overview writings venture funds angels incubators

writings This part of the e-capital guide looks at writing about funding business in the new economy, particularly venture capital and angels. Christopher Golis' Enterprise and Venture Capital: A Business Builder's & Investor's Handbook (St Leonards, Allen & Unwin 98) is a concise introduction that embraces issues such as fees, business plans, negotiation strategies, choosing your venture capitalist (assuming you're not lucky enough to have them choose you), valuations and exit mechanisms. It's written for Australian conditions. Angel Financing: How To Find & Invest in Private Equity (New York, Wiley 00) by Gerald Benjamin & Joel Margulis is an incisive introduction to angel financing and incubators.  Although written for the North American market, much of their analysis is applicable locally.  John Nesheim's High Tech Start Up (New York, Free Press 00) is comprehensive and readable, although again pitched at the N American reader. Randall Stross' EBoys: The First Inside Account of Venture Capitalists At Work (New York, 00) is better than the title suggests, although as with his books on IBM and Microsoft Stross is a tad overawed by the exalted company and inclined to believe what he's told.  We've pointed to profiles of John Doerr and Ann Winblad, two of the 'Sand Hill Road' mafiosi, in our profile on builders of the web.  Stross supersedes James Wilson's The New Venturers: Inside the High-Stakes World of Venture Capital (Reading, Addison-Wesley 85).   Ruthann Quindlen's Confessions of a Venture Capitalist: Inside the High Stakes World of Startup Financing (New York, Warner 00) relentlessly looks on the bright side; Steve Harmon's Zero Gravity: Riding Venture Capital From High-Tech Start-Up to Breakout IPO (New York, Bloomberg 00) is merely thin. Udayan Gupta's Done Deals: Venture Capitalists Tell Their Stories (Boston, Harvard Business School Press 00) is a collection of accounts by VCs from 1946 onwards.  The Venture Capital Cycle (Cambridge, MIT Press 00) by Paul Gompers and Josh Lerner is just the ticket if you're an academic or have a thing about econometrics. We liked the depth of its research and its analytical rigour. Among academic sites we recommend the Frontiers of Entrepreneurship Research (FER) site at Babson College and of course the Baker Library site at Harvard Business School. Angel Investing (London, Jossey-Bass 00) by Robert Robinson & Mark Osnabrugge covers VC as well as the guys with wings and harps. It is particularly valuable for its analysis of how different sorts of angels view the world and thus how to deal with them. Locally, Business Angels: How To Be One, How To Find One, How To Use One (St Leonards, Allen & Unwin 99) is an approachable introduction by Mark Abernethy & David Heidtman.    The Monk & the Riddle (Boston, Harvard Business School Press 00) by Randy Komisar is a dot com Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance; if like us you weren't wowed by Pirsig's book we'd advise you to skip the recipe for sensitive new age Silicon Alley millionaires with very large egos.  Tom Ashbrook's The Leap: A Memoir of Love & Madness in the Internet Gold Rush (Boston, Houghton Mifflin 00) has a bit more substance. A local view is provided by Bill Ferris' Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained (St Leonards, Allen & Unwin 00), an anecdotal account by one of Australia's leading vc's. The Internet Bubble (New York, HarperCollins 99) by Anthony Perkins and Michael Perkins supplied a prescient analysis of why the bubble was going to burst. We forecast further pain for dot com speculators and Amazon.com wannabees as they run out cash over the next four months and the absence of a product or credible business plan becomes obvious to all.  David Evanson's Where To Go When The Bank Says No: Alternatives For Financing Your Business (New York, Bloomberg 98) is a nice introduction - from a US perspective - of 'alternate' financing: angels, venture capital, the IPO etc. Going Public: The Theory & Evidence On How Companies Raise Equity Finance (Oxford, Clarendon Press 96) by Tim Jenkinson & Alexander Ljungqvist is one of the more interesting empirical studies of IPOs.   historical perspectives Despite the hype, there have been digital-style booms and busts (and financiers to go with them) in the past. Australian Financiers (South Melbourne, Macmillan 88), edited by Boris Schedvin & Reginald Appleyard, offers a broader historical perspective with profiles of the great, the good and the excessively greedy. Want an overview of how business has been funded over the past five hundred years?  A History of Corporate Finance (Cambridge, Cambridge Uni Press 97) by Jonathan Baskin & Paul Miranti is a crisp history and introduction to conglomerates, investment banks, the evolution of the stock market, leveraged buy outs and the impact of such things as double entry book-keeping. Charles Geisst's Wall Street: A History (New York, Oxford Uni Press 97) provides a serviceable intro to 'the Street'. We prefer John Steel Gordon's more insightful The Great Game: The Emergence of Wall Street As A World Power (New York, Scribners 99). David Kynaston's multi-volume The City of London (London, Chatto & Windus 94- ), examining global finance and London as a financial centre, is an exemplary production, rich in detail and analysis without the mogadon effect of much academic history.     next page (venture funding)