Top 5 Tweets

1. “Stop being a pussy. Kill the stupid feature.” -@micah  http://bit.ly/wRJObl
2. Now this is cool: a spray-on antenna  http://on.wsj.com/yun9J9
3. “Pinterest’s monetization strategy isn’t in the oven and it’s not even off the baking table.” -@jeremyl  http://on.wsj.com/ya5eT5
4. Entrepreneurs, Climbing Mt. Paperwork (via NYTimes) – agreed that startups need a solid accountant, but hard to find  http://nyti.ms/AlBaw1
5. Bain or blessing? – solid article (& set of charts) via @TheEconomist re private equity funds  http://econ.st/y00aK6

Walker Blog-Related

1. New motivational vid post: “Don’t Be Afraid to Try” (via Michael Jordan)  bit.ly/x0fgTJ
2. New vid post – How To Pitch Investors (via David Cohen of TechStars)  http://bit.ly/xOTJ4D
3. New motivational vid post: “You Want Something, Go Get It – Period”  http://bit.ly/ycBIe3

Welcome to our weekly series “Motivational Clips for Entrepreneurs.”  Each week, we post a favorite video clip to inspire and motivate entrepreneurs.  Why?  Because we know how tough it is being an entrepreneur; and whether you’re launching a venture, trying to execute your business model or raising funds, you need a little juice to help you push the ball forward.  I hope these videos are a little juice.  Cheers, Scott

www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfA-qNWLBHo

To Our Clients & Friends: Welcome to our weekly series “Helping Entrepreneurs Succeed.”  Each week, we share a favorite video of a successful entrepreneur, investor or business leader on a variety of topics.  This week, we again present Mark Pincus, the founder and CEO of Zynga and a brilliant entrepreneur.

In this interesting video (courtesy of Bloomberg), Mark discusses, among other things:

• his background and first few ventures;
• how he came-up with the idea for Zynga;
• the importance of the Facebook platform;
• having skin in the game (i.e., funding your startup);
• how to differentiate;
• Zynga’s revenue model;
• trends vs. industries; and
• the significance of rapid experimentation.

I hope you enjoy it.  Many thanks, Scott

In this extraordinary 30-minute clip (starting at the 8:45 mark and courtesy of This Week in TechStars), David discusses how to pitch investors by dissecting the actual pitch done by Alex White of  Next Big Sound in 2009.  Indeed, David specifically highlights the importance of:

• focusing on the first minute (especially in a group setting);
• describing the big problem in the marketplace – the pain proposition;
• demonstrating the product and how it addresses that problem;
• telling a story;
• “painting [your] vision” and not just focusing on what you’ve done to date;
• going after something “big and audacious” (a “big, hairy goal”);
• making sure that every slide has a point (“it exists for a reason”);
• not talking about your competitors – instead, talking about your differentiation;
• convincing investors that you don’t need a lot of capital (“we are cheap to keep alive”);
• demonstrating traction and your ability to execute;
• strategizing about the amount of capital you are trying to raise (“ask for less”); and
• “beating [investors] over their head with a couple of things that matter.”

I hope you enjoy it.  Many thanks, Scott

Welcome to our weekly series “Motivational Clips for Entrepreneurs.”  Each week, we post a short video clip to inspire and motivate entrepreneurs.  Why?  Because we know how tough it is being an entrepreneur; and whether you’re launching a venture, trying to execute your business model or raising funds, you need a little juice to help you push the ball forward.  I hope these videos are a little juice.  Cheers, Scott

www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfvuF5qf9v0

To Our Clients & Friends: Welcome to our weekly series entitled “Helping Entrepreneurs Succeed.”  Each week, we post a short video clip of a successful entrepreneur, investor or business leader on a variety of topics to help entrepreneurs succeed.

This week, in celebration of the filing of Facebook’s S-1 registration statement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, we again present Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder of Facebook and indeed an amazing, inspirational entrepreneur.

