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The Acquihire Market for Early Stage Startups is Ice Cold. One Better Strategy? Announce You’re For Sale.

Hunter Walker

Especially in the early days of mobile/iOS engineering, if you hired strong technical talent into your early stage company, you basically created an acquisition outcome floor. Those who do, often believe they can hire from the open market without the hassle of an acquisition. per engineer.”

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An Alternative to Board Decks Some Seed VCs Actually Prefer

View from Seed

Examples of housekeeping include the following list, though not every item will appear every time: Finance: Cash out date, burn rate, 409A valuation, cap table, common/preferred stock dashboard. Team: Hires, fires, departures, responsibility changes, major promotions, and your org chart. The seed stage is all about traction.

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VCs eating our own dog food: Using technology and analytics to make better investments

David Teten

Point Nine Capital uses Qwilr to create modern, mobile-native collateral. 645 Ventures released a cap table simulator to help level the playing field. ff Venture Capital hired two full-time engineers to build out Totem. Capital has built a free online tool for founders to calculate their cost of capital.

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Sharp Elbows Among Seed VCs

View from Seed

But taken to the extreme, you would have rounds with only one lead and almost no one else on the cap table. Some funds have elevated or hired junior professionals to “partner” titles to try to address this. In this case, you lose out on the breadth of support from your investors in both their network and their dollars.

Syndicate 267
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After Raising $6.7M For Startups And Winning SEC Approval, AngelList Opens Up Investment Platform To More Companies

techcrunch.com

That way, startups only have one entity in the cap table, which simplifies documentation and structure. It’s clear that AngelList wants to help bring much of the transactional conversations and introductions that happen at the early stage of hiring and fundraising via word of mouth or in meetings online. Enterprise.

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10 Startup Red Flags

adamac.blogspot.com

Maybe the CEO got his cousin from Omaha to be their lawyer or theres been some serious messing around with the cap table. It follows that an "idea guy" who "just needs to hire a few engineers" probably isnt running a tech startup. Hiring is one of the main things a startup must get right, but contract recruiters arent the way.

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The Summer Solstice And Seed Stage Squeeze

Haystack

You lose influence as larger investors come into the cap table and start throwing their weight around. Many of these new data-driven funds are hiring experienced VCs across early stages and building outposts in the Bay Area. We know the web and mobile internet have hit critical mass and embedded into our lives.