Synopsis of VC Legal Issues

Reviewed by Brian Lomax, 2005-08-05

This book outlines the organizational and funding aspects of venture capital from a legal viewpoint for investors and company management. It does a good job of pointing out the basic legal issues for a non-lawyer. It is not useful for assessing a business venture's fundamentals or valuing a company. The author's website VC Experts is useful.

Difficult to use

Reviewed by A. J. Sutter, 2005-04-21

I'm an attorney with many years' experience in the venture capital area. The content of the book tends to reflect East Coast practice more than West Coast (Silicon Valley) practice. That's not necessarily a flaw, but you should be aware that the styles can differ in some respects.

The style of writing though, is my major complaint about this book. In a word, it's pompous. Too many sentences have very complex, passive or impersonal constructions. Paragraphs are long and dense, without any concern for the reader's fatigue level.

Also, some quantitative concepts could have been much more clearly expressed with a simple formula (high school-level math). The discussion of weighted average antidilution protection at pp. 90-91 is a case in point. I found this impossible to understand when I first read it. The more I read it, the more obscure it became to me. It could have been described much more accurately, and in many fewer lines, with a simple fraction.

Clear communication didn't seem to be a priority for this author.

Basics to Venture Capital - The Legal Side of Things

Reviewed by C. A. Smith, 2003-10-10

Bartlett writes an informative book to those unfamiliar to the details to deal structuring, particularly with the documentation side. This book is truly for the novice who is unfamiliar with business and legal concepts. Those with a business or corporate law background may see this book as a "nice" reference source. If purchased, it's likely to be unused.

Individuals who wish to know the legal side of basic business structures, term sheets, business plans, and such would find the book resourceful. Though it's only 157 pages, it provides a foundation to the non-business professional.

This Book Needs to be Rewritten

Reviewed by M. Grooms, 2002-03-05

Most of the other reviewers have said this book is NOT easy to read. I am another one of those readers. I want to be more specific WHY this book is so difficult to read. This book is supposed to be for layman. However the author uses terminology that would go over the layman's head. At the same time he skims and glosses over the details. So it sounds technical but it's not! What's worse, the readability of this book suffers from the use of tedious sentence structure and from unnecessarily high-caliber word selection like: atavistic, quixotic and salubrious.

I was disappointed in this book for more reasons than the readability problem. Chapters 3 through 7 cover the basics of starting a business. First of all these chapters don't belong in this book. As it is chapters 3 through 7 skim over topics that each belong in their own separate and adequately detailed book. Even if this book had been titled, "The Complete Guide to Starting a Business" it would have failed miserably because the level of detail is so totally inadequate.

This book is supposed to be about Venture Capital and that's all it should have discussed from beginning to end. This book is 160 pages long and yet the author only starts to get into venture capital at page 80. Again readability suffers, the detail isn't there, the line of thought is disjointed and the layman would be lost in the technical terms.

I think this book needs to be completely rewritten and revised. I have no doubt the author knows what he's talking about and that he has valuable knowledge to share. However, in it's current form, I wouldn't recommend this book to anyone. There's little in this book for either the layman or the seasoned professional.

A book that I would recommend to advanced readers is "Structuring Venture Capital, Private Equity, and Entrepreneurial Transactions : 2001" -- by Jack S. Levin. It covers tax and accounting issues in great detail and the readability is superb.

Quick Read

Reviewed by W. Strahan, 2001-07-15

Given the overall complexity of the topic, I thought that this was an especially quick read. At the same time, it touched upon enough sub-topics and did so with sufficient detail to get a good overview of how VC approach new businesses. I did not think that this was the authoritative statement on any given point, but a solid primer. To the extent you need to know more about a topic, you should be well armed to research it further.

I encounted the book through a senior capstone course at a local MBA program. I was lecturing on a topic and saw the book on the syllabus.