Below is five-minute highlight video of Mark and some of his “words of wisdom.”  I have also set forth below a copy of the letter he wrote to potential investors as part of the registration statement.  It is an extraordinary document, chock full of golden nuggets for entrepreneurs (particularly in “The Hacker Way” section).

I hope you enjoy them both.  Many thanks, Scott

www.youtube.com/watch?v=MyMgR47IRPo

LETTER FROM MARK ZUCKERBERG

Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission — to make the world more open and connected.

We think it’s important that everyone who invests in Facebook understands what this mission means to us, how we make decisions and why we do the things we do. I will try to outline our approach in this letter.

At Facebook, we’re inspired by technologies that have revolutionized how people spread and consume information. We often talk about inventions like the printing press and the television — by simply making communication more efficient, they led to a complete transformation of many important parts of society. They gave more people a voice. They encouraged progress. They changed the way society was organized. They brought us closer together.

Today, our society has reached another tipping point. We live at a moment when the majority of people in the world have access to the internet or mobile phones — the raw tools necessary to start sharing what they’re thinking, feeling and doing with whomever they want. Facebook aspires to build the services that give people the power to share and help them once again transform many of our core institutions and industries.

There is a huge need and a huge opportunity to get everyone in the world connected, to give everyone a voice and to help transform society for the future. The scale of the technology and infrastructure that must be built is unprecedented, and we believe this is the most important problem we can focus on.

We hope to strengthen how people relate to each other.

Even if our mission sounds big, it starts small — with the relationship between two people.

Personal relationships are the fundamental unit of our society. Relationships are how we discover new ideas, understand our world and ultimately derive long-term happiness.

At Facebook, we build tools to help people connect with the people they want and share what they want, and by doing this we are extending people’s capacity to build and maintain relationships.

People sharing more — even if just with their close friends or families — creates a more open culture and leads to a better understanding of the lives and perspectives of others. We believe that this creates a greater number of stronger relationships between people, and that it helps people get exposed to a greater number of diverse perspectives.

By helping people form these connections, we hope to rewire the way people spread and consume information. We think the world’s information infrastructure should resemble the social graph — a network built from the bottom up or peer-to-peer, rather than the monolithic, top-down structure that has existed to date. We also believe that giving people control over what they share is a fundamental principle of this rewiring.

We have already helped more than 800 million people map out more than 100 billion connections so far, and our goal is to help this rewiring accelerate.

We hope to improve how people connect to businesses and the economy.

We think a more open and connected world will help create a stronger economy with more authentic businesses that build better products and services.

As people share more, they have access to more opinions from the people they trust about the products and services they use. This makes it easier to discover the best products and improve the quality and efficiency of their lives.

One result of making it easier to find better products is that businesses will be rewarded for building better products — ones that are personalized and designed around people. We have found that products that are “social by design” tend to be more engaging than their traditional counterparts, and we look forward to seeing more of the world’s products move in this direction.

Our developer platform has already enabled hundreds of thousands of businesses to build higher-quality and more social products. We have seen disruptive new approaches in industries like games, music and news, and we expect to see similar disruption in more industries by new approaches that are social by design.

In addition to building better products, a more open world will also encourage businesses to engage with their customers directly and authentically. More than four million businesses have Pages on Facebook that they use to have a dialogue with their customers. We expect this trend to grow as well.

We hope to change how people relate to their governments and social institutions.

We believe building tools to help people share can bring a more honest and transparent dialogue around government that could lead to more direct empowerment of people, more accountability for officials and better solutions to some of the biggest problems of our time.

By giving people the power to share, we are starting to see people make their voices heard on a different scale from what has historically been possible. These voices will increase in number and volume. They cannot be ignored. Over time, we expect governments will become more responsive to issues and concerns raised directly by all their people rather than through intermediaries controlled by a select few.

Through this process, we believe that leaders will emerge across all countries who are pro-internet and fight for the rights of their people, including the right to share what they want and the right to access all information that people want to share with them.

Finally, as more of the economy moves towards higher-quality products that are personalized, we also expect to see the emergence of new services that are social by design to address the large worldwide problems we face in job creation, education and health care. We look forward to doing what we can to help this progress.

