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:

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 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 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 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 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 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 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

There’s a beautiful post up today by Charlie O’Donnell (First Round) titled The Race is Long. It starts out:

“Jordan Williamson, the Stanford kicker who missed three field goals in the Fiesta Bowl, will wake up today and feel like crap. Tomorrow, he’ll wake up and still feel like crap, but a little less… and a little less the day after that, and less the day after that.

His Stanford e-mail is undoubtedly filled with two things… love and hate. If there ever was a moment in someone’s life where you get to find out who your real friends are, this will be it.”

As we start a new year, Charlie riffs nicely on important lessons that come out of a failure. Powerful stuff – and a great way to start the day.

Today’s VC Post of the day is from Mark Suster (GRP) titled Spend 2012 on the Right Side of the Haimish Line. In it he references a really great OpEd by David Brooks titled The Hamish Line.

Brooks describes the Haimish line through a description “I know only one word to describe what the simpler camps had and the more luxurious camps lacked: haimish. It’s a Yiddish word that suggests warmth, domesticity and unpretentious conviviality. It occurred to me that when we moved from a simple camp to a more luxurious camp, we crossed an invisible Haimish Line. The simpler camps had it, the more comfortable ones did not.”

I spend a lot of time on both sides of the Haimish line and – as Mark says – much prefer being on the same side that Brooks describes as “the simpler camps.” Mark gives a ton of examples of how he does this as a VC, including going to SxSW, visiting companies at their offices (rather than having them come to him), participating in TechStars, having dinner with entrepreneurs, and his accelerator LaunchPad LA.

This philosophy is at the core of my passion for Startup Communities. It’s also part of the beauty of the Startup Community in Boulder.

Mark – stay haimish!

Oopsie – we forgot to do the “best VC post of the day” for the last month or two. You might have thought there weren’t any great VC posts, but you’d be wrong. We were just being lazy. As with all good things that start up again on January 1st, we’ll try to get back in the “best VC post of the day” groove.

There weren’t many on 1/1/12 so Firas Raouf’s (Openview) titled What Made Alex Ferguson a Great Manager stood out amidst the silence of the morning of the new year. I didn’t know who Alex Ferguson was until I read the post; he’s the “manager” (CEO) of Manchester United and has been since 1986. Firas summarizes Ferguson’s management principles, as they apply to a CEO of an early stage company.

• Identify yourself with your company brand
• Cultivate every interest group in your company
• Gather information everywhere
• Seek total control, but recognize when you cannot have it
• Don’t let others cause you stress
• Remember that crises blow over
• Always be unsatisfied

Go read What Made Alex Ferguson a Great Manager to get the bullet points for what’s behind this post. Happy new year Firas!

Question: How would you describe VC firm’s efforts to connect firms in their portfolio with fresh MBA grads? Typical? Rare? Never? Im just curious because here in Philadelphia, First Round Capital is posting a lot of job offers for firms in its portfolio on their website, and I’m not seeing any other Philly VC firms doing this (at the moment). Im an MBA applicant at this point, and Im trying to size up my (realistic) career goals via an MBA in Entrepreneurial Management or some similar track.

This varies dramatically by firm and by school. Some venture firms do a good job of having dynamically updated job boards on their websites that list all open jobs by portfolio company. Some examples are us (Foundry Group), Union Square Ventures, First Round Capital (as you indicated), and Spark Capital. These job listings tend to be by company, role, and location – not by educational background.

Some firms actively engage with the nearby MBA programs through their entrepreneurship programs. This is especially true of places like MIT and Stanford, but equally likely at schools like University of Colorado and University of Michigan. While a lot of this is locally driven, some of this is alumni oriented (for example, see the trip that my partner Jason Mendelson and I made recently to University of Michigan, where’s he’s an alum.)

