What Matters in Startup Valuation


Book Description

In What Matters in Startup Valuation, Dr. Kenji Ng contributes two decades of experience into this essential book for anyone with an enterprising spirit and enthusiasm. As one of the startup-industry’s most tenacious, creative, and bold strategists, Dr. Kenji contributed to the leadership of one of the noughties' great corporate evolutions in Asia, by converting small, normal startup customers into zealous business evangelists and serial entrepreneurs. As the founder and director of a consultancy firm, an advisor for a private investment company, a strategic planning, and financial modeling & valuation specialist in the enterprise business, she has put her ideas to the test with dozens of newly formed partnerships and companies. Through her own initiatives, networks and enterprising influence, she has consulted countless businesses and helped various startups into achieving their dreams. When starting a new business, an entrepreneur's ultimate goal is to show that it can generate revenue. The company has proven itself when the developed product or service is a solution that clients require and utilise. This book will not only illustrate but also explain how startups and entrepreneurs may overcome significant uncertainty by prioritising important tasks, and raising sufficient fund for continuous growth of their startup ventures. Entrepreneurs have lofty goals but setting up a business for success needs foresight. Being reactive may lead to problems with clients or employees, as well as divert attention away from the ultimate goal of increasing productivity and revenues. Don't sweat the little stuff when it comes to matters that are beyond your control and have an impact on areas that you can influence. A lack of preparation might result in future problems that can bankrupt a business. For instance, failing to manage HR issues consistently may end in a lawsuit, whereas hiring a HR consultant may have completely avoided this predicament. Similarly, in the startup sector, collecting the appropriate and accurate information from verified sources and relevant personnel is critical to attaining startup goals; in this case, acquiring proper, adequate funding and establishing long-term sustainability, as well as thriving and prospering. Instead of sophisticated business strategies, this book will indicate a framework for startups to explore, analyse, and adjust their strategies in a continuous improvement cycle. Thus, the business model that the team advocates here, is a novel approach to new product/service creation, with an emphasis on quick iteration, consumer insights, creative vision, and tremendous ambition all at the same time.




Valuation Challenges and Solutions in Contemporary Businesses


Book Description

Defining the value of an entire company can be challenging, especially for large, highly competitive business markets. While the main goal for many companies is to increase their market value, understanding the advanced techniques and determining the best course of action to maximize profits can puzzle both academic and business professionals alike. Valuation Challenges and Solutions in Contemporary Businesses provides emerging research exploring theoretical and practical aspects of income-based, market-based, and asset-based valuation approaches and applications within the financial sciences. Featuring coverage on a broad range of topics such as growth rate, diverse business, and market value, this book is ideally designed for financial officers, business professionals, company managers, CEOs, corporate professionals, academicians, researchers, and students seeking current research on the challenging aspects of firm valuation and an assortment of possible solution-driven concepts.




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.




Damodaran on Valuation


Book Description

"Aswath Damodaran is simply the best valuation teacher around. If you are interested in the theory or practice of valuation, you should have Damodaran on Valuation on your bookshelf. You can bet that I do." -- Michael J. Mauboussin, Chief Investment Strategist, Legg Mason Capital Management and author of More Than You Know: Finding Financial Wisdom in Unconventional Places In order to be a successful CEO, corporate strategist, or analyst, understanding the valuation process is a necessity. The second edition of Damodaran on Valuation stands out as the most reliable book for answering many of today?s critical valuation questions. Completely revised and updated, this edition is the ideal book on valuation for CEOs and corporate strategists. You'll gain an understanding of the vitality of today?s valuation models and develop the acumen needed for the most complex and subtle valuation scenarios you will face.




