There are a few ways to create a valuation when looking at a company to acquire regardless if you're an incumbent or scaling growth company debating your first acquisition. On the other hand, as a founder, you can have your FP&A team to run this as an exercise before you approach any potential acquirers or… Continue reading Quick Backwards Valuation Methodology
Author: Andrew
Navigating Termsheets
Termsheets are (1) used by founders raising capital and (2) investors looking to deploy capital. Most all termsheets are different in some slight way (unless you're using a SAFE or KISS note), they usually require lawyers, and all are time-consuming where neither party usually gets 100% of what they want. For a founder, it's about obtaining capital without giving… Continue reading Navigating Termsheets
Negotiations
Everyone has a different style when negotiating - and all of these styles lend themselves to have better outcomes depending on the topic at hand and who you're speaking to. Having experience is the best defense, but if that isn't an option there is a template I like to follow and have honed. That said,… Continue reading Negotiations
Record charts
Standards and expectations have been squashed since covid began spreading. Business implications range from record breaking unemployment rates, savings rates, debt rates, hiring rates, and more. I've been coming across new graphs weekly since Feb / March and wanted to showcase a few which buck the norm. Some of these will change quickly once the… Continue reading Record charts
First Virtual FinTech Conference
I attended my first fully virtual fintech conference two weeks ago. It was spread across two days and was split into two, four hour blocks with breakout sessions and 1:1 meetings. I wanted to pass a fact (or trend) that I took away from each day, as well as one from a founder I spoke… Continue reading First Virtual FinTech Conference
Silent Corporations
Pay attention to who is and who is not stepping up, like YouTube where they are encouraging staff to take today (Tuesday) off for nationwide protests, vs. Facebook, where it was decided not to condemn posts from Trump referring to shooting protesters. Pay attention to which VC firms are and are not posting support (investing in AA or… Continue reading Silent Corporations
Sam Altman’s Post
I'm currently in the process of writing an essay on grit and being scrappy. It has taken many renditions over the past month. Then this morning Sam posted a speech he gave back in 2018 that is very thoughtful and pointed. The content resonated and slightly overlapped on the direction I wanted to take the… Continue reading Sam Altman’s Post
Remote First ‘Forever’
Shopify (link here) and now Coinbase, both announced today, are the latest tech firms to embrace remote first; allowing a majority of their employees to work from where they choose or any office of their liking. Link here for Coinbase. They’re following in Jack’s decision to let the Twitter employees as well. Over the past two months there… Continue reading Remote First ‘Forever’
Machine learning for the enterprise
Where should we expect there to be disruption in the next 5 years, and specifically across enterprise-grade machine learning? Additionally, what areas will companies likely focus on building, and what will be acquired by large incumbents? To understand this, we need to know where we are currently and what we have accomplished to date. Currently,… Continue reading Machine learning for the enterprise
Likely a new HBS case study: Quibi
Is anyone else following Quibi (or even downloaded it)? I think it'll soon be a business school case study on what went wrong. The team (Jeffrey Katzenberg / Meg Whitman) raised $1.75bn, recruited some big names for producing and staring (Steven Spielberg and Liam Hemsworth), and sold $150m of add inventory pre-launch. Some of those… Continue reading Likely a new HBS case study: Quibi
