Founder’s Pocket Guide: Startup Valuation

Author: Stephen R. Poland
Publisher: 1x1 Media
ISBN: 1938162048
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 80

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: Term Sheets and Preferred Shares

Author: Stephen R. Poland
Publisher: 1x1 Media
ISBN: 1938162064
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 70

Book Description
This easy to follow guide helps startup founders understand the key moving parts of an investment term sheet, and review typical preferred share rights, preferences, and protections. Along the way, we also provide easy-to-follow examples for the most common calculations related to preferred share equity deals. Expanding on these fundraising concepts, this Founder’s Pocket Guide helps startup founders learn: What a term sheet is and how to summarize the most important deal terms for your fundraising and startup building goals. How preferred stock shares differ from common shares, with review of how each key preferred share right and preference is tied to the investor’s shares. Key terms and definitions associated with equity fundraising, such as pre-money valuation, founder dilution, and down round. How to decipher legalese associated with a term sheet deal, such as pro rata, fully diluted, and pari passu. The full list of the most common term sheet clauses, their plain English meaning, and their importance to an early-stage investment deal. Simple math for the key term sheet financial aspects, including calculating fully diluted shares outstanding, investor equity ownership percentages, and the impact of option pools on founder dilution. Example exit scenarios, showing how term sheet deal points impact how exit proceeds get divided among investors and founders.

Founder’s Pocket Guide: Cap Tables

Author: Stephen R. Poland
Publisher: 1x1 Media
ISBN: 1938162072
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 92

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

Author: Stephen R. Poland
Publisher: 1x1 Media
ISBN: 1938162099
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 76

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.

Founders at Work

Author: Jessica Livingston
Publisher: Apress
ISBN: 143021077X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 468

Book Description
Now available in paperback—with a new preface and interview with Jessica Livingston about Y Combinator! Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days is a collection of interviews with founders of famous technology companies about what happened in the very earliest days. These people are celebrities now. What was it like when they were just a couple friends with an idea? Founders like Steve Wozniak (Apple), Caterina Fake (Flickr), Mitch Kapor (Lotus), Max Levchin (PayPal), and Sabeer Bhatia (Hotmail) tell you in their own words about their surprising and often very funny discoveries as they learned how to build a company. Where did they get the ideas that made them rich? How did they convince investors to back them? What went wrong, and how did they recover? Nearly all technical people have thought of one day starting or working for a startup. For them, this book is the closest you can come to being a fly on the wall at a successful startup, to learn how it's done. But ultimately these interviews are required reading for anyone who wants to understand business, because startups are business reduced to its essence. The reason their founders become rich is that startups do what businesses do—create value—more intensively than almost any other part of the economy. How? What are the secrets that make successful startups so insanely productive? Read this book, and let the founders themselves tell you.

The Founders

Author: Jimmy Soni
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1501197258
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 484

Book Description
NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2022 BY THE NEW YORKER National Bestseller * New York Times Editors’ Choice * Financial Times “Books to Read in 2022” A SABEW BEST IN BUSINESS BOOK AWARDS FINALIST “A gripping account of PayPal’s origins and a vivid portrait of the geeks and contrarians who made its meteoric rise possible” (The Wall Street Journal)—including Elon Musk, Amy Rowe Klement, Peter Thiel, Julie Anderson, Max Levchin, Reid Hoffman, and many others whose stories have never been shared. Today, PayPal’s founders and earliest employees are considered the technology industry’s most powerful network. Since leaving PayPal, they have formed, funded, and advised the leading companies of our era, including Tesla, Facebook, YouTube, SpaceX, Yelp, Palantir, and LinkedIn, among many others. As a group, they have driven twenty-first-century innovation and entrepreneurship. Their names stir passions; they’re as controversial as they are admired. Yet for all their influence, the story of where they first started has gone largely untold. Before igniting the commercial space race or jumpstarting social media’s rise, they were the unknown creators of a scrappy online payments start-up called PayPal. In building what became one of the world’s foremost companies, they faced bruising competition, internal strife, the emergence of widespread online fraud, and the devastating dot-com bust of the 2000s. Their success was anything but certain. In The Founders: The Story of PayPal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley, award-winning author and biographer Jimmy Soni explores PayPal’s turbulent early days. With hundreds of interviews and unprecedented access to thousands of pages of internal material, he shows how the seeds of so much of what shapes our world today—fast-scaling digital start-ups, cashless currency concepts, mobile money transfer—were planted two decades ago. He also reveals the stories of countless individuals who were left out of the front-page features and banner headlines but who were central to PayPal’s success. Described as “an intensely magnetic chronicle” (The New York Times) and “engrossing” (Business Insider), The Founders is a story of iteration and inventiveness—the products of which have cast a long and powerful shadow over modern life. This narrative illustrates how this rare assemblage of talent came to work together and how their collaboration changed our world forever.

