Startup on Bulrush Labs — Richard Tibbetts

Book Review: Early Exits: Exit Strategies for Entrepreneurs and Angel Investors

Mon, 27 Dec 2010 00:21:00 +0000

“>As someone several years into a successful venture backed enterprise software startup, I find myself spending a lot of time looking at the green grass on the other side of the startup fence: angel funding and quick flips. People have mixed opinions on flipping, both the practicalities and the ethics of quickly flipping a company. Ethically, I tend to agree that “Flipping is Good“. But practically, there are a lot of moving parts in a company and lining them up for a quick windfall seems to require more than a bit of luck. It was in hopes of better understanding these practicalities that I read Basil Peters book Early Exits: Exit Strategies for Entrepreneurs and Angel Investors (But Maybe Not Venture Capitalists).

There Can Be Too Many Suckers at the Table

Sun, 12 Dec 2010 23:25:00 +0000

Everyone knows the old saw about poker: If you can’t spot the sucker, it’s probably you. It’s nice to think you could sit down at a table with incompetent players and take their money. It probably works in poker. Mark Suster applies the aphorism to angel investing in his post Dealflow – Are You Sitting at The Right Poker Table? It’s a good post, dealflow is really important. But the poker metaphor falls short. Too many suckers actually ruin a startup market.

Yes Virginia, You Can Work on Great Technology at Startups

Mon, 06 Dec 2010 02:17:00 +0000

You can work on great technology at startups. You wouldn’t think that would be a controversial statement. But it is if you believe Ted Tso’s defense of Google, “Google has a problem retaining great engineers? Bullcrap.” Ted dismisses the engineering that goes on in a startup, saying:

Similarly, you don’t work on great technology at a startup. Startups, by and large, aren’t about technology — at least, not the Web 2.0 startups like Facebook, Foursquare, Twitter, Groupon, etc. They are about business model discovery. So if you are fundamentally a technologist at heart, whose heart sings when you’re making a better file system, or fixing a kernel bug, you’re not going to be happy at a startup. At least, not if the startup is run competently.

Lean Startups and the Theory of the Firm

Sun, 24 Oct 2010 23:28:00 +0000

If you spend much time in the entrepreneurial corners of the blogosphere, you’re certain to have heard about lean startups. If you haven’t, check out Eric Reis and Steve Blank. The core of the lean startup is two related ideas: continuous validation and building the smallest company that can validate an idea. The result is dramatically reduced costs, reduced time-to-failure, and reduced risk. A lot has been written and can be written about validation. But what I’m concerned about now is how small the smallest possible company is, and specifically why it is usually more than one person.

Valuing Startup Options

Sun, 03 Jan 2010 23:52:00 +0000

Nearly everyone who goes to work for a startup gets options, and the first question they ask is “how much are these options really worth?” When you are considering a job offer, particularly competitive job offers, it’s important to understand the value of the whole package. Putting a value on an option grant in a pre-IPO startup is quite challenging, and there are many opinions. I’d like to share the way I think about option valuation.