Some people say that accepting an investment from an outside investor is like getting married. It is true that you might spend more time with your investor than with your wife. If that is so, signing of a term sheet is like getting engaged. How often do you see couples starting a happy relationship by having a long argument? Just keep that in mind when you will be negotiating the term sheet.
This is the second part of my mini series focusing on term sheets. The goal is to cover the convertible loan – in general the less commonly used investment method.
In the past five years, seed-stage investing has experienced a boom. In North America, seed funds now represent 67% of all VC funds, up from 33% in 2008. The CEE region is no different: according to European Private Equity and Venture Capital Association, the number of seed deals has increased 19x over the past four years. Even considering the fact that EVCA’s data is not fully comprehensive, since many investments are not announced at all or are not made by EVCA’s members, it still illustrates my point
"I am sick and tired of the word startup. It seems like everyone and their mother has a startup today, I might even start calling the Vietnamese grocery store next doors a food startup."
In my last post on importance of employee equity, I set myself up for an ambitious task: to explain how employee equity works and how to set up a stock options plan in Europe. This topic is so complex and robust that it is almost impossible to pack all the relevant content into a single blog post. Therefore, I have decided to use a different approach: this post will summarize the basic concepts of employee equity using already existing content available on the internet and provide some commentary and context for European startups.
Dealing almost exclusively with first time startup founders, we at Credo tackle the following question with basically each of our CEOs: How much equity should they give to the employees?
Attending Product Management Festival 2017 (PMF 2017) in Zurich, Switzerland, and meeting amazing product professionals inspired me to go deeper into six important areas that are often neglected or entirely overlooked by product leaders.
At their 10th anniversary, the Slovenian high-tech company Zemanta d.o.o. announced that it was entirely acquired by Outbrain from the US, the world’s largest premium content discovery platform. The sum that Outbrain paid for Zemanta’s technology, products and team remains a business secret, and Zemanta’s co-founders Andraž Tori and Boštjan Špetič will join Outbrain. After becoming part of Outbrain Zemanta’s platform will continue to operate as a standalone product.