Lost and Founder

Author: Rand Fishkin
Publisher: Penguin Group
ISBN: 0593853962
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 321

Book Description
Rand Fishkin, the founder and former CEO of Moz, reveals how traditional Silicon Valley "wisdom" leads far too many startups astray, with the transparency and humor that his hundreds of thousands of blog readers have come to love. Everyone knows how a startup story is supposed to go: A young, brilliant entrepreneur has a cool idea, drops out of college, defies the doubters, overcomes all odds, makes billions, and becomes the envy of the technology world. This is not that story. It's not that things went badly for Rand Fishkin; they just weren't quite so Zuckerberg-esque. His company, Moz, maker of marketing software, is now a $45 million/year business, and he's one of the world's leading experts on SEO. But his business and reputation took fifteen years to grow, and his startup began not in a Harvard dorm room but as a mother-and-son family business that fell deeply into debt. Now Fishkin pulls back the curtain on tech startup mythology, exposing the ups and downs of startup life that most CEOs would rather keep secret. For instance: A minimally viable product can be destructive if you launch at the wrong moment. Growth hacking may be the buzzword du jour, but initiatives can fizzle quickly. Revenue and growth won't protect you from layoffs. And venture capital always comes with strings attached. Fishkin's hard-won lessons are applicable to any kind of business environment. Up or down the chain of command, at both early stage startups and mature companies, whether your trajectory is riding high or down in the dumps: this book can help solve your problems, and make you feel less alone for having them.

Super Founders

Author: Ali Tamaseb
Publisher: PublicAffairs
ISBN: 1541768418
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 280

Book Description
Super Founders uses a data-driven approach to understand what really differentiates billion-dollar startups from the rest—revealing that nearly everything we thought was true about them is false! Ali Tamaseb has spent thousands of hours manually amassing what may be the largest dataset ever collected on startups, comparing billion-dollar startups with those that failed to become one—30,000 data points on nearly every factor: number of competitors, market size, the founder’s age, his or her university’s ranking, quality of investors, fundraising time, and many, many more. And what he found looked far different than expected. Just to mention a few: Most unicorn founders had no industry experience; There's no disadvantage to being a solo founder or to being a non-technical CEO; Less than 15% went through any kind of accelerator program; Over half had strong competitors when starting--being first to market with an idea does not actually matter. You will also hear the stories of the early days of billion-dollar startups first-hand. The book includes exclusive interviews with the founders/investors of Zoom, Instacart, PayPal, Nest, Github, Flatiron Health, Kite Pharma, Facebook, Stripe, Airbnb, YouTube, LinkedIn, Lyft, DoorDash, Coinbase, and Square, venture capital investors like Elad Gil, Peter Thiel, Alfred Lin from Sequoia Capital and Keith Rabois of Founders Fund, as well as previously untold stories about the early days of ByteDance (TikTok), WhatsApp, Dropbox, Discord, DiDi, Flipkart, Instagram, Careem, Peloton, and SpaceX. Packed with counterintuitive insights and inside stories from people who have built massively successful companies, Super Founders is a paradigm-shifting and actionable guide for entrepreneurs, investors, and anyone interested in what makes a startup successful.

The Founder's Dilemmas

Author: Noam Wasserman
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691158304
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 490

Book Description
The Founder's Dilemmas examines how early decisions by entrepreneurs can make or break a startup and its team. Drawing on a decade of research, including quantitative data on almost ten thousand founders as well as inside stories of founders like Evan Williams of Twitter and Tim Westergren of Pandora, Noam Wasserman reveals the common pitfalls founders face and how to avoid them.

Heirs of the Founders

Author: H. W. Brands
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0385542542
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 432

Book Description
From New York Times bestselling historian H. W. Brands comes the riveting story of how, in nineteenth-century America, a new set of political giants battled to complete the unfinished work of the Founding Fathers and decide the future of our democracy In the early 1800s, three young men strode onto the national stage, elected to Congress at a moment when the Founding Fathers were beginning to retire to their farms. Daniel Webster of Massachusetts, a champion orator known for his eloquence, spoke for the North and its business class. Henry Clay of Kentucky, as dashing as he was ambitious, embodied the hopes of the rising West. South Carolina's John Calhoun, with piercing eyes and an even more piercing intellect, defended the South and slavery. Together these heirs of Washington, Jefferson and Adams took the country to war, battled one another for the presidency and set themselves the task of finishing the work the Founders had left undone. Their rise was marked by dramatic duels, fierce debates, scandal and political betrayal. Yet each in his own way sought to remedy the two glaring flaws in the Constitution: its refusal to specify where authority ultimately rested, with the states or the nation, and its unwillingness to address the essential incompatibility of republicanism and slavery. They wrestled with these issues for four decades, arguing bitterly and hammering out political compromises that held the Union together, but only just. Then, in 1850, when California moved to join the Union as a free state, "the immortal trio" had one last chance to save the country from the real risk of civil war. But, by that point, they had never been further apart. Thrillingly and authoritatively, H. W. Brands narrates an epic American rivalry and the little-known drama of the dangerous early years of our democracy.