Here is a helpful list of venture debt providers that was put together by our kickass new VP of Business Development Robyn Ward.

Venture Debt Providers – Get more Business Plans

And here is a a helpful presentation on Venture Debt: venture-debt-analysis

As a recent law school graduate (never practiced law), and a current CEO of a technology company, I have a deep appreciation for both the law and entrepreneurship (although the former clearly won out). I also know first hand that law school and lawyer-ing do not go hand in hand with risk taking, and can have the affect of sedating one’s entrepreneurial spirit.

That’s why I wanted to highlight a few exceptional CEO’s in the tech space, who just happened to get their start in the law.

Peter Thiel is best known as the CEO and co-founder of PayPal. Now he’s a badass VC. But once upon a time he too was a lowly 1L… at Stanford.

Michael Arrington is the founder of TechCrunch (and technically not CEO anymore). But back in the day he graduated from Stanford Law School and practiced as a corporate and securities attorney. Some of my favorite posts of his are stories like, “It’s Time to Rethink Copyright Law”.

Erick Hachenburg is Metacafe’s CEO, which ranks on the first page of Google for the term “sex”… doesn’t get much cooler than that. But before he was ballin like a villan with user-generated videos, Erick was hustling away at Harvard Law… “safety school”.

Richard Rosenblatt is the current CEO of Demand Media, and best known for his role as Chairman of a place for friends called MySpace. Little did he know, while goofing off in law school classes at USC, that he would provide the most popular in-class distraction for a generation of law school students.

Eric Alterman is the founder of Kickaps.com and a graudate of the Washington College of Law. In looking at his LinkedIN profile, I think Erick has founded more companies that classes he took in graduate school.

I’m fortunate to consider Tim Stanley a friend. He’s one of the sharpest CEO’s I know, and was the founder of FindLaw.com, one of the most widely used resources to help the Regular Joe find out about the law. Tim’s not done kickin ass and taking names, he’s heading up another legal/tech venture in Justia.

Al Gore is Chairman of Curret TV, once upon a time he was living la vida loca at Vanderbilt Law School. The consummate underachiever, he went on to serve as senator, Vice President, accumulate the majority of the popular vote for the President of the United States, become a movie star, win a noble peace prize, and save the planet from the likes of folks who believe global warming is a either a left wing conspiracy or the rightful interpretation of the final chapter of the bible.

Thanks to CrunchBase for helping me with most the research and pictures.

Non Disclosure Agreement (NDA) – these are over-hyped in my opinion and few angel or venture investors will sign them, but always helpful to have one handy to bust out at parties.

LLC Operating Agreement – I put my first LLC together myself using this agreement. My advice is to hire an attorney, but if you don’t listen to advice so well, knock yourself out.

Sample Convertible Note – A convertible note is a way to raise debt for your company that will convert into equity. When you are first raising money, if you can use a convertible note instead of having to give up shares/equity, you’ll usually be in a better position later on and own more of your company.

Board of Advisor Agreement – A good board of advisor can be worth their weight in gold, a bad one can be worth their weight in radioactive fluid.

Financial Projections Template – This document is “da bomb”. My good friend and previous business partner Mike Sheridan put this together in our prior consulting company Venature. This is a fantastic financial model template to build your basic Income Statement, Balance Sheet, and Cash Flow statement. Needless to say he paid a LOT more attention in accounting classes in our MBA program.

Financial Model Projections for an Internet Company – Big shout out to Brian Garrett of Crosscut Ventures (site coming soon). This is a fantastic model/template for internet companies to use to project their growth.

Application for Employer Identification Number (EIN) – Basic government form you need to fill out to get set up with an Employer Identification Number (EIN) so that you too can hire folks and pretend to be a badass at cocktail parties (don’t forget to pull out the NDA).

Start Up Pitch Presentation – there are no graphical elements here, but this doc lays out how to describe your business in a presentation format. Business Plans are dead, use a PPT Deck, see graphic examples below.

10 Questions to Consider When Start a New Business – I wrote this doc so I’m biased (hell, I’m writing this whole blog post) – but I do think this is a simple set of questions you can use to analyze any business you are thinking of starting. And once you decide to start, here are some mistakes to avoid.