Our Mission and Our Business

As I said above, Facebook was not originally founded to be a company. We’ve always cared primarily about our social mission, the services we’re building and the people who use them. This is a different approach for a public company to take, so I want to explain why I think it works.

I started off by writing the first version of Facebook myself because it was something I wanted to exist. Since then, most of the ideas and code that have gone into Facebook have come from the great people we’ve attracted to our team.

Most great people care primarily about building and being a part of great things, but they also want to make money. Through the process of building a team — and also building a developer community, advertising market and investor base — I’ve developed a deep appreciation for how building a strong company with a strong economic engine and strong growth can be the best way to align many people to solve important problems.

Simply put: we don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services.

And we think this is a good way to build something. These days I think more and more people want to use services from companies that believe in something beyond simply maximizing profits.

By focusing on our mission and building great services, we believe we will create the most value for our shareholders and partners over the long term — and this in turn will enable us to keep attracting the best people and building more great services. We don’t wake up in the morning with the primary goal of making money, but we understand that the best way to achieve our mission is to build a strong and valuable company.

This is how we think about our IPO as well. We’re going public for our employees and our investors. We made a commitment to them when we gave them equity that we’d work hard to make it worth a lot and make it liquid, and this IPO is fulfilling our commitment. As we become a public company, we’re making a similar commitment to our new investors and we will work just as hard to fulfill it.

The Hacker Way

As part of building a strong company, we work hard at making Facebook the best place for great people to have a big impact on the world and learn from other great people. We have cultivated a unique culture and management approach that we call the Hacker Way.

The word “hacker” has an unfairly negative connotation from being portrayed in the media as people who break into computers. In reality, hacking just means building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done. Like most things, it can be used for good or bad, but the vast majority of hackers I’ve met tend to be idealistic people who want to have a positive impact on the world.

The Hacker Way is an approach to building that involves continuous improvement and iteration. Hackers believe that something can always be better, and that nothing is ever complete. They just have to go fix it — often in the face of people who say it’s impossible or are content with the status quo.

Hackers try to build the best services over the long term by quickly releasing and learning from smaller iterations rather than trying to get everything right all at once. To support this, we have built a testing framework that at any given time can try out thousands of versions of Facebook. We have the words “Done is better than perfect” painted on our walls to remind ourselves to always keep shipping.

Hacking is also an inherently hands-on and active discipline. Instead of debating for days whether a new idea is possible or what the best way to build something is, hackers would rather just prototype something and see what works. There’s a hacker mantra that you’ll hear a lot around Facebook offices: “Code wins arguments.”

Hacker culture is also extremely open and meritocratic. Hackers believe that the best idea and implementation should always win — not the person who is best at lobbying for an idea or the person who manages the most people.

To encourage this approach, every few months we have a hackathon, where everyone builds prototypes for new ideas they have. At the end, the whole team gets together and looks at everything that has been built. Many of our most successful products came out of hackathons, including Timeline, chat, video, our mobile development framework and some of our most important infrastructure like the HipHop compiler.

To make sure all our engineers share this approach, we require all new engineers — even managers whose primary job will not be to write code — to go through a program called Bootcamp where they learn our codebase, our tools and our approach. There are a lot of folks in the industry who manage engineers and don’t want to code themselves, but the type of hands-on people we’re looking for are willing and able to go through Bootcamp. 

The examples above all relate to engineering, but we have distilled these principles into five core values for how we run Facebook:

Focus on Impact

If we want to have the biggest impact, the best way to do this is to make sure we always focus on solving the most important problems. It sounds simple, but we think most companies do this poorly and waste a lot of time. We expect everyone at Facebook to be good at finding the biggest problems to work on.

Move Fast

Moving fast enables us to build more things and learn faster. However, as most companies grow, they slow down too much because they’re more afraid of making mistakes than they are of losing opportunities by moving too slowly. We have a saying: “Move fast and break things.” The idea is that if you never break anything, you’re probably not moving fast enough.

