Book 178 - A Year of Magical Learning

Reflection Title: Think Again…Take a Second Look at Your Dreams!

Book – Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist by Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson

Book Description: Help take your startup to the next step with the new and revised edition of the popular book on the VC deal process—from the co-founders of the Foundry Group

How do venture capital deals come together? This is one of the most frequent questions asked by each generation of new entrepreneurs. Surprisingly, there is little reliable information on the subject. No one understands this better than Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson. The founders and driving force behind the Foundry Group—a venture capital firm focused on investing in early-stage information technology companies—Brad and Jason have been involved in hundreds of venture capital financings. Their investments range from small startups to large Series A venture financing rounds. The new edition of Venture Deals continues to show fledgling entrepreneurs the inner-workings of the VC process, from the venture capital term sheet and effective negotiating strategies to the initial seed and the later stages of development.

Reflection:

Venture Deals is one of the first books I read on this journey while in my favorite spot in the world, sitting on that little recliner right next to my daughter while she was still with us in the NICU.

At this point in my life, I was still immersed in the idea of starting my own technology company and I thought this would be a great book to consume to help me on this journey. Successfully launching a company, getting it funded, and playing a major part in its growth was my dream. I’d been working for years on a project that I hoped would be “the one” to make this happen. Venture Deals was a logical next step to check out as I every internet article on books about how to get funded seemingly kept telling me that this is the bible that everyone should read.

So I did…

What I found was an incredible confusing and elaborate system of rules, jargon, and procedures that made my head want to explode. You would need years of training and immersion in this system to fully comprehend and understand what had been created and curated over the past 30 years by a small elite group of investors. Even though the system was weird and confusing, I thought “if this is what I have to master to make this dream happen…let’s do it.”

A few weeks after finishing this book, Emilia passed away.

As you can probably imagine, everything in my life changed in an instant. My past life and everything I had worked for vanished when I realized that none of it mattered with Emilia. The stuff I used to care about seemed pointless and meaningless. Books and knowledge learned, like Venture Deals, that supported past dreams went out the window because I no longer had any dreams. My creativity, imagination, ideas, and dreams had been stripped from me as reality of facing a life ahead of me without my daughter punched me square in my face.

While my past life and all my dreams had been taken from me, what this event left was a blank slate to create whatever I wanted to create. I didn’t realize it at the time because I was too busy just trying to put one foot in front of the other each day; however, in time, I would come to see that I could build whatever new world I wanted to build. Through this Year of Magical Learning journey of exploring my values, purpose, and mission with Emilia every day, the possibilities of how to live this new life seemed endless (and still does).

Slowly, but surely, over time and with the help of my daughter’s guiding hand, I started to regain my imagination. From there, new dreams started to form, and my creativity began exploding. I started to rethink and reframe everything. I began to revisit old concepts and dreams and look at them in radically new ways. I did this by diving deep into understanding the fundamentals of humanity which helped me to break down elaborate systems and constructs into their founding first principles. From there, I could then start to reimagine a new way of looking at a path forward.

One of those dreams and concepts I revisited once I emerged from the rubble of my life was starting my own business. I began by looking at the only ways I knew I could do it, which brought me back to Venture Deals. The more I broke down the VC system, the more impressed I became at the marvelous structure that had been built by this industry for the past 30 years. Humans are so creative! The world of Venture Capital is such an elaborate collection of rules, systems, processes, jargon, and procedures that were crafted by these people to accomplish their goals. Whatever they did has certainly worked. It is so impressive, that people now need to write a book about it to help others understand what they must do in order to live, work, and thrive in this ecosystem (ie..a book like Venture Deals).

After spending a lot of time in thought on this topic, I was left with one question on my mind…How could I start my own business, and still give it the opportunity to grow and thrive with absolutely no money from any outside investor…ever?

That is a question that I have been hard at work on with my ClubAny co-founder for the past 18 months. We are getting closer and closer each and every day to an answer and a repeatable system to make this happen for not just ourselves, but for anyone else that wants to come along and build their own dream. In my mind, I imagine someone in 40 years reading a book at how to understand and maximize their success in the world we created. How cool would that be?

Stay tuned…

Question: What would happen if you used your imagination to reframe and reengineer an answer to your dreams?

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Links:

What is The Year of Magical Learning? An Introduction

YOML Podcast Discussion - Coming Soon

YOML Bookstore - Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist by Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson