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Why I'm Giving Away My New Book to Founders
Forty years ago, I put on my best suit, drove to 3000 Sand Hill Road, and hand-delivered printed, ring-bound business plans to the receptionists at the nation's top venture capital firms.
There was no internet. No accelerators. No startup meetups. No YouTube channels explaining venture capital. No founder podcasts. No AI copilots. No books that explained what a liquidation preference was, why investors insisted on Delaware corporations, how venture funds actually worked, or what could happen after you signed a term sheet.
There was just a genuinely confident young entrepreneur in a questionable suit who knew enough to start a company, but not nearly enough to understand the people sitting across the table from him.
That entrepreneur was me.
Over the next four decades, I founded ten companies, raised venture capital, took one company public, navigated acquisitions, sat on boards, invested in startups, and spent the last twenty-six years helping founders through Venture Mechanics. Along the way I learned a great deal about startup finance, governance, fundraising, venture capital, acquisitions, and human nature.
I also made an extraordinary number of mistakes.
Some were minor. Some were expensive. A few were spectacular enough that they still make for entertaining stories at conferences and dinner parties. The good news is that I eventually learned from most of them. The bad news is that every new generation of founders seems destined to repeat the same mistakes unless somebody takes the time to explain what is actually happening behind the curtain.
That's why I wrote Lawyers, Venture Capitalists and Other Useful Predators.
Despite the title, this is not a book about why lawyers are bad or why venture capitalists are evil. In fact, some of the best startup attorneys and investors I've ever worked with created enormous value for founders and helped build extraordinary companies.
The problem is that founders are often negotiating with people whose incentives they do not fully understand.
Most of the painful startup stories you've heard are not the result of villains. They're the result of incentives that gradually stopped pointing in the same direction.
Once you understand that simple truth, a surprising amount of startup behavior suddenly makes sense.
Why do investors care so much about liquidation preferences and anti-dilution provisions? Why do boards sometimes replace founders? Why do startup attorneys recommend structures that seem more complicated than necessary? Why do investors who once seemed enthusiastic suddenly begin pushing for outcomes that don't feel aligned with the founder's vision?
The answer is usually not malice. The answer is incentives.
Understanding those incentives before you sign documents is considerably less expensive than discovering them afterward.
What You'll Learn
The book is intentionally practical. Rather than focusing on startup mythology, it focuses on the mechanics that determine who controls what, who gets paid when, and what happens when things don't go according to plan.
Topics include:
Perhaps most importantly, the book explores alternatives.
For decades, founders have been taught that venture capital is the default path to building a meaningful company. In reality, venture capital is one financing tool among many. Depending on the business, alternatives such as bootstrapping, revenue-based financing, crowdfunding, grants, customer-funded growth, and modern LLC structures may produce outcomes that are every bit as attractive while preserving substantially more founder ownership and control.
There is no universally correct answer. There are only tradeoffs. Founders deserve to understand those tradeoffs before committing years of their lives to a particular path.
Why I'm Giving It Away
I didn't write this book to maximize Kindle revenue. Frankly, if I were optimizing for hourly compensation, writing a book would rank somewhere below aircraft restoration and above commercial fishing.
I wrote it because I've spent thousands of hours sitting across the table from founders who were about to make preventable mistakes. Sometimes those mistakes cost a few thousand dollars. Sometimes they cost millions. Occasionally they cost founders control of companies they built.
Many of those mistakes happen because the information founders need is scattered across law school textbooks, venture capital blogs, legal documents, obscure tax regulations, and conversations that only occur after someone has already made the mistake.
That seemed inefficient.
If forty years of accumulated scar tissue could be organized into a single founder-friendly guide, perhaps a few entrepreneurs could avoid learning every lesson the hard way.
So we're making the book available free of charge to founders. If you're actively building a startup, we'd like you to have it. If you're not a founder but are curious about how venture capital, startup finance, and entrepreneurial decision-making actually work, the book is available on Kindle. We're not checking, this is on the honor system.
Why This Matters Now
When I started my first company, information was scarce. Investors, attorneys, and advisors possessed knowledge that founders often had no practical way to access. Today, that advantage is eroding rapidly.
AI has made expertise dramatically more accessible. Founders can now obtain sophisticated explanations of financing structures, legal concepts, market strategies, customer acquisition models, and operational challenges in minutes rather than weeks.
The challenge is no longer access to information. The challenge is understanding which information matters, which questions to ask, and which advice applies to your particular situation.
My hope is that this book helps founders ask better questions, recognize hidden assumptions, negotiate from a position of knowledge, and build companies that align with their own goals rather than someone else's template.
After all, wisdom is simply expensive experience that somebody else paid for first. If I can save a few founders from paying tuition at Hard Knocks University, the book will have accomplished its mission.
Download your free copy here.
