Venture Capital

Venture Capital

Why Choose a C-Corporation for Your Startup Journey

In this podcast you will learn why C-Corporations are the vehicle of choice for tech startups in Silicon Valley and the tech sector. You’ll learn why it doesn’t make sense to operate as an S-Corporation, or an LLC, and how you can escape paying taxes when you sell your C-Corporation shares.

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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 Angel Investors

How angel investors work, how they syndicate investments and how they structure their investments as convertible notes or preferred stock rounds of financing. David Smith presents materials from the Silicon Valley Business School Raising Finance for Startups course and explains how he managed to raise more than $20m from angel investors in one of his previous startups.

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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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Why Startup Valuation is Not Startup Valuation

This episodes explains how startups are valued and presents the argument as to why venture capital investments in startup ventures should not be used as the basis to place a valuation on the company.

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Preferred Pizza Toppings

This episode explains how venture capital investors get preferred stock, and founders get common stock. Preferential toppings provided to investors include liquidation preferences, veto rights, board rights, anti-dilution rights, co-sale and drag-along rights. David Smith talks to Mark Cameron White, founder of the White Summers law firm, about the terms Mark’s seeing in Silicon Valley and elsewhere today.

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Interview with Paul Kallmes, Entrepreneurship and Angel Investment Expert at the Vault, San Francisco

Paul Kallmes discusses entrepreneurship, international expansion, managing risk, pitching investors, raising finance from venture capital investors, angel investing and even rock climbing in this interview from the Vault, an innovation ecosystem and global network of startup accelerators and collaborative workspaces with a facility in the heart of San Francisco.

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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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