This week I had two meetings with CEOs of companies we’ve recently invested in where the question of “what is an ideal board meeting” came up. I’m writing an entire book on it called Startup Boards: Reinventing the Board of Directors to Better Support the Entrepreneur so it’s easy for me to define my ideal board meeting […]

Yesterday I was with yet another non-US entrepreneur who is struggling to get the right visa to stay in the US and build his company here. This entrepreneur happens to be from England and his business partner (and best friend since they were kids) is also English, but managed to get into the US because […]

My friend Krista Marks (now at Disney – which acquired her first company – Kerpoof) sent me a copy of the graduation speech she gave at the University of South Carolina College of Engineering and Computing on May 8th. Krista graduated 21 years ago and her speech embodies the amazing wisdom she’d gained over the […]

Jason and I occasionally get asked “why are the majority of companies incorporated in Delaware, regardless of their actual physical location?”  Besides being difficult to spell (c’mon – you thought there was an “e” instead of an “a”, didn’t you), Delaware offers some tangible advantages over incorporating in other states.  While we aren’t experts on […]

You may ask yourself “why are Brad and Jason so hung up on 409A – it just seems like yet another accounting thing my CFO is going to have to deal with.”  Wrong – it’s going to impact every employee in your company that gets stock options and is something every board member and the […]

Several months ago, I posted about Pascal Levensohn’s great white paper titled “After the Term Sheet: How Venture Boards Influence the Success or Failure of Technology Companies.” This is a must read for any entrepreneur who is raising or has raised venture capital, as well as every VC. Pascal is now working on a new […]

PeopleSoft made a brilliant move this week when they announced their strategic alliance with IBM. PeopleSoft is obviously under attack from Oracle. IBM has simultaneously been positioning themselves as the ultimate middleware player via their WebSphere products. IBM’s software strategy is to be complementary to enterprise application software providers rather than competitive to them. I […]

I received a number of comments, private emails, and a few links to my post on Venture Capital Deal Algebra. The consistent theme was “tell me more about how VC investments work.” As a result, I’m going to write a series of posts on the structural and financial components of a typical venture capital investment. […]