Table of Contents

The Venture Café contains candid, practical information about how to build a successful high-tech company.

Chapter One, The Entrepreneurial Mind, contains anecdotes about how real, live entrepreneurs:

• Identify new business opportunities
• React to power outages
• Decide whether they are serious
• Come to terms with feelings of isolation
• Commit themselves to starting their businesses, against all odds
• Think about risk
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Chapter Two, Making the Decision to Go For It, explains how entrepreneurs:

• Construct an entrepreneurial safety net
• Line up support from family members
• Practice working on the company, before they are fully committed
• Decide who should be an official member of the founding team
• Persuade potential business partners to join their ventures
• Avoid being discouraged
• Juggle family and business
• Deal with personal bankruptcy

Chapter Three, Setting up Shop: Establishing Your Company's Image, contains anecdotes about:

• Locating an appropriate first office
• Presenting yourself in a professional manner
• Deciding whether to join a business incubator
• Getting people to call you back
• Obtaining help from advisors
• Setting up the internal corporate hierarchy
• Deciding who gets the final say in an engineering process
• Deciding what needs to happen, when

Chapter Four, Protecting Your Intellectual Property, contains anecdotes about:

• Choosing a lawyer
• Making the most of your legal connections
• Reducing legal bills
• Deciding whether to apply for a patent
• Filing provisional patent applications
• Classifying information as a trade secret
• Talking about your idea, without giving too much away
• Researching the competition
• Figuring out who is trying to compete with you
• Convincing journalists to pay attention to your company

Chapter Five, It's the People: How to Attract Dynamic Individuals to Your High-Tech Startup -- And Keep Them From Burning Out, contains anecdotes about:

• Evaluating a candidate's attitude
• Convincing technologists to work at your company, instead of the one down the block
• Avoiding the bad apples
• Evaluating a candidate's communications skills
• Trusting your employees
• Using innovative strategies to attract job applicants
• Crashing career fairs
• Using publicity to compete for candidates
• Convincing headhunters to send you their best candidates
• Workplace perks
• What employees want
• How to close on an employee
• How to position your company as a place engineers want to be
• What it's like to get burned-out

Chapter Six, What Venture Capitalists (VCs) Look For When They Evaluate New Proposals, contains advice about:

• How rises and falls in the stock market affect investments in seed-stage companies
• How to make contact with VCs
• Why angel investors may be more appropriate
• How a VC's money supply affects the negotiation process
• How to tailor your sales pitch to the desires of an individual VC
• What venture capitalists look for in an entrepreneur
• How to decide which firm to approach
• How to think like a venture capitalist
• What investors try to avoid
• How personal idiosyncracies affect the investment process
• Why an entrepreneur shouldn't take it personally

Chapters Seven, Eight, and Nine provide an in-depth look at ArsDigita Corporation and the One Core Financial Network.

• "Perseverence: The Story of One Core Financial Network" shows readers why it is important to be fully committed to one's company.
• "Entrepreneur or Rock Star?" examines what it's like to run a new high-tech company when scores of VCs are scrambling to buy your stock.
• "Paradise Lost" shows readers what it's like when your relationship with VCs goes awry.

Chapter Ten, Getting the People in Place: Executive Headhunters and the Right CEO, contains advice about:

• Where to conduct interviews with prominent individuals
• How professional headhunters begin their interviews
• What professional headhunters think about during interviews
• How professional headhunters evaluate candidates
• How prominent individuals decide when to change jobs
• What sorts of questions professional headhunters use to determine whether candidates are ready to change jobs
• How to convince a CEO candidate that a particular company is right for her
• How to get a CEO candidate to sign on the dotted line

Chapter Eleven, The Dark Corner, contains stories about:

• What it's like to work at a company that is about to be shut down
• What engineers learn from the experience of going through a corporate shut-down
• Why it's important to think twice before taking on clients you have never met
• Why stock vesting schedules are important for entrepreneurs
• How unscrupulous business people can take advantage of naive technologists
• Why it's important to put stock agreements in writing
• What can happen when trust breaks down
• Why some VCs insist on putting "weird" looking terms into a term sheet, and why this is okay
• Why it's important to ask a trusted third party to examine term sheets
• How entrepreneurs deal with being short of cash

Chapter Twelve, Entrepreneurs and the Media, contains ideas about:

• What publicity can do for a new business
• How to increase your chances of getting on the front page
• Why journalists used to love the Internet
• Why some journalists began to hate the Internet
• Why the "dot-com downturn" received so much press
• What causes journalists to like entrepreneurs
• How to appear professional when dealing with journalists

Chapter Thirteen, Success, contains anecdotes about:

• How entrepreneurs arrange their corporate buyouts
• What it's like when your company gets acquired
• What it's like when your company goes through an initial public offering
• How liquidity events change the way employees feel about their jobs
• How to protect yourself from an unexpected tax hangover
• How entrepreneurs evaluate whether or not they have been successful
• What motivates serial entrepreneurs