William Carleton

William Carleton

8p

6 comments posted · 0 followers · following 0

13 years ago @ ReveNews - Will Commercializing F... · 0 replies · +1 points

Barry, great questions. The sad thing about all this is that Facebook, and probably Facebook alone, has the opportunity to turn commercialization the other way around, in favor of the user or consumer. That is to say, instead of exposing users to advertisers, Facebook could use its power over advertisers to force them to expose themselves to users. It will be quite an underwhelming lack of imagination for Facebook to leverage its success to simply . . . perpetuate 20th Century consumer commerce. You may be right; it may be simply commercialization that could turn people off. But I think a new kind of commercialization would keep people, something the opposite of what the offline world traffics in.

13 years ago @ Gabriel Weinberg'... - False Dichotomies in C... · 1 reply · +1 points

Gabriel, you're so right: with notes, there are a lot of terms that need to be thought through and customized. An analogy might be the difference between corps and LLCs. LLCs are cool, I use them, but they are more expensive to organize and maintain.

Whoops, I said "expensive" where you were going with "complicated." I usually think the two correlate, when talking about legal stuff. You must be pretty experienced, to do the docs on your own?

Won't represent that my own posts on the subject http://www.wac6.com/wac6/convertible-notes/ are worthy of your list, but FYI I did post this morning on the question of whether notes as seed financing mechanisms save costs.

13 years ago @ TechCrunch - Costolo: Twitter Now H... · 0 replies · 0 points

Wonder if users will have an option to turn off / filter out all "promoted tweets."

13 years ago @ Mendelson's Musings - The Carried Interest D... · 1 reply · +1 points

Yes, exactly. Take their own capital and leave their firms and invest their own money.

13 years ago @ Mendelson's Musings - The Carried Interest D... · 3 replies · +1 points

Mike, for what it may be worth, I heard Mark Heesen of the NVCA speak at an Angel Capital Association in San Francisco this month, and he said that if the rules change on the taxation of carried interest, "you will see many venture capitalists turn into angels."

13 years ago @ Feld Thoughts - Failing Fast at Standa... · 3 replies · +1 points

Brad, in leaving the field you sure are leaving a wealth of insight for others who might pick this up.

Nothing terribly original with the following thought, but the Series Seed documents by Ted Wang are very good, and will support "modularization" so that deal docs for subsequent rounds can be built upon them. (Other lawyers disagree though and think subsequent rounds will have to start from scratch with new docs.)

Your conclusion that lawyers should lead this, having the right incentives, makes sense. Query though whether bigger firms can endorse this. They may have too much invested in their templates, in training their lawyers on them, in managing their risks with them. I could be wrong, but I think the lawyers who can do this will be iconoclasts or extremely high-profile lawyers from the big firms, and entrepreneur- and angel-oriented lawyers at boutiques.

While lawyers may need to settle on the modules in the docs, success (adoption) depends on you and other VCs, and serial entrepreneurs. Investors and companies will need to give permission to tell the world, if not every precise variant term, then the fact that the seed financing terms and documents were used. Picking a number out of the air here, but I think even something like 15% adoption would be huge and would end up winning the day.

The goal should be to reduce startup legal fees in seed financings to $10,000?