Venture Deals
By Brad Feld; Jason Mendelson
ISBN: 9781119594828
Date read: 2025-11-25
How strongly I recommend it: 9/10
If you're raising money, one clean funding number beats a range every time.
MY NOTES
✅ Make sure you get your lawyer right. One wrong lawyer can turn “raising money” into “bleeding time.”
✅ When raising a round, the goal is term sheets. Everything you do is in service of creating multiple term sheets.
✅ “You MUST have the attitude that you will succeed.”
If doubt is your default setting, your pitch will leak it.
✅ Don’t give a funding range. Pick a number. Better a smaller, clean goal than a bigger, fuzzy one.
✅ If you were starting out and it would take six months to go to market with a team of eight people, you can quickly estimate it would take about $100,000 a month for six months. Give yourself some time cushion, say a year, and raise $1 million since it will take time to hire people and ramp up spending