Be Bold

Building great things means taking risks. This can be scary and prevents most companies from doing the bold things they should. However, in a world that’s changing so quickly, you’re guaranteed to fail if you don’t take any risks. We have another saying: “The riskiest thing is to take no risks.” We encourage everyone to make bold decisions, even if that means being wrong some of the time.

Be Open

We believe that a more open world is a better world because people with more information can make better decisions and have a greater impact. That goes for running our company as well. We work hard to make sure everyone at Facebook has access to as much information as possible about every part of the company so they can make the best decisions and have the greatest impact.

Build Social Value

Once again, Facebook exists to make the world more open and connected, and not just to build a company. We expect everyone at Facebook to focus every day on how to build real value for the world in everything they do.

Thanks for taking the time to read this letter. We believe that we have an opportunity to have an important impact on the world and build a lasting company in the process. I look forward to building something great together.

In this interesting, four-minute clip, Richard shares a few solid insights for founders, including the importance of (i) being a great listener and motivator; (ii) understanding the “thin dividing line” between success and failure; and (iii) effective delegation.

I hope you enjoy it.  Many thanks, Scott

www.youtube.com/watch?v=VH35Iz9veM0

www.youtube.com/watch?v=kiQV0oTyd98

In this interesting, 15-minute clip (courtesy of the 2011 Clean Tech Investor Summit), Elon discusses his rationale for founding Tesla and then provides solid advice to entrepreneurs (starting at the 5:33 mark), including the importance of:

• critical thinking  (i.e., the “fundamentals of logic”) and avoiding “wishful thinking”;
• not following the trends and looking at things from a “first-principles standpoint”;
• trying to get to a useful prototype as soon as possible with the least amount of money – i.e., showing investors the actual working hardware (as opposed to a powerpoint presentation);
• allowing for a certain amount of chaos in an organization, including encouraging failure;
• persistence (you should not give up if you’re convinced what you’re doing is “correct”); and
• understanding how tough it is to start a company (“starting companies is like eating glass and staring into the abyss of death”).

Elon then provides some fascinating predictions about the future (starting at the 10:21 mark).  I hope you enjoy it.  Many thanks, Scott

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nu4sR2VVhg8

Welcome to our weekly series “Motivational Clips for Entrepreneurs.”  Each week, we post a favorite video clip to inspire and motivate entrepreneurs.  Why?  Because we know how tough it is being an entrepreneur — whether you’re launching a venture, trying to execute your business model or raising funds.  This week, we pay tribute to Muhammad Ali on his 70th birthday.  Cheers, Scott

www.youtube.com/watch?v=tU_dYowAmMw

I’m using Twitter as a form of micro-blogging to share interesting blog posts, articles and podcasts relating to entrepreneurship and startups, M&A and legal issues.  Below are my five most popular tweets (via bit.ly) for the past week and a couple of blog-related tweets.  If you’d like to see all of my tweets (or an RSS feed of them), you can do so here.  Cheers, Scott

Top 5 Tweets

1. “Bottom line: If you can’t get past a 7 or 8, you should really quit the samurai/startup business.” -@Jason  bit.ly/wJaxJm
2. “We now have…me-too companies getting funded at outrageous valuations. For most, it will end badly.” -Mike Carusi  on.wsj.com/xD1DCr
3. Why I switched from Ruby back to C++ (interesting post via @chrismdp)  bit.ly/xbYKsB
4. As of Jan 1, 2012, the 100% exclusion (up to $10 million) for “qualified small business stock” is over. Solid memo:  bit.ly/AitT1C
5. “New entrepreneurs would be well served to learn by Jeff Bezos’ example. Smart. Thoughtful. Patient.” -@davidhornik   bit.ly/y1qR39

Walker Blog-Related

1. I just uploaded my new Forbes post: Crowdfunding Bill Stuck in the Senate  bit.ly/zHXCzy
2. New vid post — Helping Entrepreneurs Succeed: Bing Gordon  bit.ly/wMl1dR

In early November, the U.S. House of Representatives overwhelming passed the Entrepreneur Access to Capital Act, a crowdfunding bill which permits startups to offer and sell securities via crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter or social networking sites like Facebook.  As I discuss below, this is a game-changer for startups and lifts certain securities law prohibitions that have been on the books since the 1930’s.

