Founder’s Pocket Guide: Startup Valuation


Book Description

This updated edition includes several new features, including: · The Startup Valuation Explorer · Expanded coverage of Valuation Methods · Responding to investor questions about your valuation · Understanding option pool impact on your valuation For many early-stage entrepreneurs assigning a pre-money valuation to your startup is one of the more daunting tasks encountered during the fundraising quest. This guide provides a quick reference to all of the key topics around early-stage startup valuation and provides step-by-step examples for several valuation methods. This Founder’s Pocket Guide helps startup founders learn: • What a startup valuation is and when you need to start worrying about it. • Key terms and definitions associated with valuation, such as pre-money, post-money, and dilution. • How investors view the valuation task, and what their expectations are for early-stage companies. • How the valuation fits with your target raise amount and resulting founder equity ownership. • How to do the simple math for calculating valuation percentages. • How to estimate your company valuation using several accepted methods. • What accounting valuation methods are and why they are not well suited for early-stage startups.




Founder’s Pocket Guide: Cap Tables


Book Description

The goal of this guide is to help you understand the key moving parts of a startup cap table, review typical cap table inputs, and demystify terminology and jargon associated with cap table discussions. Along the way, this highly visual guide provides easy-to-follow examples for the most common calculations related to cap table building. Expanding on these key skills every startup founder should know, this Founder’s Pocket Guide helps you learn how to: • Build your basic cap table step by step, including founder’s shares, option pools, angel investor rounds, and VC rounds. • Decipher cap table specific lingo, such as fully-diluted shares outstanding, preferred shares vs. common shares, Series A, Series B, and so on. • Establish a stock option pool in your cap table and understand the option pool effect on founder dilution. • Understand the simple math behind cap table formulas and calculations, including calculating fully diluted shares outstanding, investor equity ownership percentages, and share price.




Founder’s Pocket Guide: Founder Equity Splits


Book Description

“How do we split up the equity ownership of our startup?” This guide provides a framework and process to help startup founders answer this common question. Equity ownership affects the culture and sense of wellbeing of a startup. Founders typically sacrifice a great deal of other life opportunities to work on a startup effort. In exchange for that sacrifice, a founder wants to feel the ownership equation with any co-founders is fair. In detail, this Founder’s Pocket Guide walks entrepreneurs though the following elements: • Take The Founder Test to make sure everybody deserves founder status • Review the case for splitting your founder equity into equal parts • Use the Equity Split Scorecard as a fair method to allocate more equity to highly skilled cofounders • Solve common equity problems using founder vesting structures • Answer common equity split questions like IP and founder-investors Note that this guide does not go into how to use equity to attract employees or using equity to pay service providers, advisors, development companies, or other contractors. This guide focuses solely on the best practices of deciding the equity ownership split between the founders of a startup venture.




Startup CEO


Book Description

You’re only a startup CEO once. Do it well with Startup CEO, a "master class in building a business." —Dick Costolo, Former CEO, Twitter Being a startup CEO is a job like no other: it’s difficult, risky, stressful, lonely, and often learned through trial and error. As a startup CEO seeing things for the first time, you’re likely to make mistakes, fail, get things wrong, and feel like you don’t have any control over outcomes. Author Matt Blumberg has been there, and in Startup CEO he shares his experience, mistakes, and lessons learned as he guided Return Path from a handful of employees and no revenues to over $100 million in revenues and 500 employees. Startup CEO is not a memoir of Return Path's 20-year journey but a thoughtful CEO-focused book that provides first-time CEOs with advice, tools, and approaches for the situations that startup CEOs will face. You'll learn: How to tell your story to new hires, investors, and customers for greater alignment How to create a values-based culture for speed and engagement How to create business and personal operating systems so that you can balance your life and grow your company at the same time How to develop, lead, and leverage your board of directors for greater impact How to ensure that your company is bought, not sold, when you exit Startup CEO is the field guide every CEO needs throughout the growth of their company.




High Growth Handbook


Book Description

High Growth Handbook is the playbook for growing your startup into a global brand. Global technology executive, serial entrepreneur, and angel investor Elad Gil has worked with high-growth tech companies including Airbnb, Twitter, Google, Stripe, and Square as they’ve grown from small companies into global enterprises. Across all of these breakout companies, Gil has identified a set of common patterns and created an accessible playbook for scaling high-growth startups, which he has now codified in High Growth Handbook. In this definitive guide, Gil covers key topics, including: · The role of the CEO · Managing a board · Recruiting and overseeing an executive team · Mergers and acquisitions · Initial public offerings · Late-stage funding. Informed by interviews with some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley, including Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn), Marc Andreessen (Andreessen Horowitz), and Aaron Levie (Box), High Growth Handbook presents crystal-clear guidance for navigating the most complex challenges that confront leaders and operators in high-growth startups.




Venture Capital Valuation, + Website


Book Description

Very few of the decision makers involved in a venture backed company have a definitive understanding of how valuation techniques are being applied to their financial statements and their decision making process. This casebook provides a quick and accurate road map on how valuation techniques used for tax, financial reporting and deal structure impact a company's past, present and future. The book includes real world case studies to simplify this complex subject for the practitioners serving companies, the founders and executives running the companies, and the investors that fund the companies.




Angel Investing


Book Description

Angel Investing: Start to Finish is the most comprehensive practical and legal guide written to help investors and entrepreneurs avoid making expensive mistakes. Angel investing can be fun, financially rewarding, and socially impactful. But it can also be a costly endeavor in terms of money, time, and missed opportunities. Through the successes, failures, and collective experience of the authors you’ll learn how to navigate the angel investment process to maximize your chances of success and manage downside risks as an investor or entrepreneur. You’ll learn how: - Lead investors evaluate deals - Lawyers think through term sheets - To keep perspective through losses and triumphs This book will also be of use to founders raising an angel round, who will be wise to learn how decisions are made on the other side of the table. No matter where you’re starting from, this book will give you the context to become a savvier thinker, a better negotiator, and a positive member of the angel investing and startup communities.




Hello, Startup


Book Description

This book is the "Hello, World" tutorial for building products, technologies, and teams in a startup environment. It's based on the experiences of the author, Yevgeniy (Jim) Brikman, as well as interviews with programmers from some of the most successful startups of the last decade, including Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, GitHub, Stripe, Instagram, AdMob, Pinterest, and many others. Hello, Startup is a practical, how-to guide that consists of three parts: Products, Technologies, and Teams. Although at its core, this is a book for programmers, by programmers, only Part II (Technologies) is significantly technical, while the rest should be accessible to technical and non-technical audiences alike. If you’re at all interested in startups—whether you’re a programmer at the beginning of your career, a seasoned developer bored with large company politics, or a manager looking to motivate your engineers—this book is for you.




The Startup Funding Book


Book Description

This book reveals: * Where to to find investors and the best approaches to win their support * What investors are really looking for but won't tell you * How to persuade banks, business angels, VCs and public funders * Insider tips for compiling material that satisfies investors * Little-known strategies that will boost your success




The #1 Guide to Startup Valuation


Book Description

When investors ask for a valuation, many founders choke. They stutter, stall or worse: ask the investor. The investor is puzzled. Founders can name the price for their product. Then why not for their shares? The #1 Guide to Startup Valuation hands you the tools to value your startup. You will learn: The difference between selling your shares and raising money Why investors buy your shares The 4 building blocks of startup valuation How to value your startup if you raise money with equity How many shares you have to give away when you do a convertible How to choose between one or multiple exit scenarios How to choose between a convertible with a discount and a discount and a cap How to choose between equity and convertible debt If you don