Venture Deals


Book Description

An engaging guide to excelling in today's venture capital arena Beginning in 2005, Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson, managing directors at Foundry Group, wrote a long series of blog posts describing all the parts of a typical venture capital Term Sheet: a document which outlines key financial and other terms of a proposed investment. Since this time, they've seen the series used as the basis for a number of college courses, and have been thanked by thousands of people who have used the information to gain a better understanding of the venture capital field. Drawn from the past work Feld and Mendelson have written about in their blog and augmented with newer material, Venture Capital Financings puts this discipline in perspective and lays out the strategies that allow entrepreneurs to excel in their start-up companies. Page by page, this book discusses all facets of the venture capital fundraising process. Along the way, Feld and Mendelson touch on everything from how valuations are set to what externalities venture capitalists face that factor into entrepreneurs' businesses. Includes a breakdown analysis of the mechanics of a Term Sheet and the tactics needed to negotiate Details the different stages of the venture capital process, from starting a venture and seeing it through to the later stages Explores the entire venture capital ecosystem including those who invest in venture capitalist Contain standard documents that are used in these transactions Written by two highly regarded experts in the world of venture capital The venture capital arena is a complex and competitive place, but with this book as your guide, you'll discover what it takes to make your way through it.




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.




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.




The Fairshare Model


Book Description

The Fairshare Model is an idea for a performance-based capital structure that redefines capitalism at the DNA level, where ownership interests are set. When used to raise venture capital via an IPO, it balances and aligns the interests of investors and employees--capital and labor. Author Karl Sjogren utilizes highly approachable language, humor, and analogies, along with insights about capital markets. The result is an eclectic, yet inviting discussion that might occur in a graduate-level symposium on economics, finance, and philosophy. This groundbreaking book focuses on startup valuations--microeconomics. But it also considers the macroeconomic implications of the Fairshare Model for economic growth, income inequality, and shared stakeholding, as well as game theory and financing of blockchain projects. The Fairshare Model has two classes of stock--both vote but only one is tradable. --Investors get the tradable stock. Employees get it too, for actual performance. --For future performance, employees get the non-tradable stock; it converts to the tradable stock based on milestones. With this structure, public investors are more likely to profit when they invest in a company with high failure risk--because they have less valuation risk. By offering a better form of capitalism, The Fairshare Model is a movement book for our times.




Startup Valuation


Book Description

This book offers a primer on the valuation of startups. Innovative startups are characterized by high growth potential that usually absorbs liquidity. This is unattractive for traditional banks, replaced by other specialized intermediaries such as venture capital or private equity funds, which diversify their portfolio basing their strategies on a multi-year exit. Startups coexist in an evolving ecosystem with established firms, to which they transfer innovativeness, technology, flexibility, and time-to-market speed, contributing to reinvent the business models and receiving from mature firms feedback on the current market features, the existing clients, and their unsatisfied needs. The valuation paradigms represent a central issue for any start-upper seeking external finance, either from family and friends or through a wider professional placement. This book, complemented by practical cases (concerning, for instance, FinTechs, digital platforms, and e-Health applications) offers a guide to practitioners, students, and academics about the trendy valuation patterns of the startups based on their strategic business planning




On Startups: Advice and Insights for Entrepreneurs


Book Description

Note from the Author Hi, my name is Dharmesh, and I’m a startup addict. And, chances are, if you’re reading this, you have at least a mild obsession as well. This book is based on content from the OnStartups.com blog. The story behind how the blog got started is sort of interesting—but before I tell you that story, it’ll help to understand my earlier story. As a professional programmer, I used to work in a reasonably fun job doing what I liked to do (write code). Eventually, I got a little frustrated with it all, so at the ripe old age of 24, I started my first software company. It did pretty well. It was on the Inc. 500 list of fastest growing companies three times. It reached millions of dollars of sales and was ultimately acquired. I ran that first company for over 10 years working the typical startup hours. When I sold that company, I went back to school to get a master’s degree at MIT. I’ve always enjoyed academics, and I figured this would be a nice “soft landing” and give me some time to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. As part of my degree requirements, I had to write a graduate thesis. I titled my thesis “On Startups: Patterns and Practices of Contemporary Software Entrepreneurs.” And, as part of that thesis work, I wanted to get some feedback from some entrepreneurs. So, I figured I’d start a blog. I took the first two words of the thesis title, “On Startups,” discovered that the domain name OnStartups.com was available, and was then off to the races. The blog was launched on November 5, 2005. Since then, the blog and associated community have grown quite large. Across Facebook, LinkedIn, and email subscribers, there are over 300,000 people in the OnStartups.com audience. This book is a collection of some of the best articles from over 7 years of OnStartups.com. The articles have been topically organized and edited. I hope you enjoy them.