The Obama Administration supports the House bill and noted in its Statement of Administrative Policy that: “This bill will make it easier for entrepreneurs to raise capital and create jobs.”  Unfortunately, two very different crowdfunding bills have been introduced in the U.S. Senate, and committee hearings have been surprisingly focused on fraud concerns and other potential problems.  Indeed, it is unclear whether the Senate will even pass a crowdfunding bill (and, if so, in what form).

Background 

As the term suggests, “crowdfunding” is funding from a crowd of people — that is, many people provide small amounts of money to finance something.  Crowdfunding has its roots in charitable causes (including the advent of microfinancing to provide financial services to poor people), but has progressed to the online funding of creative and other projects via sites like Kickstarter and RocketHub.

Under current federal and state securities laws, startups are prohibited from selling stock or other securities via crowdfunding sites or social networking sites.  Such laws include:

• A prohibition against “general solicitation” – which means that a company may not offer or sell securities unless there is a substantive, pre-existing relationship between the company (or a person acting on its behalf) and the prospective investor (see “Can I Raise Money For My Startup Via Twitter?” );

• Disclosure and state law compliance requirements if the investors are not “accredited investors” — which usually makes the offering of securities too costly and onerous for a startup (see “Ask the Attorney – Securities Laws”);

• A requirement that any intermediaries (including websites) must be registered with the SEC and applicable state securities commissions as a “broker-dealer” in order to legally accept any transaction-based compensation in connection with the sale of securities (see “Ask the Attorney – Beware of Finders”); and

• A requirement that any company that has 500 or more shareholders and total assets exceeding $10 million must register with the SEC and file periodic reports.

The House Bill

The crowdfunding bill passed by the House lifts all of the foregoing prohibitions and requirements and allows a company to sell securities via crowdfunding sites and/or social networking sites so long as the company (and its intermediary, if applicable) comply with the following key restrictions:

• The company may only raise a maximum of $1 million (or $2 million if the company provides potential investors with audited financial statements);

• Each investor is limited to investing an amount equal to the lesser of (i) $10,000 or (ii) 10% of his or her annual income; and

• The issuer or the intermediary, if applicable, must take a number of steps to limit the risk to investors, including (i) warning them of the speculative nature of the investment and the limitations on resale, (ii) requiring them to answer questions demonstrating their understanding of the risks, and (iii) providing notice to the SEC of the offering, including certain prescribed information.

The First Senate Bill (the “Brown bill”)

On November 2, 2011, Senator Scott Brown of Massachusetts introduced the Democratizing Access to Capital Act of 2011, a crowdfunding bill which has four significant differences with the House bill:

• The Brown bill only permits the issuance of securities through a “crowdfunding intermediary”; accordingly, startups would not be permitted to raise funds via social media sites like Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn (as permitted under the House bill);

• Under the Brown bill, each investor is limited to investing up to $1,000 per  company for each 12-month period;

• Similar to the House bill, the Brown bill caps the total amount of capital that may be raised during any twelve-month period at $1 million, but does not raise the cap to $2 million if the issuer provides potential investors with audited financial statements; and

• Finally, the Brown bill permits some form of registration by the State in which the company is organized and/or “any State in which purchasers of 50 percent or greater of the aggregate amount of the issue are…residents.”  (The House bill preempts State law and, accordingly, there is no State registration requirement.)

The Brown bill was referred to the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, and a hearing was held by such Committee on December 1, 2011, with respect to several pieces of capital formation legislation, including crowdfunding.  As noted above, the hearing focused on fraud concerns, including testimony from Professor John C. Coffee of Columbia University Law School that:

“[Early stage] issuers are in effect flying on a ‘wing and a prayer,’ selling hope more than substance.  Precisely because of this profile, however, such offerings are uniquely subject to fraud, and some issuers will simply be phantom companies without any assets, business model, or real world existence.”

