The Startup Checklist

This book is designed for a very specific type of business starter: the entrepreneur who is deliberately setting out to create a scalable, high-growth business designed for the twenty-first century; a business that will hire employees, issue stock options, raise money from outside investors, grow rapidly, and eventually either be acquired by a larger company or go public through an initial public offering. Starting that kind of business gets very complicated, very quickly, and making even small mistakes at the beginning can cause problems at every later step along the way. These mistakes include the fundamental (starting a business that just doesn't make sense) to the painful (hooking up with people whose interests are divergent from yours) to the tragic (getting equity allocations wrong at the beginning and never being able to recover), all the way to the really, really expensive (making simple mistakes at the incorporation level that result in five- and six-figure clean-up costs the first time a serious investor is thinking of supporting you). This book is your one-stop checklist to starting off right. It assumes no prior knowledge about business-just a strong desire to create something seriously big, and to do so in the most effective, most efficient, and least expensive way possible. David S. Rose, a serial entrepreneur who is one of the world)s leading startup investors, walks beside you throughout the process, providing the background you need to understand the whys in addition to the whats and the hows. He takes you step-by-step through the nitty gritty practical tasks of starting up a high-growth venture, introduces you to the latest online tools that will save you time and money, points you to the standard books that should be in every entrepreneur's library, and gives you a peek behind the curtains of the angel investor and venture worlds. Among the concrete steps covered are: Translating your idea into a compelling business model Aligning business and IT during mergers, acquisitions, and divestitures Allocating equity among your startup team Incorporating as a Delaware C corporation Recruiting your boards of Directors and Advisors Measuring your business with data analytics Establishing a stock option plan Understanding the funding process Crowdfunding with online platforms Negotiating investment term sheets The role of the CIO and CFO Reaping the benefits of success through acquisition