I’ve just added AskTheVC to my blogroll. It’s full of thoughtful answers to serious questions asked by entrepreneurs about details related to getting financed by a venture capitalist. If you are one of the Ready to Fly startups looking at VC deals, it’s a great resource. Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson have real VC experience and take time to explain.
As a reminder, this is not for everybody starting a business, just for a few thousand high-end ventures having founder teams with strong track records and real prospects for very high growth and exits to liquidity. Venture capital is not for the corner bar or the dry cleaner or that restaurant you want to start.
If this is for you, you already know who you are. If you have to ask, then you probably aren’t a candidate. Don’t worry, there are plenty of other routes to startup financing.
From the “About” on that blog:
Brad and Jason have been working together since 2000 when Jason joined Mobius Venture Capital, a venture capital firm that Brad co-founded. They started writing together on Brad’s Feld Thoughts blog in 2005 with their Term Sheet series. After several other series about issues facing venture capital-backed companies, Jason and Brad decided to start AsktheVC. Brad and Jason, along with three other partners, have recently founded a new venture firm, the Foundry Group located in Boulder, Colorado.
We’ve started this blog to discuss relevant issues in the venture capital and entrepreneurial ecosystem. As you may know, we’ve spent a lot of time over the past three years writing about venture capital and entrepreneurship on Feld Thoughts. We’ve had great feedback regarding our regular posts on matters that effect people in our industry, as well as our blog series on topics such as term sheets, letters of intent and 409A. We’ve also had a lot of fun and learned a lot from the questions that people have asked us. We’ve decided to put more focused effort into regularly addressing these questions. Brad will still blog about venture capital and entrepreneurship, and we’ll occasionally cross-post between blogs, but we’ll begin to use AsktheVC to address the steady stream of questions we are now getting on a daily basis from entrepreneurs around the world.
You can expect the same thoughtful and honest opinions that we’ve always had. We will also tackle bigger issues in a larger format than a single post. Our goal is that this blog becomes a broadly used informational source on venture capital and entrepreneurship. To achieve this, we welcome (and encourage) questions from anyone reading this and hope that “meaty” questions lead to better and more relevant content for our readers.
I’ve referred to their answers and used them several times, so it’s about time I mention the blog itself.
Tim Berry is the founder and chairman of Palo Alto Software and Bplans.com. Follow him on Twitter @Timberry.
