Category Archives: entrepreneurship

Copywrong: Disruptive Startups, IP and Legal Risk

Copywrong: Disruptive Startups, IP and Legal Risk

Entrepreneurs tend to focus on opportunity rather than startup legal risk, and rightly so. As Steve Blank has written, at its core, a startup is an organization formed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model. In the lexicon of the lean startup movement, once “product-market fit” has been achieved, the focus shifts to scale and execution as the startup matures into a growth company.

In a sense, risk and opportunity are two sides of the same coin to early stage startups. The huge risk that eclipses all others is that the product or service being offered simply won’t succeed — there is no product-market fit, at least at numbers that would make for a financially viable business — in which case (assuming competent execution) the perceived opportunity, viewed broadly, wasn’t really there to begin with.

Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that financial and startup IP legal risk items on which experts focus seem like afterthoughts to many founders. After all, if value isn’t created in the first place, isn’t it premature to worry about its impairment? Even at large corporations, legal departments are jokingly dubbed the “Department of Sales Prevention” because of their tendency to insist on the elimination of all risk from deals. Continue Reading

When Good Legal Advice Is Worth $10 Million An Hour

When Good Legal Advice Is Worth $10 Million An Hour

One of the highest profile liquidity events in the first half of 2012 was Facebook’s deal to acquire Instagram for $1 billion. The popular mobile photo-sharing service should fit well into Facebook’s growth strategy as a public company, but its eye-popping valuation — more than that of the New York Times, for those keeping score… Continue Reading

Equity Crowdfunding Back On Track — As Milk Train, Not TGV

Equity Crowdfunding Back On Track — As Milk Train, Not TGV

The version of the JOBS Act initially approved by a bipartisan majority in the House was a bold experiment in targeted radical deregulation of financial markets that would have come on the heels of one of the worst economic disasters in American history — itself attributable to deregulation with inadequate oversight — while the asthmatic U.S. economic recovery continues to wheeze and stumble through the smoldering wreckage of once-mighty financial institutions. Continue Reading

Valuation Caps and the $650 Million Sale of MySpace for $125 Million

Valuation Caps and the $650 Million Sale of MySpace for $125 Million

Valuation caps can shape the fundamentals of an exit, redistribute value among stakeholders, or even kill a deal altogether. Never missing an opportunity for a good war story, I’d like to revisit one high-profile transaction, the $650 million acquisition of MySpace by Fox Interactive Media in 2005. Continue Reading

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