The hearing also included this testimony from Jack Herstein, President of the North American Securities Administrators Association (NASAA):

“Main Street investors should not be treated as the easiest source of funds for the most speculative business ventures.  The law should not provide lesser protections to the investors who can least afford to lose their money.” 

The NASAA, a trade group for state regulators, has been lobbying very hard against the House Bill to prevent the preemption of State law and to reduce the maximum investment amount per investor.  As President Herstein wrote in a letter to House members:

“Any effort to remove or weaken the up-front registration and disclosure process should not happen without adequate alternative safeguards….[The House bill] will create an exemption that will expose many more American families to potentially catastrophic financial harm.”

The Second Senate Bill (the “Merkley bill”)

A second crowdfunding bill, called the Capital Raising Online While Deterring Fraud and Unethical Non-Disclosure Act of 2011 (or the “CROWDFUND Act”), was introduced on December 8, 2011, by Senator Merkley.  This bill veers even further from the House bill and differs in the following material respects:

• The Merkley bill only permits the issuance of securities through a registered broker-dealer or “funding portal” (which is a new term generally defined as any individual or entity engaged in the business of effecting securities transactions that does not offer advice or recommendations or solicit sales);

• Under the Merkley bill, each investor is limited to investing up to the greater of (i) $500 or (ii) 1% or 2% of his or her annual income (depending upon the amount of such income), per company for each 12-month period;

• The Merkley Bill also creates an aggregate annual cap on the amount of all crowdfunding investments by an investor of (i) $2,000 or (ii) 4% of the investor’s annual income if such income is above $50,000 or (iii) 8% of the investor’s annual income if such income is above $50,000;

• Similar to the House and the Brown bills, the Merkley bill caps the total amount of capital that may be raised during any twelve-month period at $1 million; however, it requires the delivery of audited financial statements to the SEC and investors if the company seeks to raise more than $500,000; and

• Finally, the Merkley bill grants investors a new cause of action against the issuer’s directors or officers personally in the event of fraud.

At a hearing held on December 14, 2011 by the Securities, Insurance, and Investment subcommittee of the Banking Committee, attorney Mark T. Hiraide testified in favor of the Merkley bill and noted that:

“I share Professor Coffee’s concerns that unregistered salespersons may abuse the broker-dealer registration exemption set forth in [the Brown bill].”

Conclusion

The crowdfunding bill that was passed in the House by a 407-17 vote (and is enthusiastically supported by the Obama Administration) is stuck in the Senate.  Why?  Because of effective lobbying by the NASAA and two hearings designed to highlight the potential of fraud.

The Senate needs to take a step back and focus on (i) the plight of entrepreneurs and their difficulty in raising capital; and (ii) the need for job creation in our country.  Indeed, as uber-entrepreneur and investor Steve Case so aptly pointed out in a recent interview in support of crowdfunding and other pro-entrepreneur initiatives (see video below):

“It seems a little crazy to me that you have to be an accredited investor to invest in a company, but you can go to Las Vegas and lose $10,000 at the table in an hour and you don’t have to be an accredited gambler to do that.” 

In this interesting, twenty-five minute speech, Bing discusses how to be a great CEO at a consumer internet company, and his advice includes the following:

• Be curious and data-driven;
• Be a visionary (“you’re the spokesperson in chief, the communicator in chief”);
• Build a company that’s missionary, not mercenary;
• Be a coach (“define objectives and be around to help”);
• Be fast (“be the fastest person in the company”);
• Have a great executive assistant;
• Put your office in the middle;
• Set expectations for the Board members;
• Encourage your best people to be taking risks;
• Instill confidence in everyone that everything is going to be okay;
• Be as hard on yourself as you are with your young employees; and
• In addition to being the CEO, you must be the Chief Product Officer.

