Private equity and venture capital investors are copying our sisters in the hedge fund world: we’re trying to automate more of our job. When I was single, I registered for (a lot of) dating websites. When I met my now-wife, I realized that any technology that can find me a spouse is a killer app....
[Continue Reading]Use agile budgeting to manage your business
Instead of budget approvals, monitor key metrics and give managers more flexibility Traditional budgets can be destructive and a huge waste of time. How should a growth company manage their budget? Does the annual budget approval process even make sense in a fast-moving firm? My friends who are executives at large, established companies complain about...
[Continue Reading]18 ways to make your financial model stand out to investors
The median investor looking at your proposal is in her 40s. Her eyes are going, not to mention her brain. I look at a lot of spreadsheets and analytic reports, and way too many are difficult to read and therefore hard to understand. In an effort to make my life easier, I’ve summarized here the...
[Continue Reading]How to prepare for and run a board meeting
After spending quite a bit of time in board meetings, I worked with a NYU student team to prepare a template for board presentations to investors. In the deck below, I include our best practices on preparing for, running, and closing up on a board meeting, including what to include in your materials. I would...
[Continue Reading]Valuing Startup Employee Options
This is the third of three blog posts on financial modeling for startups. The first was on best practices in building financial models, and the second was a template financial model for a startup. I’ve often found it helpful to have on hand a simple model showing the impact of each financing stages on all...
[Continue Reading]Template Startup Financial Model
(This is the second of three blog posts on financial models for startups. Yesterday I wrote about best practices in spreadsheet design.) I couldn’t find a good template financial model online, so I decided to create one. We started with a sanitized version of a financial model I had developed for startups I have run. ...
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