Don’t you love it when someone can nut a concept in ten slides with bullets? (Startups should be so easy…) Dayna Grayson from North Bridge Venture Partners (Boston) presented Pacing Your Startup to the current Techstars class this week.
North Bridge is an early stage investor, from everything I hear, they’re a great ally and investor. If you’re a startup and you don’t know anything about Techstars, you had better check them out. They’re one of the best tech incubators in the business.
There is no underestimating the importance of a startup’s pace. While you’re getting your team together, building your product, making plans and validating what you’re doing, it is your pace that drives your early success.
Here are my personal favorites from Dayna’s Presentation:
- Speed is your only advantage. Rock and roll, validate, fail FAST and get it out there.
- If your Mom doesn’t understand what you’re doing, then you need to adjust your pitch. For those of you that think that your parents haven’t understood you, get a non-tech mentor - quick!
- Build Checkpoints into your business. Checkpoints are goals, milestones, and meetings with your board and funders to gather feedback, validate, and adjust. A very healthy thing to do.
I look forward to more posts and presentations by Dayna. She gets it and has a great way of sharing what she knows.
Let’s imagine for a moment that you’re underway with your startup and you’ve started talking to your lawyer about your company’s legal formulation. He should be recommending that you create a C-corporation since VCs and other investors won’t talk to you otherwise. He also should be giving you guidance on issuing stock and the different types of stock classes that you issue to your shareholders. Now what? According to IRS Rule 144, under certain conditions, you can sell your stock to qualified investors. Great! How do you do it?
SharesPost might have the answer. By using SharePost, private companies can sell blocks of shares in $25,000 increments to qualified investors. SharePost charges a monthly subscription fee of $34 and have partnered with US Bank for escrow management. I believe this is an excellent concept that goes a long way towards helping startups get funded. Check them out! You’ll be surprised at the press-worthy transactions that have executed through their system.
