Acknowledgments

We wouldn't have been able to write this book without the able assistance of many people.

A huge thanks goes to Matt Blumberg, CEO of Return Path, for all of his insightful and entrepreneur-focused comments. Matt provided all of the sidebars for “The Entrepreneur's Perspective” throughout the book, and his comments helped focus us (and hopefully you) on the key issues from an entrepreneur's perspective.

Our Foundry Group partners, Seth Levine and Ryan McIntyre, put up with us whenever Brad said, “I'm working on Jason's book again,” and whenever Jason said, “I'm working on Brad's book again.” Our assistants, Kelly Collins and Jill Spruiell, as always, were invaluable to us on this project, and we appreciate the support of the rest of the crew at the Foundry Group. You guys are the best team anyone could ever have.

A number of friends, colleagues, and mentors reviewed early drafts of the book and gave us extensive feedback. Thanks to the following for taking the time to meaningfully improve this book: Amy Batchelor, Raj Bhargava, Jeff Clavier, Greg Gottesman, Brian Grayson, Douglas Horch, David Jilk, TA McCann, George Mulhern, Wiley Nelson, Heidi Roizen, Ken Tucker, and Jud Valeski.

Jack Tankersley, one of the fathers of the Colorado venture capital industry, provided a number of his early deal books from his time at Centennial Funds. In addition to being fascinating history on some legendary early venture capital deals, they confirmed that the term sheet hasn't evolved much over the past 30 years. We'd also like to thank Jack for the extensive comments he made on an early draft of the book.

Thanks to Bill Aulet and Patricia Fuligni of the MIT Entrepreneurship Center for helping track down the original Digital Equipment Corporation correspondence between Ken Olson and Georges Doriot.

Our VC brethren, whether they realize it or not, have had a huge impact on this book. The ones we've learned from—both good and bad—are too numerous to list. But we want to thank them all for participating with us on our journey to help create amazing companies. We can't think of anything we'd rather be doing professionally, and we learn something new from you every day.

We've worked with many lawyers over the years, many of whom have taken us to school on various topics in this book. We thank you for all of your help, advice, education, and entertainment. We'd especially like to thank our friends Eric Jensen and Mike Platt at Cooley LLP, who have consistently helped us during the fog of a negotiation. Eric was Jason's mentor, boss, and friend while at Cooley and originally taught Jason how all of this worked.

We'd like to thank one of Brad's original mentors, Len Fassler, for creating the spark that initiated this book. Len's introduction to Matthew Kissner, a board member at John Wiley & Sons, resulted in a two-book contract with Wiley, which included Do More Faster: TechStars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup by Brad and David Cohen. Although Do More Faster was published first, the idea for this book was the one that originally captured the attention of several people at Wiley.

Brad would like to thank Pink Floyd for The Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here, two albums that kept him going throughout the seemingly endless “read through and edit this just one more time” cycle. He'd also like to thank the great staff at Canyon Ranch in Tucson for giving him a quiet place to work for the last week before the “final final draft” was due.

Jason would like to thank the University of Colorado Law School and especially Brad Bernthal and Phil Weiser for letting him subject himself to both law and business students while teaching many of the subjects contained in this book. Special thanks to Herbie Hancock for providing the background music while Jason worked on this book.

A number of friends and colleagues found errors in the first edition, which we dutifully listed at www.askthevc.com/wp/errata. Special thanks go to David Cohen, Anurag Mehta, Tom Godin, Philip Lee, Tal Adler, and Jason Seats, who were the first to identify each error.

Finally, we thank all of the entrepreneurs we have ever had the chance to work with. Without you, we have nothing to do. Hopefully we have made you proud in our attempt to amalgamate in this book all of the collective wisdom we gained from working with you.