Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist is the definitive guide to venture financings. This book is for anyone who wants the insider's guide to raising money, negotiating deals, and to know what really makes venture capitalists tick. Don't believe us? Check out these recommendations:

My biggest nightmare is taking advantage of an entrepreneur without even realizing it. It happens because VCs are experts in financings and most entrepreneurs are not. Brad and Jason are out to fix that problem with Venture Deals. This book is long overdue and badly needed. - Fred Wilson, Union Square Ventures The adventure of starting and growing a company can exhilarating or excruciating.or both. Feld and Mendelson have done a masterful job of shedding light on what can either become one of the most helpful or dreadful experiences for entrepreneurs.accepting venture capital into their firm. This book takes the lid off the black box and helps entrepreneurs understand the economics and control provisions of working with a venture partner. - Lesa Mitchell, Vice President, Advancing Innovation, Kauffman Foundation A must-read book for entrepreneurs. Brad and Jason demystify the overly complex world of term sheets and M&A, cutting through the legalese and focusing on what really matters. That.s a good thing not just for entrepreneurs, but also for venture capitalists, angels and lawyers. Having an educated entrepreneur on the other side of the table means you spend your time negotiating the important issues and ultimately get to the right deal faster. - Greg Gottesman, Managing Director, Madrona Venture Group I would highly recommend .Venture Deals. to any entrepreneur, venture capitalist, student, or casual reader who wants to get the .true scoop. on how venture deals come together and what the venture capital landscape truly looks like. The authors are not only veterans of the industry, but are willing to share their unvarnished views of what venture is all about. The reader will not find the insights shared here anywhere else. And, perhaps best of all, the authors write in an easily readable, casual style that makes the book quite fun to read. - Craig Dauchy, Cooley LLP Venture Deals is a must read for any entrepreneur contemplating or currently leading a venture-backed company. Brad and Jason are highly respected investors who shoot straight from the hip and tell it like it is, bringing a level of transparency to a process that is rarely well understood. Its like having a venture capitalist as a best friend who is looking out for your best interest and happy to answer all of your questions. - Emily Mendell, Vice President of Communications, National Venture Capital Association In my entrepreneurship class at Stanford, the number one topic is venture financing -- how it works and how (or even whether) to get it. There are no two better people to coach an entrepreneur through the venture process than Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson, and next to in-person guidance this book is the next best thing. I am planning to make this required reading for my class at Stanford. - Heidi Roizen, Fenwick and West Entrepreneurship Educator, Stanford University Technology Ventures Program Feld and Mendelson pack a graduate level course into this energetic and accessible book. The authors. frank style and incisive insight make this a .must read. for high-growth company entrepreneurs, early stage investors, and graduate students. Start here if you want to understand venture capital deal structure and strategies. I enthusiastically recommend. - Brad Bernthal, CU Boulder, Associate Clinical Professor of Law - Technology Policy, Entrepreneurial Law I've been reading and loving Brad Feld's blog for years. He's one of my favorite venture capitalists on the planet. I'm delighted Brad and Jason have written the definitive book for entrepreneurs seeking to learn about raising and going through the venture capital process. - Bijan Sabet, Spark Capital

Thanks to all who came and made the last event a success. Josh Dorkin has a good summary of what it’s all about. Check it out here.

We quickly outgrew Amante Coffee on Broadway, so we are going to move a block away to Vic’s Coffee at 1800 Broadway in One Boulder Plaza for future events.

The BIG news is that we now have our own Website! We’ll make the site an open forum where we can communicate to each other and going forward I’ll discontinue updates on the this site. Please be patient while we build it out.  At some point, I’d like to have a true forum / posting so that people can start their own discussion threads. 

My partner Brad has confirmed attendance next Tuesday, the 24^th, so if you are interested in meeting the better half of AskTheVC, stop on by and say hello, although I’ll be the one who is better dressed.

 - Jason

Thanks to a little programming glitch, the location of the OpenCoffee Club was incorrectly stated to be held at Amante Coffee on Broadway in Boulder.

It should have been 1035 Walnut in Boulder.  Sorry for the confusion

Here is the original post.

We’ve decided to start the Boulder version of the OpenCoffee Club.  The club is quickly becoming an internation club that has local franchises.  Saul Klein was the brains behind developing a forum where entrepreneurs, developers and investors organize real-world informal meetups to chat, network and grow.  In other words, people in the venture capital world get to hang out, meet each other and learn from one another.

If you are looking for more information, check out Saul’s blog and learn more about the club and him personally.  Also, check out the OpenCoffee site as well to see all the different clubs forming.

We’ve set up a site if you want to keep track of the schedule and encourage as many people to come as possible.  We intend to meet every other Tuesday at 8am. 

So if you are interested in a “live” version of AskTheVC, or just want to come and hang out, we’ll see you there. 

All, we’ve been tremendously happy with the response to our new site.  Thanks to everyone who has asked questions, told their friends and linked to us.

We’ve seen multiple questions regarding two issues:  compensation and angel deals.

On the compensation side, people are wondering how ownership is spread out between founders and executives, how much to offer a new executive, what are standard salaries and what is the “real deal” about deferred comp.

On the Angel side, we’ve been asked to share our standard term sheet and discuss what we consider to be fair angel deals.

Given all of this interest, instead of composing “one off” answers to these questions, we are going to tackle these subjects in a series of posts as we’ve done in the past with our Term Sheet, M&A and 409A work. 

So be a bit patient and stay tuned.  We hope that it will be worth your wait.

Our goal is to have AsktheVC ultimately be a broader information source for entrepreneurs than just “Brad and Jason’s thoughts.”  To that end, we’ve started with a few additional things on the site worth noting and will be adding others on a regular basis.  If you are only getting this via an RSS feed, take a quick trip to the site to see some of the stuff that’s currently there.

• Have A Question?: Just click on “Ask It” an you’ll be able to email us a question.  We’ll try to answer them as quickly as we can.  You can also email us questions anytime.
• Content: We often get requests for republishing our content.  We are fine with you doing it, as long as you put a copyright notice on it, provide a web link, and – if it’s on the Internet – link back to us.  If you click on “Download our content” you’ll get a page that let’s you download stuff in HTML or PDF.
• FeedBurner Venture Capital Network: We are members of the FeedBurner Venture Capital Network (and Brad is the coordinator of the network.)  This is a network of as many of the blogs written by Venture Capitalists that we could find.  Click through to the FeedBurner Venture Capital Network landing page to see some of the neat things you can do with the network.
• Personal Network Search: This search allows you to search all of the blogs in the FeedBurner Venture Capital Network that is brought to you by Lijit (one of our portfolio companies – as is FeedBurner.)  Simply choose “Me” and type in a search phrases (two words or more result in better searches) and you will be searching across the entire network.  If you choose “My World” you’ll end up searching across all of the FeedBurner Venture Capital Network bloggers and any other things they’ve incorporated into their Lijit profiles.
• VC Bloggers: These are direct links to VC Bloggers that we are aware of.  If you know of any that are missing from the list, please email me
• Books: We read a lot.  We’ll periodically do a book review here on something that we think is particularly relevant for entrepreneurs.  We’ve got a few of our favorites listed as a starting point.

Of course – you can subscribe via our RSS feed or email – just look at the top right of the page.

We’ve started this site 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 Brad’s blog (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 sheet, mergers and acquisitions, 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 Ask the VC 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. 

So “Ask the VC” and fire away!  We look forward to the dialogue and getting to know you.

- Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson