Customer Reviews

Financing Your Business with Venture Capital: Strategies to Grow Your Enterprise with Outside Investors

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This seems to be a bunch of lecture notes for a Venture Capital course masquerading as a book. Like lecture notes, the material presented is spotty and uneven, but interspersed with enough factoids to keep the reader interested. As a text, it would have benefited from an outline and a good editor. About 45% of its 368 pages are appendices (course handouts) of sample contracts. If this is your first venture into venture capital, find the course text or read something like Linda Chandler's Winning Strategies for Capital Formation. Then read this to add some depth.

This book is good if you are looking for a somewhat decent introduction to terminology and processes. However, I think you will find other books a far better investment in your time. I would say this is a high school level course in VC.

I question some of the motives of the author through the book. At one point he says that the best way to meet a VC is to have an introduction by a broker. In my experience taking three companies through VC, I have found this is the absolute worse way of dealing with them. All of my friends who are partners at Chicago based VC firms say they would rather the entrepreneur come directly to them. You can tell the author is an attorney, because his advice is to use an attorney to find Venture Capital. Also, the author touts the fact he is a lecturer at Wharton. Lecturer and Professor are worlds apart. It isn't that hard to get an invitation to speak at a business school, so I don't put much weight on his using this as a claim to fame.

This book is good for terminology, but not good for advice. My recommendation is that you do not follow the guidelines here, only use the book as an introduction to terminology.

If you want a real book on advice, listen to someone that has taken a company through the process. Get Rob Ryan's book "Entrepreneur America". You will find it is a much better investment of time and money.

You will find the quite difficult to follow, but it is interesting to read and you will find new information on each page if VC is stranger to you.