Venture Deals

I just started this one, so everything here is provisional and the verdict will almost certainly move by the time I'm done. I picked it up because Venture Deals is the book founders keep telling me to read before raising a round, the one that promises to make you smarter than your lawyer and your VC about term sheets, valuations, and the actual mechanics of a deal. So far it's earning that reputation. Feld and Mendelson write like operators who have sat on both sides of the table, not like academics, and the early chapters are refreshingly blunt about who's really aligned with whom when you raise money. Too early to tell you whether it ends up on the top shelf or gets shelved as a reference you only open when you need it. But it started strong. I'll update this once I've finished it.