Why?

My daughter turns 3 next week, and my son is not quite 4 1/2.  Lori and I hear, “Why?” a lot.  One of the many things I love about Lori is that she never seems to get tired of trying her best to answer each “Why?”  So, why am I writing this blog?

We’ve (my business partners and I) recently begun the process of exploring our options for future growth.  We can continue to grow organically; we can accept venture funding; we can accept a stratetgic investment from a large company; we can license the source code for our SaaS application to a large company who would like to run the system themselves internally; or we can accept funding from an angel.  We see positives and negatives in each scenario.  I’ll do my best to briefly outline each in my next post.  The reason I chose to start this blog though is this:

Before this week, I’d never seen a VC term sheet in my life.  I’ve negotiated hundreds of software license agreements, reseller agreements, and service agreements; I’ve poured through ERISA and COBRA regs and many state laws for health insurance continuation; I’ve even done my best to understand how GLB and PCI compliance laws/rules apply to our business; but I’d never seen a VC term sheet.  I’m not a fan of negotiating anything from a positition of weakness, so I went looking for help.  I found exactly what I was looking for in some outstanding blogs.  I found both VC general partners and entrepreneurs who shared their knowledge and experience in frank, easy to understand language I could understand.  I owe the authors of these blogs a great deal of thanks.  I won’t pretend here to be an expert in any of the topics I discuss like these authors are, but I would like to share some of what we learn in building this business in the hopes that I might, one day, write something which helps someone else.

The blogs which helped me so much?  Here they are:

Feld Thoughts by Brad Feld
Ask the VC by Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson
A VC by Fred Wilson
Venture Hacks by Nivi and Naval Ravikant
Ask the Wizard by Dick Costolo

Thank you to each of you.