Startup Law and Fundraising for Entrepreneurs and Startup Advisors

Book excerpt: Entrepreneurship can be chaotic. Some chaos drives innovation. But legal chaos rocks many startups to their foundations, dashing dreams, jeopardizing jobs and investments, creating liabilities, and slowing innovation. Paul Swegle wrote Startup Law and Fundraising for Entrepreneurs and Startup Advisors to help startups avoid these pitfalls, including the pitfall of struggling to grow a poorly funded business. This is a practical book meant to help entrepreneurs and their advisors:-build on a solid foundation, -avoid costly legal and regulatory mistakes, and -raise the money needed for stability, innovation, and operational success. Startup Law and Fundraising is for everyone interested in business, business law, and startup fundraising. Its 550 pages cover an unmatched range of startup-focused concepts, tips, traps, strategies, and best practices. Fifty-one colorful startup case studies keep things interesting.Legal, governance and regulatory hurdles are covered in the book's first ten chapters. But surviving those hurdles is no guarantee of success. Many startups simply run out of money. Others are bedeviled by ill-advised early funding rounds. Startup Law and Fundraising devotes five chapters to creating and executing a fundraising plan around the principles of just-in-time finance and raising money from the right investors, in the right amounts, and on the right terms, whether from friends and family, angel investors, angel investing groups, seed funds, VCs, strategic investors, accelerators, or crowdfunding platforms.The final chapters fittingly cover the final chapters of startup life - optimizing an "exit" with a successful IPO or sale, or, as happens about 80% of the time, managing through insolvency and winding up.Startup Law and Fundraising provides the foundation for an entrepreneurial law and finance class at any level, including law school, MBA, undergraduate business, community college, or startup incubator.