Secrets of Sand Hill Road

the founder’s idea maze: How did she get to the current product idea, incorporating which insights and market data to help inform her opinions?

it requires that you build out a financial forecast for your company, estimating how much cash flow the company will generate in each future year.

Yale has a 16 percent allocation to our good old venture capital category, again way in excess of the 5 percent average among other university endowments.

competition drives valuation.

To deal with this situation, you will want to make sure that board seats are conditioned upon continued service to the company as an employee, not simply granted to someone as a function of having been a cofounder. This is a simple thing to implement as

given that companies are staying private for a longer time, they are more likely to raise funding across several different rounds of financing.

blanket transfer restriction means that shareholders cannot sell without some form of company consent—often the board’s consent is required to do so. And

And those that do go public wait until they are much larger so that they can amortize these costs over a much higher base of earnings. More importantly, dollars spent on regulatory compliance are dollars that could have been devoted to early research and development investment. This is particularly relevant for venture-backed companies, as they spe

higher margin structure.