A “Rich-vs.-King” Approach to Term Sheet Negotiations

The_jerk
I feel like I’m in that scene from The Jerk where Steve Martin sees his name in the phone book and exclaims, “I’m somebody!”

I’m published (sorta)!

A couple of years ago I wrote this post on the science and art of negotiating a term sheet, which turned out to be a fairly popular post.  It also caught the eye of Professor Noam Wasserman, who teaches entrepreneurship at Harvard Business School (and who created the “Rich-vs-King” framework).  We decided that we would turn the idea from the blog post into an “industry and background note” which was finally published online here.

The 20-odd page case note takes the core idea from the blog post and extends it by including a lot more explanations of the terms as well as some real world examples and a template for scoring a term sheet.

The note is behind a pay wall, but if you’re raising money for the first time, it’s probably worth the $6.95 (none of which is seen by yours truly).