Start-Up Guide for the Technopreneur, + Website: Financial Planning, Decision Making and Negotiating from Incubation to Exit Author: Visit Amazon's David Shelters Page | Language: English | ISBN:
1118518470 | Format: EPUB
Start-Up Guide for the Technopreneur, + Website: Financial Planning, Decision Making and Negotiating from Incubation to Exit Description
Review
"The book should be an eye-opener for aspiring and new technology entrepreneurs and can help you navigate the dangerous waters known as venture capital. Even better, Shelters has over fifteen years of entrepreneurial experience as a founder, co-founder as well as an advisor to numerous United States-based and Asia-based startups."
--YoungUpstarts.comFrom the Inside Flap
It's not easy being the founder of an entrepreneurial venture, especially when you're talking about the world of tech start-ups. While entrepreneurs in this field have a passion for, and expert knowledge in, their particular innovative product or service, dealing with the various aspects of starting, growing, and profitably exiting a business can be daunting.
Nobody understands this better than author David Shelters. With over fifteen years of entrepreneurial experience as a founder, cofounder, or financial advisor to numerous tech start-ups in both the United States and Asia, he's gained valuable insights into this endeavor. And now, with Start-Up Guide for the Technopreneur, he shares them with you.
Engaging and informative, this book—organized to reflect the natural sequence of events experienced by entrepreneurial ventures—puts the elements of finance and strategy in proper perspective, and will help you avoid the dangers inherent in business start-ups in general and dealing within the realm of venture capital in particular. Along the way, it skillfully addresses issues that could allow you to take your enterprise from incubation and progressive stages of development to ultimately achieving optimum financial success with a highly profitable exit.
Start-Up Guide for the Technopreneur:
- Presents a realistic picture of what can be expected from prospective investors and teaches how to identify valuable business partners
- Explores how to craft a business plan from a strategic financial perspective
- Discusses the essential elements of successfully raising funds
- Examines the importance of formulating an overall financial strategy for your business
- Covers the four stages of negotiation: prenegotiations, due diligence, actual negotiations, and concluding negotiations
- Reveals how to establish an investment-grade organization
- And much more
Designed to be a thought-provoking, mentoring resource, Start-Up Guide for the Technopreneur + Website will empower you to realize your full creative potential and achieve maximum profit from your hard work and sacrifices.
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- Hardcover: 220 pages
- Publisher: Wiley; 1 edition (February 19, 2013)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1118518470
- ISBN-13: 978-1118518472
- Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.4 x 1.3 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Funding, growing and successfully 'exiting' a start-up is an exceptionally difficult task. As a veteran of a successful start-up (acquired), I can say that even though I experienced much of the good and the bad that has been chronicled in this book, reading this book (even in hindsight) has been a pleasure. There's always something to learn, and David Shelters doesn't just provide a framework of understanding how to structure a company's financial landscape but also provides sage advice on how to navigate through the dangerous waters of investors and investment structures.
This could have been a dry instructional guide on financing structures. Instead, I was pleasantly surprised to see that it was almost a mentoring session from Shelters himself. As he steps through the basic tenets all the way through to negotiating the exit, you feel like you have a sage advisor telling you how things REALLY work in the world of VCs and Investors. He also gives you pointed advice on how to financially grow the company and the importance of understanding how the financial milestones and structures impact the relative attractiveness of your company. What it boils down to is the first rule of investors: KYI #1: Their primary objective is to make money. And if you, as an entrepreneur, aren't showing progress, hitting milestones and moving that company in a favorable direction...you get the picture.
When I first got the book and started thumbing through it, I was surprised NOT to see a bunch of tables, graphs and examples. Yes, there are downloadable sample plans, etc. available. But this book isn't about a step-by-step on how to build your business plan.
This is an excellent book on the subject. No easy read, David Shelters made a difficult and almost impenetrable subject to almost everyone outside of finance/Wall Street palatable. This is the kind of book you read because you have to, not because you want to. I think if you like finance you took it in College. This is a book for the rest of us - and it does a great job teaching "financial planning, decision making and negotiating from incubation to exit."
Even just watching Shark Tank you have to know the difference between Seed Funding versus Later Stage Funding (Series A or Series B). There are all kinds of funding and money related issues: convertible debt, factoring. warrants, private and public funding sources, and so forth. This book covers each. It is a superb education on business funding in one well executed book. "Start-Up Guide for the Technopreneur" will stay on my shelf as a reference for a very long time.
Not only does Mr. Shelters' book offer an education on finance but it goes deeper. The author is an investor and a consultant to investors. You constantly get an inside view of how lenders and VC's (Venture Capitalists) work and think. Pithy and sage advice is on every page. Here's one example:
"Consider this truism: Ideas are cheap. An idea in itself has no tangible value. If a commercial application for its use is identified, it has potential value as it can attract potential licensees...The value of any business is not the idea or product from which the business is built; rather the value is in the formation and successful execution of a business plan associated with such an idea or product that generates exception returns for all its stakeholders."
That one paragraph alone could have saved countless bankruptcies.
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