Introduction

Guiding Entrepreneurs Toward Success

This podcast explains how the SVBS Milestone Progress system is combined with expert advice and mentoring to help entrepreneurs hit milestones, get their startups on track and drive them toward profitability or exit in the form of an IPO or acquisition.

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Silicon Valley Business School provides affordable, real-world business education to everyone, everywhere and guides entrepreneurs toward success with their startup ventures. This podcast explains how the SVBS Milestone Progress system is combined with expert advice and mentoring to help entrepreneurs hit milestones, get their startups on track and drive them toward profitability or exit in the form of an IPO or acquisition.

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Understanding Venture Capital Investors

This episode explains how venture capital funds work, how they are organized, what types of investments they’re looking for, how they make money, share it with limited partners and how they mitigate risk through modern portfolio theory. This episode provides a useful primer for anyone interested in raising finance from venture capital investors.

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Forming the Startup Company and Partnering with Co-Founders

David talks to Mark Cameron White, Harvard-educated lawyer who founded and financed hundreds of Silicon Valley startups, about forming the company and forming the founding team.

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The Startup Journey–Targeting your Destination

If you don’t know where you’re going, what chance do you have of getting there? This is the first in a series of episodes on the startup journey and today we’re talking about targeting your destination. Future episodes will deal with other aspects of your journey like generating momentum, gathering your provisions, setting and achieving milestones and selecting your travelling companions. In this series on the startup journey, you’ll learn that you’re most likely to reach your destination if you know exactly where you’re going, you have sufficient fuel to get there, you plan for contingencies, maintain momentum and assemble a winning team. This episode looks at some of the alternative destinations you might want to select for your startup.  We’re going to talk about independent survival, where you build a business independent of outside investment, with the goal of generating profitable revenues, for years to come. We’ll talk about IPO, where you build a company that has its shares traded on the public markets.  “IPO” stands for “initial public offering”. Then we’ll divide a sale of the company into two types. Cash flow sale is where you sell the company as a profitable going concern. The buyer is getting a cash-flow generating business. The term “asset sale” has a more specific meaning in legal jargon, but for the purpose of our startup journey, we’ll use this to refer to a situation where a buyer acquires your company for your product or technology.  In Silicon Valley, there are situations where unprofitable companies are acquired when they have a hot product, or some unique technology or asset that will enhance the buyer’s business. In this episode you get to learn the basics of how venture capital investment funds operate, how they select startups for investment and what types of companies are suitable for venture capital investment. This is an important episode as it provides a foundation for future discussions we will have on this podcast series.

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Introduction by David Smith, Former Apple World Marketing Manager, Serial Entrepreneur, Lawyer

David Smith explains how this podcast series is designed to help entrepreneurs  build more successful startups and help more innovators profit from their ideas and inventions. David explains how he has formed more than a dozen startups, authored several books, graduated from law school as well as business school, raised finance from Bill Gates, venture funds and angel investors in China & Japan. Unfortunately, the vast majority of startups fail. Many fail due to lack of knowledge and experience by the entrepreneurs.  The podcast series is designed to help entrepreneurs understand what they need to know to be successful. This episode discusses how this podcast series is supported with dozens of courses, thousands of videos and reading materials, and how Silicon Valley Business School provides online guidance and education to everyone, everywhere. Offering suggestions as to how entrepreneurs can be more successful, the topics range from patents to venture capital preferred stock investment terms.

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