article thumbnail

Equity for Early Employees in Early Stage Startups

SoCal CTO

For your first key hires, three, five, maybe as much as ten, you will probably not be able to use any kind of formula. For example, suppose you're just two founders and you want to hire an additional hacker who's so good you feel he'll increase the average outcome of the whole company by 20%. as his "retail" price.

Equity 391
article thumbnail

The Audacious Plan to Make Electricity as Easy as WiFi

Both Sides of the Table

As I’ve written about recently, at Upfront Ventures we started talking a couple of years ago about wanting to fund stuff with more meaning. I think this is a combination of being realists as venture capitalists that outsized returns in our funds must come from taking on bigger, more impactful projects that can move markets.

Insiders

Sign Up for our Newsletter

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

article thumbnail

LawKick: A Modern Way To Find Legal Help

socalTECH

You fill out the short questionnaire, lawyers submit their price quotes, and they get hired. You put your project up, and shortly thereafter, you get price quotes from lawyers. To fix that, we actually don''t allow lawyers to see prices, and they''re not bidding with each other. It sounds like you have some angel funding?

Help 240
article thumbnail

10 Entrepreneur Milestones That Make Funding Easy

Startup Professionals Musings

Every investor expects to see some business traction, both before and after a funding event. If you have neither, and choose to approach an investor, you will get no attention, and probably never again get a shot at funding with that investor. Now investors will pay attention, since scale-up funding is less risky and has a time frame.

Funding 112
article thumbnail

Interview with Dave Fink and Jonathan Neddenriep, Postie

socalTECH

We spoke with Dave Fink , CEO and co-founder of Posite, and Jonathan Neddenriep , co-founder and CTO of the company, to learn more. Dave Fink: I was one of the original partners at Sciences, and Jonathan was CTO of the e-commerce staff. in funding in that round, which closed about a year ago. What is Postie? We raised $3.5M

CTO Hire 100
article thumbnail

Want to Know How VC’s Calculate Valuation Differently from Founders?

Both Sides of the Table

Brad Feld hadn’t written his seminal “ term sheet series &# and The Funded hadn’t yet been created. NOTE: In the video I talked about how VC’s and entrepreneurs decide the total number of shares at the first major funding round and why it’s often a high number. Back then VentureHacks didn’t exist.

article thumbnail

Announcing a Deal I’ve Wanted to Talk About for a Year

Both Sides of the Table

Because I am true to the hiring practices I preach, I wanted a strong exec who would “ punch above their weightclass ” by taking a job they hadn’t yet done but would hugely aspire to and thus work harder to out perform. So I asked Ethan to build his product first and then we would fund. He was seeking $500k.

CTO Coach 359