Cofounder Dilution Early Stage Engineer 
Both Sides of the Table
FEBRUARY 6, 2013
I am fond of quoting that about 70% of my investment decision of an early-stage company is the team. Quick summary: Be careful not to have too many co-founders. it’s the most expensive dilution you’ll ever face. And you need to be careful about giving up control to cofounders as much as VCs.
Both Sides of the Table
NOVEMBER 14, 2017
As an early-stage VC I love this phase. Sam also had a vision as early as 2012 about how MakeSpace would be a large employer of middle-income jobs: The company would hire employees rather than just have contractors and he would lead the effort to ensure they had opportunities for growth and benefits for their families.
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Both Sides of the Table
SEPTEMBER 17, 2011
I recently wrote a post about why I didn’t think early-stage startups should have COOs. “We’re all equal co-founders and we don’t care about titles.&# Still, I’ll bet that functionally you divide areas of competence like sales & marketing, product, engineering, biz dev, etc.
David Teten
JANUARY 19, 2021
(co-written with Jamie Finney, Founding Partner at Greater Colorado Venture Fund. From RBI, Flexible VCs borrow the ability to reap meaningful returns without demanding founders build for an exit. By tying payments to actual revenues, founders and investors remain aligned around the company’s real-time performance, good or bad.
Both Sides of the Table
JUNE 5, 2015
In the old days there usually weren’t convertible notes on early-stage deals and there weren’t party rounds with 20 angels or 6 seed funds. So how DOES a VC think about financings at early stages? If you’re a solo founder and haven’t built out your team or engineers I’m likely to want 15+%.
View from Seed
APRIL 16, 2015
An easy way to think about it is that value over time doesn’t go up and to the right in a straight line like this: Instead, it’s more of a stair step like this: So, what are the value inflection points that create the stair steps, and how does one think about it at the earliest stages? These might include: Bring on a technical co-founder.
Hunter Walker
JANUARY 15, 2016
By the end of 2004 I had brought on two co-founders: John Vars – who is now the Chief Product Office at TaskRabbit, and Steven Reading took over Sales and Revenue. So I was thrilled to find CleverPet , an AI game for dogs made by animal behavioral scientists and electrical engineers. It just took another 1st place at CES.
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