I hope you enjoy it.  Many thanks, Scott

Top 5 Tweets

1. “9 times out of 10 [teams] get bogged-down in the process, and they put process over product.” -@joestump   bit.ly/y36SWI (at 35:25)
2. “L.A. is one of the most undiscovered tech hubs in the country.” -@msuster  lat.ms/wE9KDp
3. In case you missed it, here’s my new eBook via @hyperink: The Startup Law Playbook  bit.ly/ufHnYB
4. “You really have to trust your gut…and go out & build it no matter what anyone is telling you.” -@kevinrose   bit.ly/wZV2wQ at 49:30
5. Check out this solid Mixergy interview with our client Nick O’Neill & his candid discussion of mistakes at Holler:  bit.ly/ycjLQY

Walker-Related

1. I just emailed our quarterly newsletter (with firm and industry highlights) via @MailChimp:  bit.ly/xadJQW
2. New motivational vid post: “You Can Do Anything You Want to Do…”  bit.ly/y7gDoI

www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDnrLv6z-mM

Top 5 Tweets

1. Quora: What are some signs that someone is going to be a good CEO? My answer:  b.qr.ae/rJgnV1
2. The SEC’s final rule re NET WORTH STANDARD FOR ACCREDITED INVESTORS and the exclusion of primary residence’s value:  1.usa.gov/tcGLpX
3. Learn to Code: A Non-technical Co-founder’s Guide (via@kathrynhough)  bit.ly/tLRCpR
4. 6 Tips for Raising Startup Capital in 2012 via @ericmjackson: “Be sure you’re working with an experienced attorney…”  huff.to/sm5vRz
5. “People have really underappreciated what Groupon has done…” -Marc Andreessen cnet.co/udo6G4

Walker Blog-Related

1. Here are my top ten posts in 2011:  bit.ly/tIrafm
2. New motivational vid post: “Life is Hard. Real Hard. Incredibly Hard.”  bit.ly/w49NiR
3. I just uploaded this short video of Sean Parker giving some solid advice to a couple of entrepreneurs:  bit.ly/u8YZnf

1.  Legal Checklist for Startups

2.  House Passes Crowdfunding Bill: FAQ’s For Entrepreneurs

3.  What’s It Like Working At A Major New York City Law Firm?

4.  How To Hire A Superstar Engineer For Your Startup

5.  How To Launch A Startup And Avoid Ending-Up In Jail

6.  3 Ways For Startups To Cut Their Legal Fees In Half

7.  What Is A Liquidation Preference?

8.  What Makes A Great Entrepreneur?

9.  What Is A Price-Based Antidilution Adjustment?

10.  What Are Exploding Term Sheets And No-Shop Provisions?

In this interesting, four-minute video, Sean shares some solid advice with a couple of Indian entrepreneurs, including the importance of:

• building “a complete team around what you’re doing”;
• not being “stingy” with equity grants;
• convincing investors and others that “you’re not crazy and can pull this off”; and
• following Steve Jobs’s advice: “I’m succeeding because I have a great team.”

I hope you enjoy it.  Many thanks, Scott

Top 5 Tweets

1. “As an immigrant son of a Washington D.C. cab driver…, this investment has special meaning for me.” -@shervin bit.ly/v5bLAZ
2. “Looking at a lot of companies over many years…, we have some patterns of things that work.” Dana Mead, VC  bit.ly/uxYuEl @32:36
3. “Entrepreneurs are not supposed to be famous…This is not a problem I am supposed to have.” -Sean Parker (@sparker)  nyti.ms/vy8dRE
4. “This is the beginning of the second Internet boom.” -@johndoerr nyti.ms/senPgF
5. I’m reviewing the Startup Act, which was just introduced in the Senate by Senators Moran (R-Kan.) and Warner (D-Va.)  bit.ly/scvnhc

Walker Blog-Related

1. New motivational vid post: “Some of You Love Sleep, More Than You Love Success”  bit.ly/s4TdOC
2. Just posted this old vid of Steve Jobs: “We believe that people with passion can change the world for the better.”  bit.ly/s3PRMZ
3. My VentureBeat post (in case you missed it) — FAQ: What startups should know about the U.S. crowdfunding bill  bit.ly/t2JaUG

www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X38PCf7kao