated person makes.
2) Don’t publicize your offering - The Securities Act of 1933 prohibits public offerings unless accompanied by a registration statement and a valid prospectus approved by the Securities and Exchange Commission. This means you can’t post a message on twitter, facebook, etc. about your stock sale, similar to what SocialMedian did here last year.
With the amount of paperwork, complications and planning that is required to raise a round of capital, I would strongly encourage you to seek advice from an attorney before even soliciting your first investor dollar.
I get asked all the time, “When you dropped out of college, did you ever think you’d be where you are now?” I knew when I left college that we had something big (I wouldn’t have left if I thought differently), but to be honest, there was no way for me to foresee all the twists and turns that have landed the company where it is today. I think as an entrepreneur you can only plan to a certain extent, until you have to just jump in and see where your venture takes you. To illustrate this point, check out the short slideshow below of how the website has developed over the last two years and you will see that things change. From experience, I have learned that you have to be prepared for change and always ready to adapt.
