Giving Feedback - By Prof Craig Wortmann

1. Be ‘present’ to every interaction you have with people

2. Square your shoulders toward the person you are talking to

3. Make eye contact

4. Don’t think it’s weird to touch someone’s shoulder or arm when interacting

5. Speak in concise sentences that you’ve thought through

How Convertible Debt Works by Brad Feld

How Convertible Debt Works:

Last night I gave a talk hosted by SVB at their Palo Alto office. It was part of the “Never Ending All Old Is New Again Venture Deals Book Tour.” I had a ton of fun talking to and answering questions from about 75 entrepreneurs who – at the minimum – enjoyed eating the great food and wine that SVB provided on a luscious evening in Palo Alto. Oh – and I signed a bunch of copies of Venture Deals.

Several questions came up about Convertible Debt. We touch on it in Venture Deals but realized that we didn’t cover it in enough depth so Jason recently wrote a Convertible Debt series on Ask the VC. The series is now complete – here are the links to the posts in order.

• Convertible Debt Series


• Convertible Debt – The Discount


• Convertible Debt – Valuation Caps


• Convertible Debt – Conversion Mechanics


• Convertible Debt – Conversion In A Sale Of The Company


• Convertible Debt – Other Terms


• Convertible Debt – Warrants


• Convertible Debt – Early Versus Late Stage Dynamics


• Convertible Debt – Wrap Up

If you feel like we missed anything, or got anything wrong, or were confusing in our explanation, please chime in on the comments on the post. If you want to see an actual convertible debt term sheet or the actual legal documents, take a look at the TechStars Open Sourced Model Seed Financing Documents.

As a bonus to the evening, I got some direct, constructive feedback from one of the attendees via email later that night. While the “thank you” and “good job” notes are nice, I only learn when someone criticizes me (hopefully constructively, but I can handle it in any form.) The feedback was:

May I make a constructive criticism regarding your talk tonight? Your answers to audience questions tend to be overly long and rambling…..you “overanswer,” to invent a word. You start strong and respond right to the essence, but then your focus blurs and you keep taking verbal baby steps away from the thought stream. If you trim a minute or two off each answer, you can call on more people and hear more questions, which sends more people home happy. I think if you self-critique a video of yourself in a Q&A session, you’ll arrive at the same conclusion.

It’s a good suggestion. I often try to provide additional context to the question, but it sounds like – at least for one person – I went off on a few space jams that weren’t additive. I love the phrase “overanswer” – it’s a lesson from TV interviews 101 (e.g. just answer a question – any question – quickly). Something to ponder as I continue the Never Ending All Old Is New Again Venture Deals Book Tour.

Oct 9, 2011 (yesterday) Building A Company vs Building A Business from A VC by Fred

Matt Blumberg, CEO of our portfolio company Return Path, wrote an interesting post last week about the differences between building a company and building a business.

I've been an investor and board member of Return Path for over a decade and I've witnessed the company fail with its first product/business and then through a series of acquisitions build a very strong business and company. Matt and his team built the company first then the business, which is backwards, but it worked.

Matt is right that most of our portfolio companies build the product first, then the business, then the company. And building a company is often difficult for founders because they are so focused on the product.

Roelof Botha, a leading VC with Sequoia, once gave me a great piece of advice in helping founders start to focus on company building. He said founders should think of their company as a product and build it and shape it with the same passion and care. I've taken that to heart and passed it on a few times.

No matter how or when you do it, building a company is a required step to sustainability. Positive cash flow is not enough to keep the company independent and solvent. You need a culture, systems, and processes to keep everyone happy and functioning well. That is company building and Matt and his team are among the best I've seen at it.

The rules for building a cloud commerce community

September 29, 2011 | Kent Parker

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Amazon.com. eBay. Facebook. LinkedIn. Many of us rely on these online communities to manage our personal commerce, relationships and finances. Now, with increasing frequency, companies are demanding similar tools to manage their business.

A decade ago, the Internet was viewed primarily as a consumer application, with limited viability for critical business processes. Today, nearly every company is using it to help run their business in some significant way.

What brought about the shift?

Certainly, the Internet has evolved — it’s faster, more secure and proven. But the business world is also a much different place today. As business has become more global, the traditional enterprise as we know it has morphed into something new called the extraprise.

In the extraprise, it’s not just about executing a process within a company, but also across the entire value chain — especially outside the four walls of the enterprise. It’s not just about the intelligence within an organization, but also the extended intelligence networks that are developed through communities.

This new approach to business commerce won’t be driven by enterprise applications. Companies have invested billions in such technologies to simplify tasks like developing proposals or taking orders. Why? Because commerce happens between companies. And the closed systems and processes that have long been the domain of installed enterprise applications aren’t designed to accommodate this fluid company-to-company, extraprise activity.

How do you build the cloud community?

So what does it take to build these networks and communities to drive and support collaborative commerce? A whole new way of thinking and operating. Performing as a cloud commerce community requires a whole new set of rules:

Break down application silos: Participants in business commerce networks want to acquire capabilities – not purchase tools or application models as they did in the legacy software era. To enable this, vendors must break down product-oriented boundaries among applications and make development a more intertwined process.

Make innovation a constant: Innovation and capabilities are now expected as part of business commerce networks, not as a product tool to be purchased and installed. The concept of innovation extends to reporting, hosting, monitoring and security and must be frequently streamed.

Focus on quality: While innovation is key, quality trumps all other considerations when it comes to business networks. Remember the Golden Rule: “Thou shall not break anything.” And when it comes to business commerce, buyers and sellers demand greater integrity. They expect to be able to conduct complete transactions without disruption or any compromise of their data. This also means scrapping traditional notions of software availability in favor of a more comprehensive definition of business commerce availability.

Stay agile: Constantly evolving needs and shifting priorities, dictated by a more connected, globally engaged business environment, have made speed the new market requirement for success. And this means organizing to operate in a more nimble and flexible manner than ever before.

Overhaul customer support: Participants in business commerce communities have outsourced much of what used to be the function of their internal IT departments to the network provider. As a result, assistance with software and non-software challenges as well as process enablement to drive more efficient and effective business commerce is not only expected, but required. And in an always-on community, customers demand immediate, proactive responses.

Redefine customer relationships: In the legacy software product world, customer relationships were episodic. Upon “go-live,” the relationship was essentially considered complete. In a network-driven cloud community, customers and other participants require more continuous, ongoing assistance.

Lots of companies are reaching for the cloud. It’s a more scalable, efficient way to do business on a global basis. It requires no software, hardware or resources to deploy. Time to value is near immediate, and results can be astounding.

But to reap these rewards, organizations must transform in ways that enable them to deliver products and services that meet a completely new set of business challenges and customer needs. Otherwise, the benefit of the cloud will remain nothing more than a dream.

Kent Parker is chief operating officer of Ariba. He submitted this story to VentureBeat.

[Image via Jozsef Bagota/Shutterstock]

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Finding Your Focus: Self-Discipline vs. Passion

Finding Your Focus: Self-Discipline vs. Passion

(Thomas Jefferson)
“The end of democracy and the defeat of the American
Revolution will occur when government falls into the hands of
lending institutions and moneyed corporations."

Raising trillion dollars by taxing the rich is the solution? Think about which one is sustainable - increase money inflow or decrease governments operational inefficiency? I wonder what Mr President's advisers are thinking.