Naval Ravikant and I run a site called Venture Hacks which is an entrepreneur’s guide to hacking Venture Capital. Some excerpts from our latest articles:
From Reactions to Venture Hacks:
Everyone in Silicon Valley benefits from lowering the transaction costs of funding startups, which means more companies get funded, more jobs get created and tax revenues increase without raising taxes.
Shouldn’t executing disciplined business plans around new technologies be the challenge of entrepreneurship? Contacting prospective investors and understanding what they want to hear should be the easy part.
From The Option Pool Shuffle: Beat the game and raise your valuation:
Your investors offered you a $8M pre-money valuation. What they really meant was, “We think your company is worth $6M. But let’s create $2M worth of new options, add that to the value of your company, and call their sum your $8M ‘pre-money valuation’.”
Slipping the option pool in the pre-money lowers your effective valuation to $6M. The actual value of the company you have built is $6M, not $8M.
From Focus on your share price, not your valuation:
Experienced shareholders (and Venture Hacks readers) focus on the current value of their shares and the company’s prospects. Investors in public companies with wacky capital structures don’t fancy that they own 0.0003% of a company that is worth $1B. Instead, they multiply today’s share price by the quantity of their shares to determine their share value.
They focus on share price, not valuation. You should do the same: Understand how any proposed change to the company’s capital structure affects the share price.
Read more on Venture Hacks.
I’m loving Venture Hacks, esp as I’m just beginning to seek funding for a new venture. Keep up the good insights, Nivi.