Do you track liquidation scenarios in your startup?

By rickColosimo / February 1, 2011 /

Fred Wilson has had a series of posts relating to M&A transactions, generally revolving around case studies. This one on ChiliSoft describes how certain features embedded in the capitalization table (liquidation preferences and floating price warrants), coupled with being acquired for shares rather than cash led to a seemingly dramatic erosion of value for the…

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Harvesting net operating losses avoids double losses

By rickColosimo / October 7, 2010 / Comments Off on Harvesting net operating losses avoids double losses

The NYT displayed some confusion about finance realities in this older column about net operating losses, a perennial “favorite” topic of ours. We’ve done some complex planning (aka invent new deal structures) for a corporation and its shareholders that held as an unfortunate asset a vast amount of net operating losses (NOLs). We reviewed a…

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What do I “do” with due diligence?

By rickColosimo / August 9, 2010 /

Here’s a recent post by Rick Colosimo in the Five-Minute General Counsel series on due diligence, with an even shorter short form due diligence request list than our own investor-based due diligence list. One question we haven’t answered here yet is: what is the point of all this? Well, investors/acquirors have three main risks to…

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Which kind of business are you building?

By rickColosimo / August 8, 2010 /

I’ve often thought that there are two kinds of businesses: those that make money from providing more value to customers, and those that make money from providing less value to their customers. This brief article describes 5 grocery store ripoffs. I’d add Trop50 to the list, as noted also in the comments here. Trop50 is…

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