Essays
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- Programming Bottom-Up - Страница 1
- Lisp for Web-Based Applications - Страница 3
- Beating the Averages - Страница 6
- Java's Cover - Страница 12
- Being Popular - Страница 14
- Five Questions about Language Design - Страница 24
- The Roots of Lisp - Страница 28
- The Other Road Ahead - Страница 29
- What Made Lisp Different - Страница 44
- Why Arc Isn't Especially Object-Oriented - Страница 45
- Taste for Makers - Страница 46
- What Languages Fix - Страница 52
- Succinctness is Power - Страница 53
- Revenge of the Nerds - Страница 57
- A Plan for Spam - Страница 65
- Design and Research - Страница 72
- Better Bayesian Filtering - Страница 76
- Why Nerds are Unpopular - Страница 82
- The Hundred-Year Language - Страница 90
- If Lisp is So Great - Страница 97
- Hackers and Painters - Страница 98
- Filters that Fight Back - Страница 105
- What You Can't Say - Страница 107
- The Word "Hacker" - Страница 114
- The Python Paradox - Страница 117
- Great Hackers - Страница 118
- The Age of the Essay - Страница 125
- What the Bubble Got Right - Страница 131
- Bradley's Ghost - Страница 136
- Made in USA - Страница 137
- What You'll Wish You'd Known - Страница 140
- How to Start a Startup - Страница 147
- A Unified Theory of VC Suckagepad - Страница 159
- Undergraduation - Страница 161
- Writing, Briefly - Страница 166
- Return of the Mac - Страница 167
- Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas - Страница 169
- The Submarine - Страница 173
- Hiring is Obsolete - Страница 177
- What Business Can Learn from Open Source - Страница 183
- After the Ladder - Страница 189
- Inequality and Risk - Страница 190
- What I Did this Summer - Страница 194
- Ideas for Startups - Страница 198
- The Venture Capital Squeeze - Страница 203
- How to Fund a Startup - Страница 205
- Web 2.0 - Страница 217
- How to Make Wealth - Страница 222
- Good and Bad Procrastination - Страница 233
- How to Do What You Love - Страница 236
- Are Software Patents Evil? - Страница 242
- The Hardest Lessons for Startups to Learn - Страница 248
- How to Be Silicon Valley - Страница 255
- Why Startups Condense in America - Страница 260
- The Power of the Marginal - Страница 267
- The Island Test - Страница 275
- Copy What You Like - Страница 276
- How to Present to Investors - Страница 278
- A Student's Guide to Startups - Страница 282
- The 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups - Страница 290
- Mind the Gap - Страница 297
- How Art Can Be Good - Страница 305
- Learning from Founders - Страница 310
- Is It Worth Being Wise? - Страница 311
- Why to Not Not Start a Startup - Страница 316
- Microsoft is Dead - Страница 324
- Two Kinds of Judgement - Страница 326
- The Hacker's Guide to Investors - Страница 327
- An Alternative Theory of Unions - Страница 336
- The Equity Equation - Страница 337
- Stuff - Страница 339
- Holding a Program in One's Head - Страница 341
- How Not to Die - Страница 344
- News from the Front - Страница 347
- How to Do Philosophy - Страница 350
- The Future of Web Startups - Страница 357
- Why to Move to a Startup Hub - Страница 362
- Six Principles for Making New Things - Страница 364
- Trolls - Страница 366
- A New Venture Animal - Страница 368
- You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss - Страница 371
One of the VC firms says they want to invest and offers the founders a term sheet. A term sheet is a summary of what the deal terms will be when and if they do a deal; lawyers will fill in the details later. By accepting the term sheet, the startup agrees to turn away other VCs for some set amount of time while this firm does the "due diligence" required for the deal. Due diligence is the corporate equivalent of a background check: the purpose is to uncover any hidden bombs that might sink the company later, like serious design flaws in the product, pending lawsuits against the company, intellectual property issues, and so on. VCs' legal and financial due diligence is pretty thorough, but the technical due diligence is generally a joke. [8]
The due diligence discloses no ticking bombs, and six weeks later they go ahead with the deal. Here are the terms: a $2 million investment at a pre-money valuation of $4 million, meaning that after the deal closes the VCs will own a third of the company (2 / (4 + 2)). The VCs also insist that prior to the deal the option pool be enlarged by an additional hundred shares. So the total number of new shares issued is 750, and the cap table becomes:
shareholder shares percent ------------------------------- VCs 650 33.3 angel 200 10.3 uncle 50 2.6 each founder 250 12.8 employee 36* 1.8 *unvested option pool 264 13.5 ---- ----- total 1950 100
This picture is unrealistic in several respects. For example, while the percentages might end up looking like this, it's unlikely that the VCs would keep the existing numbers of shares. In fact, every bit of the startup's paperwork would probably be replaced, as if the company were being founded anew. Also, the money might come in several tranches, the later ones subject to various conditions-- though this is apparently more common in deals with lower-tier VCs (whose lot in life is to fund more dubious startups) than with the top firms.
And of course any VCs reading this are probably rolling on the floor laughing at how my hypothetical VCs let the angel keep his 10.3 of the company. I admit, this is the Bambi version; in simplifying the picture, I've also made everyone nicer. In the real world, VCs regard angels the way a jealous husband feels about his wife's previous boyfriends. To them the company didn't exist before they invested in it. [9]
I don't want to give the impression you have to do an angel round before going to VCs. In this example I stretched things out to show multiple sources of funding in action. Some startups could go directly from seed funding to a VC round; one of the companies in the 2005 SFP did.
The founders are required to vest their shares over four years, and the board is now reconstituted to consist of two VCs, two founders, and a fifth person acceptable to both. The angel investor cheerfully surrenders his board seat.
At this point there is nothing new our startup can teach us about funding-- or at least, nothing good. [10] The startup will almost certainly hire more people at this point; those millions must be put to work, after all. The company may do additional funding rounds, presumably at higher valuations. They may if they are extraordinarily fortunate do an IPO, which we should remember is also in principle a round of funding, regardless of its de facto purpose. But that, if not beyond the bounds of possibility, is beyond the scope of this article.
Deals Fall ThroughAnyone who's been through a startup will find the preceding portrait to be missing something: disasters. If there's one thing all startups have in common, it's that something is always going wrong. And nowhere more than in matters of funding.
For example, our hypothetical startup never spent more than half of one round before securing the next. That's more ideal than typical. Many startups-- even successful ones-- come close to running out of money at some point. Terrible things happen to startups when they run out of money, because they're designed for growth, not adversity.
But the most unrealistic thing about the series of deals I've described is that they all closed. In the startup world, closing is not what deals do. What deals do is fall through. If you're starting a startup you would do well to remember that. Birds fly; fish swim; deals fall through.
Why? Partly the reason deals seem to fall through so often is that you lie to yourself. You want the deal to close, so you start to believe it will. But even correcting for this, startup deals fall through alarmingly often-- far more often than, say, deals to buy real estate. The reason is that it's such a risky environment. People about to fund or acquire a startup are prone to wicked cases of buyer's remorse. They don't really grasp the risk they're taking till the deal's about to close. And then they panic. And not just inexperienced angel investors, but big companies too.
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