Gust

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Bad Notes on VC

Gust

Me: So, you raised venture capital? Me: Raising convertible notes as a seed round is one of the biggest disservices our industry has done to entrepreneurs since 2001-2003 when there were “full ratchets” and “multiple liquidation preferences” – the most hostile terms anybody found in term sheets 10 years ago. On the phone ….

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Keep It Under Your Hat: Valuation Caps and the $650 Million Sale of MySpace for $125 Million

Gust

MySpace was incubated by a small team of employees within Intermix in 2003 (Chris DeWolfe, Tom Anderson and four others). VantagePoint Venture Partners came to the rescue in late 2003 with an infusion of $15 million in capital, adding Andrew Sheehan (now at Sutter Hill Ventures ) and David Carlick (now at Rho Ventures ) to the Board.

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Probable and Improbable Lobbying Wins: The 1,000-stockholder Rule

Gust

Facebook, which did not exist in 2003, is now valued at nearly $100 billion. SOPA would disproportionately alter the risk profile for new startups, which are thinly capitalized compared to the giants like Google and Facebook. Google, which incorporated in 1998, has a market cap of $200 billion and employs more than 30,000 people.

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