Andrew Laffoon’s Thoughts

As usual, Marc has excellent advice for young entrepreneurs like myself.  This post covers six tendencies that are common to all people, but that can be especially impactful on the early life of a startup.  You should read the whole thing - it’s worth it!  http://blog.pmarca.com/2008/03/the-psychology.html

The tendencies are drawn from a book by Charlie Munger called “Poor Charlie’s Almanac“.   Mr. Munger is Warren Buffet’s long-time partner and Vice Chairman at Berkshire Hathaway, and the book is a collection of his thoughts and essays in the style of Benjamin Franklin’s “Poor Richard’s Almanac.”  I am planning to order a copy myself.

I started reading a great new blog.  The guys who write it even post funny images with their blog entries.  Very nice!

See the top 3 hacks of 2007: http://venturehacks.com/articles/2007-hacks 

Words to live by when raising money:

Jump on your desk, kick your laptop across the room and declare a start to your fund-raising; set up 10 investor meetings for the same week; you will probably end up meeting only 4-6 of them due to scheduling conflicts; tell them “We plan to sign a term sheet in 6 weeks, if we don’t have an offer by then, we’re going back to using sweat equity to build the company“; signal your valuation by saying “We want to raise $X from n investors with no more than Y% dilution, including the option pool,” (Y = 15%-25% per investor plus a 10%-20% option pool dilution). In a tight process with VCs, there are three meetings; one with the original partner you were introduced to; next, you meet the original partner with a few other partners; finally, you go to a partner’s meeting; there may also be an intermediate meeting where some of the partners come to your office to refactor your code and eat your food; if some investors are being slow while others are moving along, tell the slow ones, “By the way, we are on second meetings with three funds.” If things go well, you should receive 2-3 term sheets; reject the ones that explode the next day: “We told other investors that they have until the end of the week to send us term sheets, we can’t break our promise.” Negotiate the offers over the next 2-3 days and get your favorite investor to the terms you want. During closing, keep your other prospective investors warm in case the deal blows up; but don’t break any binding no-shop or non-disclosure agreements in the process.

Thanks Naval and Paul.

“We make a living by what we get, but we make a living by what we give.”

-Winston Churchill

Give me a wordpress theme I love!  I keep seeing various themes that I like, but I never take the time to install them.  I need to get one that I actually like…

We’ve been working with Clearspring for awhile at Mixbook to get our new AS3 book widget shared across the web. Check out how it looks:

I just got back from a very relaxing and refreshing holiday with my family in Franklin, Tennessee. I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas and New Year as well!

In parting, I would like to share this beautiful video with you:

I ate SPAM for the first time two days ago, and to my surprise, it was actually quite delicious! Spam, bacon, egg and spam. Spam, spam, spam, baked beans, and spam. Spam, spam, spam, spam, spam and spam. Sounds like my email inbox…

Another note of randomness - check out the origins of the term “spam” for email spam on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spam_(electronic). Yes, this little video had a big impact.

About 3 hours ago, a teacher from Fayetteville High School in Sylacauga, Alabama, published a 38 page book created and edited by her 32-student class about World War I. What a great use of Mixbook!

View this book full size or get a printed copy at Mixbook

• Add it to any major social network with the share feature (watch the whole thing - soon a button will be added for sharing anytime).
• Embed it from Mixbook.
• Or you can add it to your facebook profile with the new Mixbook Albums app: http://apps.facebook.com/mixbookalbums.
• And soon…choose from multiple view modes.