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In December of 2013, serial entrepreneur Jason Nazar woke up, rolled out of bed, grabbed his iPhone and with bleary eyes read the headline:

“Document-sharing platform Docstoc acquired by Intuit for $50 million.”

This wasn’t just any headline – it was his headline. Today was the day Jason would announce to the world that he had just sold the company he had worked on for 8 long years for a reported $50 million to Fortune 500 powerhouse Intuit.

Do you think he was smiling?

The Black Box of Acquisitions

We wanted to know the answer, so we spent some time with Jason to dig into the process.

The problem with understanding startup acquisitions and how Founders manage them is that people rarely talk about the process – they just talk a...

As my partner, Startups.com and Fundable founder, Wil Schroter likes to say, “There's not a lot of ‘fun' in funding.”

Raising equity funding for your startup is a long, difficult, and often demoralizing process. However, if you're successful, you walk away with money that will help your startup grow and become everything you hope it could become.

One of the major challenges that founders run across is that raising a round often takes more time than they expected. While a founder might know that your startup is excellent, convincing other people to invest thousands — and potentially millions — of dollars into their company is not a simple task.

“I've always heard that the rule of thumb is three to four months to do a fundraise — or that yo...

Your team can make or break your startup. Seriously. This is so true that is has become a cliché.

Think about it. You’re going to be spending a lot of time together. You’re going to go through a lot of super stressful situations. You may or may not go broke at some point — together. So, when you’re forming your startup team, it’s really important to make sure you’re asking the right startup interview questions.

Sure, we all know the standards. What are your greatest weaknesses? Why do you want to work here? What was your biggest accomplishment in your last job? And a bunch of those standards made it onto this list. (After all, they’re standard for a reason.) But there are other questions you can ask applicants to your startup team that real...

I was talking with a Turkish startup friend of mine, giving him advice on his new site and proofreading his English writing. He hasn’t yet launched his service, and I offered to put it through userinput.io so that he could get feedback on the site and know how to improve it.

He said “well, let’s wait until I launch the site, then I will get feedback.”

And I said “No no no no no, let’s do it before.”

I’ll explain why I was so adamant.

When you finally launch your site, whether it’s a startup or an e-commerce or a portfolio site, you want it to be awesome, of course. And not just “awesome” but it needs to explain your offering clearly, create trust in the visitor, and not have confusing UX/UI and flow.

And the best time to get feedback on you...

As mentioned briefly above, there are multiple valuation methods to value a startup, and one not mentioned (but worth noting since this is arguably the most common startup valuation approach) is the Venture Capital Method that was developed in 1987 by Bill Sahlman.

If working with a venture capital firm, you should know how they calculate valuations. Venture capital firms use this valuation method to establish an understanding of the value of a startup using this basic framework. In addition to the venture capital method, a VC Term Sheet is used to define the specific conditions of venture capital investments between an early-stage startup company and the venture firm itself.