Business Plan Presentation Template – This doc has a sample layout you can use to pitch investors/partners (plus its got a cool effect of color changing bars on the side – that only took me 4 hours to figure out one law school class)

Business Plan Presentation Template – Get more Legal Forms

Business Plan Deck – I stripped down the docstoc deck and left all the graphical assets in the presentation so that you can download it and use it however you like. We paid a good amount of money to get this done, so I hope you can take our graphical starting point, and raise LOTs of money for your own company with this. Upload Documents to Docstoc and we’ll call it even.

Business Plan Deck – Get more Business Plans

Oh yah, I should probably have some legal disclaimers around the use of these documents…. use your best judgment and hire a qualified professional to review or customize where needed. Or don’t.

I was reading Arrington’s post “Think Before You Voicemail” and his thoughts on how voice mail should be an obsolete method of communication. I think he makes many good points in reference to professional communication, especially when its someone you don’t know well. I also think Mike is speaking more from his own experience/habits, as I can confirm that he almost never checks/responds to his voicemail.

Overall, I do agree with many of his conclusions and often find myself skipping over professional voicemails, I do not consider urgent, and avoiding going through that backlog.

So I’m finally taking the plunge, and this morning I signed up for PhoneTag which will convert all my voice mails to text and send them to me via email.

I recently met the founder of PhoneTag, James Siminoff, when we were on a panel together at an entrepreneurship class for the UCLA MBA program. He was a very smart and friendly chap and had very good instincts and advice when it came to starting companies. I could tell he cared a great deal about his product and user base, two very important qualities in a founder.

So thanks to James and PhoneTag, hopefully I’ll be able to get back to all those voicemails just a bit quicker.

I’ve spent a good deal of time in the past 12 months raising money for docstoc. I thought I understood the process, but before you really go through it yourself for your own company, its hard to get the full essence of the experience while on the sidelines.

I had selectively helped some folks raise money for their companies in my last consulting business. The truth is, no one should ever be a better fundraiser for a startup than its founders. And if you are relying on an outside 3rd party to “raise you money”, you’re likely in for a huge waste of time.

I recently found a paper I wrote while in law school on a variety of topics about raising money for startups. While it certainly won’t make any dough magically appear, in re-reading it, I do think it gives a helpful overview of the process and some important legal points, for those new to the process.

I broke it down into the following sections:

The Funding Lifecycle; Business Planning; Bootstrapping; Raising Money from Friends and Family; Legal Issues with Raising Capital; Requirement for Private Placement Memorandum; C Corporation vs. LLC, Angel Investors vs Venture Capital, California Angel Investor Groups, Trends in Angel Investment, and Typical Term Sheet Clauses
Here is the full paper on Raising Money for a StartUP Company

Raising Money for a StartUp Company – Get more Business Plans

You should also check out my friend Adeo Ressi’s (founder of thefunded.com) presentation on How to Pitch VC’s

How to Pitch VCs by the founder of TheFunded.com – Get more Business Plans

You can also find lots of helpful business planing templates on docstoc

I’ve been an avid LinkedIn user for the past five years, since my first year in business school. I think they’ve done an amazing job in three main areas.

1.) Users Became Mass Marketers – I proudly imported all my contacts to show I had the largest network and then sent them all messages asking for endorsements. I must have directly signed up over 100 users.

2.) They Built Critical Mass – regardless of why you signed up for LI, you go back because the professionals you need to find are there, and more of them are there than anywhere else.

3.) Their UI Worked

Clearly though, Facebook’s success has had an influence on LI. They’ve adopted some of their design elements, and their recently highly tauted valuation was no doubt helped by FB’s recent investment by Microsoft.

I’m one of those geeky power Linkedin Users that made sure his profile was “100% complete”, answers others questions, posts jobs on LI, loves the “grab contact” feature in the Outlook Toolbar plugin, and pays the maximum monthly fee to be able to directly contact users.

But, I have to admit in many cases I find myself using Facebook to originate and maintain professional connections. Here’s why:

1.) I can add friends and send messages to users without them being in my network or having their email addresses

2.) Chat helps me instantly and easily reach out to new professional connections and start to build relationships online

3.) Going against the grain can help catch someones attention. I get dozens of LI requests a week for folks that want to join my network. Every week or so I usually just accept all. But when a new FB users asks to friend me and leaves a business related message, it seems to draw more of my attention because I wasn’t expecting it and get less of them.

LI is the real deal and provides a distinct value that is different and better for professionals than FB. But I think LI should take heed of the little things that make me (and other users) gravitate to FB for professional usage (sometimes without even knowing why).

Jason on LinkedIN Jason on Facebook