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Is a Venture Studio Right for You?

Steve Blank

Venture Studios are an “idea factory” with their own employees searching for product/market fit and a repeatable and scalable business model. In exchange for attending an accelerator, startups give up 5% to 10% of their company’s equity. In return for the lower risk, a venture studio typically takes a larger percentage of equity.

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How to Protect IP When Outsourcing Software Development

Up and Running

The best thing you can do is create an IP protection strategy and document it in a business plan , so you’ve integrated it into your larger business strategy. IP protection is especially important when your company’s ethos is unique and one-of-a-kind, and you want to protect against the possibility of copycats. IP assignment clause.

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Dear Founders: Here Are Three IP Mistakes to Watch-Out For

Scott Edward Walker

Over the past six months, my firm has been engaged by a number of startups with significant intellectual property (“IP”) problems. In a couple of cases, the founders played lawyer on their own; in the other cases, the founders either used (i) a Web service that did not address IP issues or (ii) an inexperienced law firm.

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How to Scale a Venture Capital (or Private Equity) Fund

David Teten

Sophisticated VC and private equity funds have a wide array of options for leveraging outside operating executives. Andreessen Horowitz’s compromise: they have a half-dozen “ board partners ” who serve on the boards of their portfolio companies, representing A16Z, but who are not full-time employees of A16Z. Photo credit: Wikipedia).

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How to Divide Founder Equity: 4 Criteria to Discuss

View from Seed

Editor’s note: Understanding how to divide founder equity at a startup can be tricky, even to the point of reaching emotional riffs between founders. Below, Lee Hower offers advice for approaching these equity discussions objectively and properly. Sometimes co-founders put off the equity split question for some time.

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Punch & Pie: How Should Co-Founders Divide Equity?

Agile VC

As a result, one of the trickier things co-founders tackle is determining the equity split amongst the founding group of individuals. Across both the startups I’ve personally been involved in (PayPal and LinkedIn) and the startups in which I’ve been an investor, I’ve seen a broad range of co-founder equity splits.

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Preparing For An Acquisition

YoungUpstarts

Watch out for complex areas such as accounting for revenue, inventory, contingencies, equity instruments and consolidation. Employees and contractors. If the consultant fails to be a good fit for the company, you simply do not renew the contract — which can be less messy than terminating a permanent employee.