From the Inside Flap
Venture Capital Due Diligence
"The process of making investment decisions encompasses the heart and soul of venture capital."
-Standish H. O'Grady
Senior Managing Director, Granite Ventures
Venture capitalists and other types of venture investors work very hard to uncover every critical aspect of a company that they consider an investment opportunity. This informing process has come to be called "venture capital due diligence."
Venture Capital Due Diligence: A Guide to Making Smart Investment Choices and Increasing Your Portfolio Returns provides you with a clear and complete explanation of the venture capital (VC) due diligence process and shows you how to use this process to properly assess investment opportunities, make smart investment decisions, and increase the return on your overall venture capital portfolio. Straight from the world's most successful venture capitalists, the advice in this book will show you how to assess the quality of a deal by using proven screening mechanisms, and will familiarize you with the methods for gauging the compatibility of a given opportunity with your investment strategy and portfolio. You'll also learn how to perform VC due diligence on other aspects of a company, including management, business model, product, and legal issues, as well as the intangibles of a company, such as focus, momentum, and buzz. Rounding out the process of VC due diligence, this valuable resource shows you how to analyze financial statements-both historical and pro forma-handle ownership issues, and perform the important function of valuation.
Venture Capital Due Diligence is structured around a number of carefully crafted questions that venture capitalists often ask when performing due diligence-questions that are logically organized throughout the book in the way venture capitalists usually address them. Each question puts you-the reader-in the position of a venture capitalist conducting due diligence on a particular company, so that you may gain a thorough understanding of how venture capitalists realistically perform this type of important function.
Discussion of these questions and their possible answers allows you to explore the variety of different avenues available during each step of the VC due diligence process. These discussions pull together the opinions of many of the major players in today's venture capital community, including:
* John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers
* Don Valentine of Sequoia Capital
* Kevin Fong of the Mayfield Fund
Venture Capital Due Diligence provides a rigorous VC due diligence framework along with a set of tools, techniques, tip sheets, and checklists that can be customized to fit your personal investment criteria or the practice of your firm. This unique, practical resource clearly outlines the VC due diligence process and shows you how to use it to make informed, accurate, and profitable investment decisions.
JUSTIN J. CAMP is a founder and general partner of Camp Ventures (www.campventures.com), a Silicon Valley-based seed-stage venture capital firm. Formerly, he was a corporate attorney with the Wall Street law firm of Cravath, Swaine & Moore. He graduated with honors from the University of California, Los Angeles, with a BA in economics and political science, and received his JD degree (also with honors) from the University of Pennsylvania Law School. While working on his law degree, Mr. Camp spent a year studying venture capital and entrepreneurship at The Wharton School, where he created an Early-Stage Venture Capital Due Diligence Framework. This framework has been used in two of Wharton's graduate-level MBA courses and constitutes the basis for this book.