While I think MBA Entrepreneurship programs are fine, the bigger opportunity is to spend two years at business school actively engaging in the entrepreneurial community around the school you are going to. One of the big mistakes a lot of MBA students make is that they hang out at their business school waiting for all the entrepreneurial opportunities to come to them. The industrious (and entrepreneurial) students go out into the community and find the interesting stuff that’s actually going on.

I’d encourage you to ask the question directly to the school you are applying to. They should be in recruiting mode (for you as a student) and should be clear and effective about talking about entrepreneurial opportunities for you if you go through their program.

Today’s post of the day is from my partner Seth Levine (Foundry Group) and is titled Trends in M&A Deal Terms. Seth has been involved in several significant acquisitions recently, including Google’s acquisition of AdMeld and Federated Media’s acquisition of Lijit, so he’s been deep in the contemporary negotiating dynamics. He also includes a great link to an M&A deal terms report from Shareholder Representative Services.

Question: I have a startup concept for a services agency (not a software or online business). I have previously helped launch PR agencies, one of which was subsequently acquired by a national agency. Are there angels/VCs that would be interested in my services concept?

Typically not. While there are some VCs that like services businesses, especially consolidations or rollups of services companies, most VCs aren’t interested in funding services business, especially around PR or marketing.

While there was a rash of VC financings for web agencies in the late 1990′s, when the Internet bubble burst VCs were reminded that these are companies that – at best – end up being valued at 1x revenue based on the underlying economic characteristics of the businesses. This tends not to create risk / return investment dynamics that are interesting for most VCs.

Of course, what VCs fund cycles in and out of favor, so there might be a point in the future where there is a particular type of “next generation services agency” that appeals to so VCs. But for now, most of these companies will have to rely on bootstrapping or angel financings.

Mark Suster (GRP) reminds all of us to check our laptops, iPhones, Blackberries, and other electronic devices at the door at board meetings. CEOs should enforce this, as should the other VCs and board members in the room.

No “full partial attention” – just full attention.

Today’s VC Post of the Day is from Fred Wilson (Union Square Ventures) titled VP Engineering Vs CTO. This is a topic near and dear to our hearts, especially since I (Brad) have been a CTO but never been a VP Engineering (nor would I ever want to be one – I’d suck at that.)

I’ve written about this on Feld Thoughts before in a post titled CTO vs. VP Engineering (I wonder how Google is going to deal with that SEO – eh, not really, Fred has more Google juice than me) and our friend Todd Vernon (Raindance co-founder / CTO; Lijit founder / CEO) has also written several really good posts about this titled CTO vs. VP Engineering (another take) and CTO vs VP Engineering (reprise). It’s worth noting that people who write about the difference between CTO’s and VP Engineering’s don’t seem to be very creative in the Title category.

I just noticed a late breaking post from Werner Vogels, the CTO of Amazon, referenced in the comments on Fred’s blog. It’s titled The Different CTO Roles and is a nice addition to the mix.

The VC post of the day is from Ben Horowitz (A16Z) and is titled Lead Bullets. Ben tells a story from his time at Netscape when he discovered Microsoft’s IIS was about to ship, was 5x faster than the Netscape Server product, and was free. He went searching for a bunch of silver bullets to solve the competitive issue (e.g. different market segment, acquire someone, scale back and re-segment the product). Ultimately, the solution was simply to use lead bullets – make the Netscape Server product better than the IIS product. Sure – they still addressed the other things but if they hadn’t taken on the product issues and made a superior product, the rest probably wouldn’t have mattered much.

Ben ends with a strong call to action for any entrepreneur:

There comes a time in every company’s life where it must fight for its life. If you find yourself running when you should be fighting, you need to ask yourself: “If our company isn’t good enough to win, then do we need to exist at all?”

David Skok (Matrix) has today’s great post up titled Multi-axis Pricing: a key tool for increasing SaaS revenue. If your business uses a subscription pricing model, this is a must read post. While David positions it as SaaS related post, it applies to any subscription model, including consumer and add-ons to hardware products.