The NVA Blog

This one is going to be good, folks. Ask the VC, the venture-world blog that is quickly becoming an indispensable resource for the tech start-up community, is going to do a series on start-up compensation. Expect opinion and details around how much executives should get paid, what good and bad deal terms are, and some thoughtful commentary on how to calculate and justify comp. packages at various stages of company development.

The topic of compensation comes up all the time, naturally. NVA deals with a lot of early stage companies where cash is king and our guidance is often to preserve as much capital as possible to fund business operations and hit milestones. Investors and Founders want to see tangible results for the early, high-risk money that goes into a company. Having even an extra 10k/month go out the door in the form of cash/benefits/expenses can have a direct impact on features, customer acquisition, and runway. The flip side is that even smart, talented and motivated people cannot work for partial salaries forever, and many deferred-comp deals evaporate. Every situation can have unique dynamics that require going deeper than a set of guiding principals, but we are all for having the community reading from the same play book.

Ken Gaebler has a great post (here) on how stock equity dilution really works. Ask the VC, (Foundry Group’s new-ish blog) get credit for sharing this one.

If you ever wondered how equity dilution really works, or if you own shares of a startup and want to see what they are really worth I recommend reading through this post as it contains the math and logic needed to add it all up. More importantly, understanding how dilution works will help you negotiate a much better deal when the time comes!

I hosted a discussion at BarCamp Boulder over the weekend on common startup issues and questions. Thanks to David Cohen of ColoradoStartups.com for recording and posting the podcast, which can be found here.
Topics covered include:

• Raising capital
• Corporate formation
• Marketing
• Legal issues
• Stealth mode vs transparency

P.S. - check out the ColoradoStartups.com ClickCaster archive also..(here)

BarCamp Boulder happened yesterday. Thanks to me.dium for hosting and all of the sponsors for contributing to a great event. BarCamps are a cool thing, this is the first one I have attended. Its billed as a “un-conference” where the attendees set the agenda and topics.
Certainly some good stuff today and interesting discussions. Some of the highlights below (personal filter applied, of course)

(more…)

It shouldn’t be news that the cost of starting a tech company, especially in the online space has come down dramatically in the last few years. There is an interesting thing happening in the tech/venture world right now where VCs are putting together smaller funds and doing more and more early stage deals. At the same time smart entrepreneurs can get their companies off the ground for less $$, and have less of a dependency on venture dollars in the early stages. Great opportunities for both investors and start ups to get things going.
Great article that sums it up today in the New York Times:
For Startups, Web Success on the Cheap